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The Bulletin 's literary editor, A.G. Stephens, was the main inspiration for the "Bulletin school." Among the better-known contributors were the writers Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Bernard O'Dowd, Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin and Vance and Nettie Palmer, the cartoonists Livingston Hopkins and Phil May and the illustrator and novelist Norman Lindsay.Archibald retired in 1907, and thereafter The Bulletin became steadily more conservative, and by World War I had become openly Empire-loyalist. This marked its break with the political left and the end of its real influence, although it retained its place in Australian literary life well into the 1920s. In 1927 The Bulletin was bought by the Prior family, who ran it as a private hobby. Thereafter it gradually declined, losing circulation steadily. Its pre-war attitudes came to seem increasingly reactionary, and its cult of the bushman increasingly anachronistic in what was already an urbanised country. By the 1940s The Bulletin was regarded as a sad relic, filled with racist and anti-Semitic bile, and with political commentary so right-wing as to seem almost comic.
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