Although by 1966 the literary journals addressed a similar audience about similar matters, their ideological differences remained, even if they sometimes published the same authors. Thus Sir John Latham, the object of an earlier furious correspondence from Clem Christesen, published a political memoir in Meanjin, Leonie Kramer wrote in Overland about the need for a canon of Australian writing, Brian Kiernan examined the literary value of Such Is Life in Quadrant. Their convergence came from their responses to the challenge of new writing from authors like Manning Clark and Patrick White. This writing led them to a deeper examination of Australian society, its history and culture, than had characterized the more ideological debates of the previous decade.

The most challenging development at this time was the establishment of regional journals. Westerly, which in 1956 succeeded earlier literary reviews published by the Students' Guild of the University of Western Australia, carved out its place as a regional journal providing both an insight into Western Australian writing and a regional perspective on national and international cultural affairs. Australian Letters, started in Adelaide in 1957 by Max Harris, Geoffrey Dutton and Bryn Davies, was explicitly not regional. Rather, it used its Adelaide base to provide an urbane Australian contribution to international letters. Its series of collaborations between writers and artists, which began in 1960, by crossing the boundaries between two art forms enabled each to speak to a wider audience.