Each quarter - or thereabouts - since December 1940, the journal has presented a smattering of the best Australian writing, assembling poetry, fiction and essays into a paper-bound record of a cultural moment. Four snapshots each year of what the country is thinking, feeling and creating.

"People collect literary journals and small magazines - people live with them, dip into them, rediscover writers," Anatolitis says.

"I know having been published in Meanjin and a range of other literary journals myself, I've been really thrilled to be that young, unknown voice alongside writers I've really admired and then I've been that more established voice where I get to discover other writers."

Is there a better way to grasp a broad sweep of a country's foibles, preoccupations, failings and triumphs than scanning the pages of a literary journal's recent number?

Anatolitis, a former National Association for the Visual Arts executive director who has worked extensively with Canberra-based arts organisations, was also this month appointed to the National Gallery of Australia Council. She recently led the development of a 10-year strategic plan for the Kingston Arts Precinct, a flagship project of the ACT government to transform the area around the heritage-registered powerhouse, home of the Canberra Glassworks.

Canberra, Anatolitis says, often feels like a second home. She says Canberra's reputation as a cultural wasteland is terribly unfair and praises the city's beautifully distributed literary culture.

"There's barely a weekend that there isn't something on where you can go and meet a writer and have a great conversation about their work. I think it's a really rich part of our broader community here," she says.

When Clem Christesen established Meanjin more than eight decades ago, there was a war on. Paper was in short supply and very dark global conditions had cast a pall over the idea of producing Australian writing. The first issue was handset and limited to 250 copies. Christesen's first editorial - which has become a clarion call in the years since - vowed to "talk poetry" in the face of it all.

"We believe that it would be a grave error to suppose the nation can drop its mental life, its intellectual and aesthetic activities for three or five or more years, neglecting them and those trained to minister to them, and then pick everything up again as though nothing had happened," Christesen, who would go on to edit the journal until 1974, wrote.

"Literature and art, poetry and drama do not spring into being at the word of command. Their life is a continuous process growing within itself, and its suppression is death."

The plan to keep literature's flame burning worked. The journal moved to Melbourne in 1945 at the invitation of the University of Melbourne, where it has remained since. A veritable who's who of Australian writers, as they say, have been published over the years in the journal's pages, which also gave us the "cultural cringe", a phrase used by A.A. Phillips in a 1950 essay.

The journal's influence extends beyond its circulation and has been read in Canberra from its earliest years. Verity Hewitt stocked it in her famous bookshop.

Anatolitis - who helped lead the charge on ensuring the arts were not abandoned in the shutdowns and disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic - sees echoes of Christesen's first-issue sentiment in the present, and in the role, she inherits in the editorship of Meanjin.

"Like Clem in that time, I also refused to accept that we could just imagine through this great cultural disruption that Australia's artists would somehow be able to magically get through this extraordinary economic crisis without the support that was needed," she says.

"But then from a personal point of view, seeing what was going on it just made it so clear to me that I really wanted to focus my work on championing the most urgent, the most timely creative critical, valuable Australian voices."

While it's a very different time now to 1940, Anatolitis says, it is an important period for Australia's voices to be heard.

"We're in a country at the moment where there's been a change of government who are actively saying to artists, to writers, to everyone, please contribute to a national cultural policy," she says.

"At the same time, globally we are at one of the most destabilised and potentially dangerous political and cultural times that many people in Australia would have experienced in their lifetimes and we've just come out of - well, we're still coming out - the pandemic which has been the single greatest disruption to cultural life that many people will ever have experienced."

And the way to ensure the country's voices are heard frequently remains on the printed page. Or at least something which mimics it.

Anatolitis, who spent time as a freelance graphic designer, is confident print - its feeling, shape and beauty - still has a prominent and hard-won place for presenting Australian writing.

The shape and potential for beauty in typography often catch Anatolitis' eye before the meaning of the words catches up. English is her second language; he parents migrated to Australia from Greece.

All this has stayed true even as digital media evolved. Readers still have a love affair with well-designed print, Anatolitis says.

"What happens in that evolution is that screen design for readability has absolutely mirrored the history of print design going back to the middle ages and Renaissance," she says.

"The width of a page, the weight of a typeface - all those things around leading and spacing and so on.

"These are design techniques that are hundreds of years old and we recognise so many different kinds of iconic publications over the years that inspire the way that we think about print design today such that it is still one of the greatest thrills for a writer - we still use that expression, 'To see my words in print.'"

But whose words will be the ones chosen for the permanence of being committed to a printed page?

"I think as with any role that involves commissioning, curating, publishing, developing a program it's as much foresightful as it's a response. It's an extraordinary privilege to have that space to bring together a whole range of writers, voices who wouldn't ordinarily be rubbing shoulders," Anatolitis says.

That task of commissioning and assembling began this week, while Jonathan Green, who began his long career in journalism as a cadet on The Canberra Times, signs off on his last Meanjin issue as editor. Anatolitis' first issue is the autumn number next year, but she faces a deadline before the end of 2022.

"So there's lots to get started on," she says.