AustLit

Dolphin Publications, run by Judah Waten and Vic O'Connor (qq.v.), published four books and one issue of a magazine between 1945 and 1947. Founded as a commercial press with 'a self-consciously nationalist' orientation, its first publication was the magazine, Southern Stories: Poems and Paintings, which included essays by Brian Fitzpatrick and Judah Waten, stories or extracts from novels by Alan Marshall, Gavin Casey, Waten (writing as Matt Turner), Frank Sargeson, and Yiddish writers Goldhar and Herz Bergner, as well as poetry by Garry Lyle and Yiddish writer Yosl Bernstein, among others. Dolphin's second publication was an anthology, Twenty Great Australian Stories, which David Carter contends was the first such collection to argue for a tradition of Australian short stories from the late nineteenth century. Subsequent Dolphin books (in order of publication) were Bergner's novel, Between Sky and Sea (translated by Waten, with an introduction by Vance Palmer), a re-issue of Raffaello Carboni's The Eureka Stockade ('almost the first' since 1855, with an introduction by Brian Fitzgerald), and finally John Morrison's short story collection, Sailors Belong Ships. Dolphin Publications was brought to an end by 'all too predictable' financial and distribution difficulties.

Source: David Carter, '"An Important Social Duty": The Brief Life of Dolphin Publications', Publishing Studies, 6, 1998, pp. 3-13.