We could have been given a visionary budget, emboldened by Labor’s recent electoral successes at both state and federal level, and the fact that the next election is still two years away. Instead, spooked by its own shadow and the bogeyman of inflation, Labor delivered a faded scrapbook of the Party’s old glories.

The publication of Jim Davidson’s biography of Overland’s Stephen Murray-Smith and Meanjin founder Clem Christesen provides an opportunity to re-examine the socialist realism with which Overland was once very much associated.