As we have seen, Overland had been Stephen Murray-Smith's ‘baby’ since its formation in 1954 when it incorporated with the Realist Writer. He rejected the notion that culture was exclusively produced to cater for elites, and drew inspiration from a notion of an egalitarian Australia. Overland in a sense was Murray-Smith's way of promoting an intellectual culture that could show the way to a democratic Left alternative with Australian roots. The masthead incorporated Joseph Furphy's famous dictum (‘Temper democratic, bias offensively Australian’) minus the word ‘offensively’. During the 1970s, Overland was attacked by the new wave as one of the ‘Golden Oldies’ (with the implication that it was an establishment journal, which must have been amusing to Murray-Smith, who had battled through the height of the Cold War and the frosty intellectual environment of the 1950s.

Stylistically, though, it had not adapted to the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, and its fiction was largely realist in orientation. It must be acknowledged, however, that the magazine was one of the first to publish the fabulist Peter Carey, who saw himself as a writer of relatively experimental fictions. Overland nonetheless broadly represented an exhausted tradition in the eyes of some. Aligning himself at the time with a broadly avant-garde, small-press tradition, Michael Wilding, writing in the ‘New Writing in Australia’ edition of Australian Literary Studies in 1977, said:

In broad terms, none of the established magazines, such as Overland, Meanjin or Southerly, were represented in that issue of Australian Literary Studies. The new writing was presumably the preserve of the newer little magazines. Jim Davidson, when he took over at Meanjin, made considerable overtures towards what he saw as the new wave. His magazine needed modernisation and ways in which it could strive for new constituencies of readers. In saying that, it was obvious that established cultural visibility still had the power to promote previously semi-underground writers such as Hemensley and Tranter, whereas Overland was wary of such influences.