Few Australians have lingered so long at the brink of death. Yet when the end did come it seemed sudden. On the last day, the news crews were alerted and assembled diligently at what would turn out to be the wrong address. When it was finally over the accolades duly arrived from the rich, the powerful and the talented. Long at the ready, most obituaries were fitting for such an institution, but the sound bites about the sad day and the end of an era were hurried and hackneyed.

In many ways the wake following the announcement of the closure of The Bulletin after 128 years of publishing was somewhat like Gatsby's funeral: after all, the magazine had long outlived its relevance. In its first 20 years, The Bulletin was an ‘astounding conflagration of cultural and journalistic energy’, its ‘potency and reach into the population at the time was something like that of a major television network.’ While for much of its life the magazine was racist, chauvinistic, variously anti-Semitic, anti-communist and anti-British, Australian cultural studies scholar Sylvia Lawson argues the need to consider the magazine's earlier history of misogynist and racist jokes not only in terms of inhumanity but also ‘as elements in a weekly cacophony’. Its play of contradiction around issues of nationality, colony and empire, city and bush, gender and race, she argues, created an environment in which boundaries between high and popular culture were constantly overridden.