KEY POINTS:
Just seven days short of its 128th anniversary, Australia's oldest magazine, the Bulletin, has ceased publication because of plunging circulation.
Its owners said the death of the current affairs magazine that helped to launch the stellar careers of such icons as bush poet Banjo Paterson and New Zealand cartoonist David Low was "somewhat symptomatic" of the impact of the internet on similar publications worldwide.
The Bulletin also suffered from the loss of the benevolent patronage of the Packer dynasty, which sold its publisher, ACP Magazines, to investment company CVC Asia-Pacific last year.
The decision to end publication with this week's issue stunned many Australians, who regarded it as a national institution that had clawed its way back to prominence after decades in the doldrums.
The final issue's cover story was an Australia Day survey tracking the ebullient mood of a nation that saw itself as happier than a decade ago, and loved Vegemite, the flag and the national anthem but was less sure that it remained the land of the fair go.
In its early years it had nurtured contributors such as poet Henry Lawson and author Miles Franklin, artist Norman Lindsay and soldier-poet Breaker Morant, executed by a British firing squad during the Boer War, a conflict bitterly opposed by the Bulletin.
Nicknamed "The Bushman's Bible", the magazine boasted of itself: "The Bulletin's red cover is equally familiar to the bushman of the Far North, the pearl-sheller of the Torres Straits, and the digger in the New Zealand ranges."
Launched by Sydney journalists John Haynes and J.F. Archibald after a partnership with the Catholic Archbishop collapsed before the first issue appeared on January 31, 1880, the Bulletin survived a series of libel actions and financial crises to become the most influential publication of the day.
It reflected the narrow and insular character of early Australia, attacking Chinese, Jewish and other migrants under the masthead "Australia for the White Man". That masthead was not removed until writer and historian Donald Horne, author of the The Lucky Country, became editor in 1961.
The Bulletin sought readers in the bush, where many of its contributors were based and where the drive for federalism and trade unions - both of which the magazine supported - was becoming a national groundswell.
But it was fervently nationalist and anti-imperialist, promoted republicanism, attacked capitalists and squatters, campaigned against war in South Africa and later opposed conscripting troops for World War I.
But by that time its radicalism had waned, and its declining influence gathered pace after it was sold to the family of publisher Kenneth Prior.
In 1927, with circulation plunging below 30,000, the Bulletin was sold to newspaper magnate Sir Frank Packer and was revived as a prominent and influential current affairs magazine under his son, the late billionaire Kerry Packer.
ACP chief executive Scott Lorson said circulation had fallen from a mid-1990s peak of more than 100,000 to just over 57,000, despite significant investment in staff and resources.
