The meticulous sweep of Davidson’s book is a thing made possible by the instinct – compulsion – of both men to make mountains of their archives; they appear to have hoarded everything. This was, as it turns out, to good purpose.

The magazines may have been small, their audiences modest, but the story told here is larger than the sum of these parts, as was their influence on the national self. Through Davidson’s silky intertwining of two publications and two lives we glimpse a broader panorama that is at once literary, more broadly cultural and ideological.

That said, there are moments in Davidson’s telling when he seems a little too much the servant of his research, the narrative clogged a little by his very particular attention to the detail, but these pass, as often as not rescued by the author’s wry turn of sardonic phrase.

Politics looms large. The writers, the editors, and the magazines they crafted were engaged in a process of societal inquiry and change. For Meanjin this was almost osmotic, the inherently progressive nature of literary thought steering a quietly forward-looking path; though that said, Christesen would find himself as a person of interest to the Petrov Royal Commission in 1954, a bit-part in an anti-communist witch hunt.

For Overland the project was overt. Murray-Smith joined the Communist Party in 1945 and founded Overland in 1954 as an offshoot of the communist Realist Writers Group. The magazine would stay within the committed fold until wrestled free with Murray-Smith’s own departure from the Party in 1958.

The tumult of mid-century politics is only one strand in Davidson’s saga. There is a full, fascinating, taxonomy of Australian letters. The early lives of both men are set out, their marriages — of Clem to Nina Maximoff, of Stephen to Nita Bluthal — their varied pre-magazine working lives. Of the two, Murray-Smith emerges as the more complete individual, a man born to privilege and uncertain politics, who fought as a commando in Papua New Guinea, who wrote, travelled and lived a curious and varied life.

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Christesen by contrast was a man consumed by the magazine he created. There is a sense of tragedy in this, for his editorship did not end well. He created Meanjin, stood by it, sank his money and his wife’s earnings into it, sold property, took part-time jobs and somehow managed to see the thing endure and become a lauded publication; so much so that when his too-long editorship became a burden to the magazine, its supporters determined that he should move on for Meanjin’s own good.

This was not a thing Christesen accepted readily, but eventually the transition was made; to Jim Davidson as it happens, whose account slips into the first person —Power Struggle in The Clemlin is the chapter — as he details an unhappy transition.

But, nine editors later, Meanjin endures. As does Overland. In Davidson’s wittily told tale of culture, personality and politics we get a good sense of why.

Jonathan Green’s final edition of Meanjin was published on December 1.

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