Features
Not just ‘big cattle stations’: the story of Galah and regional magazine publishing
Topping five other titles, independent magazine Galah took home Consumer Publication of the Year at the Mumbrella Publish Awards this month. On the back of the win, Darcy Song caught up with Annabelle Hickson, Galah's editor-in-chief, to explore the magazine's story and publishing in regional Australia.
Annabelle Hickson did not plan to live in regional Australia, but love found her when she least expected it. Leaving behind the bustling city, and what she thought was only the beginning of her long journalism career, Hickson moved to a town along the NSW-Queensland border to be with her now husband, Ed, who planted pecan trees around the farm.
Twelve years and three children later, Hickson created Galah – a magazine about stories from regional Australia. Earlier this month, Galah took home the Consumer Publication of the Year title at the Mumbrella Publish Awards. Now helming the publication as editor-in-chief, Hickson admitted starting a magazine wasn’t the first thing on her mind when she moved to regional Australia.
Annabelle Hickson. Photo by Luisa Brimble
“When I moved there it was in the middle of a drought, I kind of had – without a lot of thought – quit my dream job. But I thought, that’s okay, I’m up for an adventure,” she recalls.
“There was a local newspaper called The Moree Champion, I walked into there thinking ‘I’ll just be able to get a job here’. And they laughed and said: ‘there are no jobs. We don’t have spare jobs going around.’
“Then I walked to a café to try and get a job there, and they also had no job … and it dawned on me then that it was going to be a bit hard to find work that was not agriculture out there.”
The latest issue of Galah
Hickson realised then that she needed to create her own work opportunities. After a few years of online blogging and authoring a book about “foraging for roadside flowers and building big folly installations”, the idea of starting a magazine seems less crazy. In summer 2020, the first edition of Galah was born.
Interestingly, the landscape of regional living has also changed around this time. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, while regional Australia had an influx of 70,900 people during 2020-21, capital cities witnessed a decline of 26,000. For the first time since 1981, Australia’s regional population grew more than the capital cities because of migration patterns in the pandemic.
From Hickson’s perspective, however, this means regional magazine publishing will need to be more diverse to reflect the change.
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From church building renovations and paper art, to saddlery and knife forging, the range of topics Galah explores is far and wide. Among the often disadvantaged narratives in current affairs about regional Australia that consist of floods and fires, Hickson is hopeful Galah can showcase the other side of life in the country – the creativity, community, and sustainability.
“It’s so exciting because it reflects this Renaissance vibe that’s going on in regional Australia. It’s almost like when little mushrooms pop up in this fertile soil,” she says.
“The old established publications like Outback, and Country Style are amazing, but there are a lot of people in regional Australia who are not involved in ag[riculture] and who have nothing to do with big cattle stations, and there’s lots of people in regional Australia who aren’t only interested in interior design.
“It’s almost like when you look at publications that aren’t targeted to regional Australia, the city ones – imagine that was just like apartment living and computer science magazines… just because we live in regional Australia, it doesn’t mean we don’t have diverse interests as well.”
With that said, it’s no easy task to turn a magazine into a profit in the current publishing landscape. However, Hickson made a point to keep the first four issues advertising-free. “Magazines have to really care about advertising, but for me, that just erodes readers’ trust,” she says. “I love reading magazines, but I’ve fallen less and less in love with them over time. So, I wondered, can you build a magazine that has more of a book model than a magazine model?”
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With a higher cover price than similar titles ($30), Galah gets approximately 90% of its revenue from its reader base, rather than through advertising. The magazine is designed as a luxury print product. In rare cases of commercial partnerships, it is careful in its partner selections so as to not be disruptive to its tone of voice. The latest partnerships include R. M. Williams and Westfund, a Lithgow-based not-for-profit health fund.
However, regardless of what will happen next, Hickson was content knowing the magazine was genuinely loved by readers and made an impact on regional magazine publishing. “The one moment that made me feel extremely proud was when a regional reader wrote to us and said: ‘finally here’s a publication that we who live in regional Australia can be proud of’.
“The whole aim of Galah … just seems to come through in the way that woman described. It was everything I could hope for.”
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