Before the Europeans had fully come to grips with that whole Earth-is-not-flat thing and there wasn’t much east of Jerusalem or south of Alexandria, Australia was no more than a concept. It even had its own groovy Latin name: Terra Australis (meaning “Vaguely terrifying”).

Once they understood that Earth is kind of globular and stopped burning people at the stake for talking about science, it took a while (and a few more burnings) for the Europeans to actually get here. What they discovered was all kinds of wrong. Hopping bears, otters with duckbills and a million different bitey things, some of which were not Bob Katter. The native people weren’t thrilled about them being here, the landscape spent six months of the year trying to set them on fire and the other six months trying to drown them, and everything that flew, swam, hopped or crawled wanted to piss in their laps or more commonly tear their faces off. Here be monsters, they rightly proclaimed.

Some 200 years later, not much has changed. Except that now we have the internet and everybody has access to a blog, a comment stream or a social media client where they can, with some justification, shout noisily about the Great Bitey Pissy-ness of Everything. Politics is becoming more and more imbecilic; we may not be quite as tin-foil hat/get-these-spiders-off-my-eyeballs crazy as our American cousins just yet, but we seem to be giving it a Red Hot Go.

Wayne Swan could come up with a cure for cancer, and Julia Gillard’s announcement would sound like everything else she says outside of Parliament: “I am over-pronouncing a bunch of words that have been rinsed through the spin-cycle because I don’t actually believe it motherhood-statement-going-forward-endeavour-something-I-read-on-a- Motivation-poster.”

Tony Abbott’s response would be that cancer doesn’t actually exist and anyway if it did, the Carbon Tax would cripple us all. The following day, a different audience would hear that yes, cancer exists, but Joe Hockey cured it years ago only to have it stolen by union thugs.

The subsequent reporting and “analysis” would run:

The ABC headlines (in search of “balance”): “Abbott denies Swan’s Cancer Claims”.

Alan Jones (in search of next shriek) “Swan has invented cancer in collusion with boat people” and would bait Abbott into agreeing with him (thus taking contradictory position number Eleven).

The Age (still in search of too much to say) would misspell everything and put some boobs on their website.

News Ltd (showing their objectivity) would print something unkind about Bob Brown.

And we continue to buy their papers, read their websites and watch their evening news, but in ever-decreasing numbers and with ever more weariness.

The Fourth Estate is supposed to provide us with information we can’t get for ourselves - they’re the ones with the press passes and time to spend on investigation and analysis. They have a responsibility to do something more with their time (and ours) other than elicit sound bites and report on each other’s opinions.

There are some genuine quality journalists in Australia. Laura Tingle, Leigh Sales, Michelle Grattan, George Megalogenis, Bernard Keane and George Negus, among others, do a laudable job of showing up the hacks and proving that the media can still serve its constituents well. Bloggers like Greg Jericho and Andrew Elder are running right on their heels in the knowledgeable analysis race. Good writing is not always easy to find, but it’s definitely out there. It’s a bloody shame that the white noise of the tabloid press, the likes of ACA, Andrew Bolt and Miranda Devine, so discredit their industry.

Somewhere in all this mess is our place.

The Kings’ Tribune is not here to make any great claims of quality journalism. That takes more time, money and experience than we can currently access.

What we can do, however, is provide a small space outside the echo chamber where quality writers can have a voice.

We don’t expect that you will agree with every opinion you’ll find in our pages; in fact if you do, we’re probably doing something wrong. What you will find is reasoned arguments from writers with differing views on politics, religion and social issues. Satire that is funny and biting without being gratuitously offensive. Personal stories and profiles that are interesting without being self indulgent.

That’s the plan anyway. Almost everyone we’ve talked to about this project has told us that it’s doomed to failure. “The age of print media is dead”, they tell us in portentous tones, “you’ll lose your trousers on this one” *sage nods*.

Clearly, we disagree. The age of print media is not dead; the age of crap print media is dead.

We believe that people will pay for magazines that don’t treat their readers with contempt but deliver intelligent, high quality content, because they know that quality does not come for nothing. They know that good writers deserve to be paid and paper magazines still have a tactile joy that even the iPad cannot replace.

Time will tell who was right, but if you like our magazine and you want us to keep going, we need you to subscribe. Advertising is not going to carry us, our readers are; we cannot succeed without you.

So enjoy the Tribune’s first professional outing, email us and let us know what you think and, if you have the time, have a look at our history on our website. While you’re there, take out a subscription and enjoy us for even longer.

Love to all who love us and a week inside Bob Katter’s hat for those who don’t.

Jane and Justin Shaw

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Coming up in The King’s Tribune (with your help): Leslie Cannold, Malcolm Farnsworth, Dee Madigan, Ben Pobjie, David Mallard, First Dog On The Moon, Tron Lord, Rachel Woodlock, Jo Thornely, Mat Larkin, Claire Connelly , Regina Pritchard, Heath Callaway... and so many many others

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