19 Facts About Stephen Murray-Smith

Stephen Murray-Smith AM was an Australian writer, editor and educator.

Stephen Murray-Smith described his home as "bookless", adding however that his mother was "a voracious reader all her life", getting her books from the circulating and public libraries.

The business, and the wealth, came "to a dead end in 1938, when the Indian army mechanised", but generosity from the school and from Stephen Murray-Smith's grandfather allowed him to remain at Geelong Grammar and complete his schooling in 1940.

Stephen Murray-Smith spent a year at the University of Melbourne before enlisting in the army at the end of 1941.

Stephen Murray-Smith worked as the organising secretary of the Australian Peace Council from 1952 to 1958, and became a prominent member of the Melbourne Realist Writers' Group.

Stephen Murray-Smith edited several editions of the Group's magazine, Realist Writer, from 1952 to 1954.

Overland, said Stephen Murray-Smith later, aimed "to talk of books and writing in an unselfconscious way with the assumption that there was no reason whatsoever why 'ordinary people' should not enjoy such writing and participate in it".

In 1958, when Ian Turner was expelled from the Communist Party, Stephen Murray-Smith resigned his membership.

Stephen Murray-Smith was determined that Overland should "avoid the dreadful humorlessness and dogmatism of the fully convinced".

Stephen Murray-Smith continued to edit Overland until his death in 1988.

Stephen Murray-Smith worked for the Victorian Teachers' Union from 1958 to 1961, then returned to the University of Melbourne, as research fellow, then as lecturer, then as reader in education by the time of his retirement in 1987.

Stephen Murray-Smith's thesis, "A History of Technical Education in Australia: With special reference to the period before 1914", is one of the university library's most-read theses.

Stephen Murray-Smith edited the annual publication Melbourne Studies in Education from 1973 to 1982.

Stephen Murray-Smith edited two books about the Bass Strait islands.

Stephen Murray-Smith compiled two reference books in the 1980s, the 464-page Dictionary of Australian Quotations and Right Words: A Guide to English Usage in Australia, which aimed "to apply an Australian understanding to words".

Stephen Murray-Smith intended to produce further editions of Right Words, but this was one of several projects his death precluded.

Stephen Murray-Smith espoused what he called "radical nationalism", adding that Australia's radicals "should not seek to destroy the past, but to build on it".

Stephen Murray-Smith died of a heart attack on 31 July 1988 at his home in Mount Eliza.

Stephen Murray-Smith's family buried his ashes under a cairn at Erith Island.