One of Australia’s longest running literary journals has been scrapped, in what has been described as an act of “utter cultural vandalism” on the part of the University of Melbourne.

After 85 years, Meanjin, run by the university’s subsidiary Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), will publish its last edition in December. Although the journal’s editor, Esther Anatolitis, worked her last day at Meanjin on Thursday, the spring and summer quarterly editions of the journal are already at the printers.

In a statement, the MUP chair, Prof Warren Bebbington, confirmed Meanjin’s demise, saying it was “a matter of deep regret”.

“The decision was made on purely financial grounds, the board having found it no longer viable to produce the magazine ongoing,” the statement said.

“The two part-time staff of Meanjin were not involved in the decision, which led to their being made redundant this week.”

Bebbington told Guardian Australia that MUP and Anatolitis, who was contacted by the Guardian but declined to comment, had agreed to the wording of the statement, and he declined to confirm that the editor had signed a non-disclosure agreement as part of her redundancy package.

Bebbington also scotched speculation that any pressure was brought to bear on MUP by the University of Melbourne Council, led by the current chair of the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, after Meanjin ran an essay highly critical of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and its unequivocal support for Israel’s incursion into Gaza in its last spring edition. The article was written by the Melbourne academic Max Kaiser, a co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia, set up in opposition to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry over the Gaza conflict.

“That’s all completely wrong,” Bebbington said.

“MUP is independent, it makes its own decisions about its publications, and I doubt that the university’s council has even discussed Meanjin this year. There has certainly been no discussion, no communication, with them.”

_{Sign up: AU Breaking News email}

The former Labor politician, polymath and one of the National Trust’s Australian Living Treasures, Barry Jones, a regular contributor to Meanjin, has accused the University of Melbourne of muzzling the publication’s editor.

“[Anatolitis] has been exemplary as an editor … and I think she’s been put in an absolutely atrocious situation,” Jones told the Guardian. “Worst of all is the cone of silence that’s been imposed on her, and that’s awful. Universities ought to be promoting diversity, not shutting down debate. This is a very disturbing pattern. I’d like to think it could be reversed, but knowing the way universities operate these days, I doubt it will be. It’s an act of utter cultural vandalism on a large scale.”

A spokesperson for the University of Melbourne said its council was not involved in the decision to close Meanjin, nor were any individual members of the university council involved in the decision.

“The council was only informed after MUP had made its decision to close Meanjin,” the statement said.

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance said the MUP board’s claim that Meanjin is closing because it has become financially unviable “doesn’t add up”.

“The publication recently secured a $100,000 grant from Creative Australia to fund its next two years of operation,” the MEAA media director, Cassie Derrick, said in a statement provided to the Guardian.

“At a time when writers and creatives are increasingly facing censorial voices, the frank and fearless writing Meanjin has always published is more important than ever.”

The former MUP chief executive Louise Adler, director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, who along with five MUP board members resigned in protest in 2019, also expressed scepticism over the publisher’s claims the journal had become financially unsustainable.

“The costs of running Meanjin were insignificant in the university’s budget,” she told the Guardian.

“It is very easy to cut cultural projects – low sales, declining subscriptions, a lack of funding all provide the rationale philistines are looking for. But with every cultural institution that disappears, the opportunities for writers decline and the literary fabric of our nation is diminished.”

Meanjin, which came under the governance of MUP in 2008, has been revered as a scholarly peer-reviewed journal since its establishment in Brisbane by the journalist Clem Christesen in 1940. In 1945 the publication relocated to Melbourne and Christesen continued to serve as its editor for almost three decades.

It is credited for publishing myriad essays and works of fiction and poetry by emerging writers over the decades, as well as attracting the cream of Australian literary talent. Among its contributors were Patrick White, Randolph Stow, Frank Moorhouse and Thomas Keneally, who told the Guardian on Thursday that Meanjin had been with him all his life and its editor was a cultural asset.

“It is a matter for lament that a journal of such repute and consistent commentary cannot be permitted to have an assured place amongst us,” he said.

In the field of poetry, Meanjin’s lengthy list of contributors include Judith Wright, AD Hope, Les Murray and Sarah Holland-Batt.

Holland-Batt told the Guardian the closure of Meanjin would come as an “enormous loss” to Australian literature.

“It’s quite devastating, really. I’m shocked,” she said.

“It’s become such a mainstay of Australian literature, and it’s a place where so many Australian writers and poets have had their first publications. Meanjin was always the lodestar young people were hoping to publish in.

“All efforts should be made to save it because of the prestige it brings to MUP and to Melbourne University. It’s a real pearl of Australian literature and it’s just an incalculable loss.”

• This article was amended on 4 September 2025. The MEAA initially said Meanjin had received a $2m grant from Creative Australia. The MEAA then provided an updated statement with the correct amount, $100,000.