[8] It is the namesake of the Sydney lane Bulletin Place, where the journal was published between 1880 and 1897, the year it moved to newer and larger offices in George Street.

It mercilessly ridiculed colonial governors, capitalists, perceived snobs and social climbers, the clergy, wowsers (puritanical moralists), feminists and prohibitionists.

[9] The Bulletin decried the mistreatment of Indigenous people and regretted that, apart from the perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre, offending colonists had escaped justice.

[10] Even so, The Bulletin assumed that their "black brothers" would soon die out regardless, viewing them as an inferior race unfit "for the ordeal of civilisation", and any efforts to ameliorate their condition as futile.

In 1886, it opened to submissions from all readers, calling for "original political, social or humorous matter, unpublished anecdotes and paragraphs, poems and short stories".

Vincent Buckley alleged that it was "a debilitating force in Australian culture" that "saw men as no different from, and with no more soul than, the gibber-plains, mulga, soil erosion, crows, dead sheep and withered outback mountains which regularly appeared in their poems.

"[19] The journal Australian Woman's Sphere, published by suffragist Vida Goldstein, wrote that there were two types of Bulletin School verse: "one a clothes-horse on which to hang bush terms, and the other an echo from the grave, with blighted love and regret in it".

While commending the Bulletin School for being "racy of the soil" and displaying "unconventional local genius", Arthur Patchett Martin considered the defects of their verse to be "an absence of lucidity and an excess of expletives".

English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson read some Bulletin School poetry but declined to finish it, saying, "Unlike John the Baptist, I cannot live on locusts and wild honey.

[26] In a piece on Rhodes, W. T. Stead wrote that "The Bulletin he thus honoured by his dread is indeed one of the most notable journals of the world": "It is brilliant, lawless, audacious, scoffing, cynical, fearless, insolent, cocksure".

[28] Like Lawrence, the novel's English narrator considers it "the momentaneous life of the continent", and appreciates its straightforwardness and the "kick" in its writing: "It beat no solemn drums.

Bulletin School writers Henry Lawson, Mary Gilmore, and Banjo Paterson are among the four historical figures who have been commemorated on the Australian ten-dollar note.

[30] W. H. Traill, part-owner of the Bulletin, was aware of the literary talents of his sister-in-law Pattie Lewis, who had been, as "Mab", writing children's stories for the Sydney Mail.

Walsh promoted Lyndall Crisp to be its first female editor, but James Packer then advocated that former 60 Minutes executive producer Gerald Stone be made editor-in-chief.