aCOMMENT

In October 1941 Perth's Daily News cast the first stones, especially at its design, the reviewer having received a"gift of some copies of a queer (to me) little publication, 'a comment,' produced in Melbourne.

"[2]The Sydney Morning Herald rated it "the most suavely produced – on brown paper with Cairo type – [...] sophisticated man-about-town (and lately somewhat in need of cash) of the literary journals,"[3] while The Age newspaper article about the January 1945 issue was headed "High-brows Only"; "Readers of modern literature, of the experimental kind, may like to know about A Comment...It is an attractive little magazine, if you like this sort of thing...A comment on Angry Adelaide with a plea for freedom of expression, a fine poem by Alec King, and one or two indifferent lino cuts make up the staple of this number.

"[6] In his memoir of the period, contributor to the magazine Alister Kershaw remarks on; "...the dispiriting atmosphere prevailing when Cecily Crozier took it into her head to launch her Comment.

To her credit, Cecily didn't give a hoot for whatever tut-tutting disapproval she may have encountered but she must have felt tempted on occasion to call the whole harebrained enterprise off when she came up against the material difficulties involved.

[6] Due to the wartime shortages the magazine was printed on 23 cm brown wrapping paper by Bradley Printers[9] of 40 Glenferrie Road, Malvern, and set in the Cairo typeface.

[10] The covers,[11] mostly linocuts by William Constable, Robert Miller, Irvine Green, Decima McColl, Eric Thake and others, austererly printed in only one or two colours, declared its Modernist ethos.

The first number of Comment declared; "Our aim is stimulation...we will extract from the surrounding gloom a few people who will be really interested in our effort to put into print the newest ideas in writing and design."

In issue four Crozier challenges her readers: “Why not let Comment be the battle ground upon which YOU will fight for your ideals and ideas.” The last issue, Winter 1947 featured Max Harris, Irvine Green, and Karl Shapiro; there is a two-page review of Shapiro's The Place of Love by Harris; Louis Thomas Dimes' three-page article under the pseudonym 'l'homme qui rit'; Joseph O'Dwyer; and Parker Tyler.

Though he joined the RAAF and was posted in aerial reconnaissance he contributed woodcuts and linocuts for most of the covers and his illustrations, and occasionally his tipped-in photographs, appear regularly in aCOMMENT until its demise after 26 issues in 1947.