Failures and false starts: Why the new Bush Journal magazine has been 13 years in the making.
A guest post by Jess Howard, editor + founder of Bush Journal
Jess: On my first day at the London College of Fashion, I stood in line to enter the building behind a woman wearing a red sculptural fascinator. I’d quit my job as a TV reporter and moved to the UK for a course I’d hoped would act as a wormhole into the world of magazines, which at that moment felt like a grave error. Over the following months, I learned important things like graphic design and creative direction, and less important things like what people were wearing on the streets of Hackney.
I published a student magazine called Away about the young Australian diaspora - with stories on conductors in London, surfers in Cornwall, and illustrators in Berlin. It ran for one single issue, but ultimately I felt it exposed me for the person I really was: a kid from a cattle property in Central Queensland who wasn’t as clever as she thought. And so I stashed the magazine away, filed any desire to work in the industry in the ‘don’t be silly love’ category, and promptly got a job in business television. But the time planted the tiniest seed in me that sat dormant, waiting for the right moment to germinate.
I spent the next eight years as a producer on TV programs about money - who owed the most, who made the most, and where it was sloshing around in the world. My economics education started and finished with year nine business studies, so I spent a good deal of time googling European Central Bank members and currencies for countries I scarcely knew existed. Sometimes I travelled to those countries with film crews where I logged shots in train carriages, wrote scripts for anchors, and endured frozen pre-dawns for the perfect time-lapse. My job was a bit like plastering band-aids on a leaking barrel - I’d stick one on and another would pop off, with water gushing everywhere. And sometimes it flooded.
Once, I spent two months working in the Persian Gulf with the crew of an affiliate TV station to teach them the basics of delivering the news. They were shut down after their second night on air by a less-than-benevolent Saudi owner who didn’t like their adherence to the truth. Some years later, the editor-in-chief was murdered in Turkey - allegedly by the same nation. My (only) wins were drawing stories of humanity from very dry subjects - like finding shamans in Siberia and sumo wrestlers in Ulaanbataar to demonstrate the nuances of economic development in Eastern Russia and Mongolia. I was finding my storytelling voice and discovering that real people - not fancy people - were at the heart of the best yarns.
When I moved back to Australia, I reconnected with family, friends, and a landscape I’d spent years running from - turning a photography hobby into a business and using my old contacts to bounce up and down the state to build a portfolio - all the while writing in my spare time. But it wasn’t until I joined a rural photography collective, Beauty in the Bush, that things started to fall into place. I was surrounded by people who were just as excited about building something as I was and our WhatsApp chat spooled as a flood of messages dinged between us. The energy triggered little changes in that seed and it began to unfurl, setting down a tap root that started to draw life from the fertile ground. I played around with ideas for a magazine - taking inspiration from photography books from the 1960s and 70s that found beauty in the grit - and Bush Journal was born.
Our first iteration was a slim paper: 40-pages of big, beautiful images and stories that dug into rural life. We examined broken relationships, fear of failure and generational connection with subjects who weren’t famous (even among their friends) but we’re all committed to sharing their lives truthfully. Real people - not fancy people - fill our pages, even now. By our sixth edition, we were double the size and had a stable of contributors whose work regularly featured in national mastheads. The little seed had pushed through to become a seedling.
The thing about new seedlings is they’re fragile, and if not treated properly their viability can sharply decline. Over the past two years, we’ve nurtured a community from whom we receive the loveliest messages about why the Journal reminds them of their grandparents or parents and how they embrace its ageing process, yellowing pages and all. I have a soft-spot for newspapers too and loved that we shared a printer with dozens of regional papers - but ultimately newsprint is impermanent, and our stories deserve better. It felt a bit like inviting your favourite person over to stay only to make them sleep in scratchy sheets.
Producing a magazine that’s a bit like a book (magabook? bookazine?) is the logical next step for Bush Journal. And when I look back at my first publication - with slightly squinted eyes - I can see the similarities. Away ostensibly explored life abroad, but at its heart, was really about feeling connected to home. Which is kind of how I feel about rural Australia, and so many people I’ve met and interviewed in the last couple of years agree: the bush is a place that jangles around inside you like a set of keys, reminding you of its presence wherever you are. Bush Journal is a celebration of that feeling.