While the older magazines sought new ways of accommodating to changes in old Cold War certainties, a newer generation of editors began to search for fresh starting points. In 1957, Helen Palmer, recently expelled from the Communist Party, had established Outlook, a two-monthly journal that provided news and commentary on current events from a Marxist but non-Party point of view. During its thirteen years of existence, it was distinguished by its interest in issues of education and race matters, in Australia, Latin America and South Africa, and in constructing alternative socialist forms of power through both the trade union movement and parliamentary processes. It was reviled by those who stayed in the Party, who argued that its claim to represent ‘the new left’ was merely camouflage for attempts to ‘tear down’ the Soviet Union and, following the ‘failure of the Hungarian counter-revolution in 1956’ to destroy the ‘vitality and strength’ of Marxism in the interests of capitalism.

From the point of view of the new politics, the most important of the new journals were two Melbourne-based publications: the Catholic and communitarian Prospect, first published in 1958, and the secular and socialist Dissent, established in 1961. Despite the differences in their religious stance, they shared some common contributors, and even editors, and both, while remaining sympathetic to Labor, were firmly anticommunist. They differed from the established literary journals by being more concerned with intellectual debate than with fiction, poetry and criticism, or even historical writing.