POL magazine
Encyclopedia
POL Magazine was a monthly magazine published by Gareth Powell Publishing in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 in the late 1960s. It is considered to have played an important role in raising awareness of the status of women, and established new standards in terms of content, design and photography.

In March-May 2003, the Australian National Portrait Gallery
National Portrait Gallery (Australia)
The National Portrait Gallery of Australia is a collection of portraits of prominent Australians that are important in their field of endeavour or whose life sets them apart as an individual of long-term public interest...

 in Old Parliament House, Canberra
Canberra
Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of over 345,000, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory , south-west of Sydney, and north-east of Melbourne...

 held a retrospective of Pol magazine which it called Portrait of a Generation. A catalog was published for the occasion with an introduction which said:
Gareth Powell has been quoted as saying that the name POL stood for nothing, and was chosen by the magazine's first editor, Richard Walsh, because it was short and lent itself to bad puns in headlines.

A major influence on the style of the magazine was the photographic and design team that had started with Chance
Chance Magazine
Chance was a men's monthly magazine founded in Sydney in 1966 by Gareth Powell Associates, which was basically Gareth Powell in association with Jack de Lissa. It used Playboy and Penthouse magazines as a model, creating a magazine that Australia had not seen before with both pictures of beautiful...

, one of the early men's magazines in Australia. The photographers were among the best that Australia had produced, and they were given the opportunity with both POL and Chance to choose the photographs used and to decide how they should be displayed. No other magazine in Australia at that time allowed that sort of involvement by the creative staff. The only person who was kept well away from the creative process was the publisher and owner, Gareth Powell. He knew printing - and POL set new standards in that area for Australia - and he knew publishing. But the editorial content of the magazine was, in its earliest and finest days, totally under the control of Richard Walsh and a team which contained many of the great editorial talents of Australia.

After Richard Walsh's departure, Arnold Earnshaw took over as editor of POL for eight months. The editorship then passed to a couple of other people for a short time, but POL's time was drawing to a close and by 1971 it had ceased publication.

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