Stephen Murray-Smith
| Stephen Murray-Smith | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
9 September 1922 Toorak, Victoria, Australia |
| Died | 31 July 1988 (aged 65) Mount Eliza, Victoria |
| Occupation | Writer, editor, educator |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Education | Geelong Grammar School |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne |
| Spouse | Nita Bluthal |
| Children | Joanna Murray-Smith |
Stephen Murray-Smith AM (9 September 1922 – 31 July 1988) was an Australian writer, editor and educator.
Murray-Smith's father ran a lucrative business shipping Australian horses to India for the armed forces. It enabled the family to live in Toorak, one of Melbourne's wealthiest suburbs, and to send Stephen to board at Geelong Grammar School from 1934. He 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 Murray-Smith's grandfather allowed him to remain at Geelong Grammar and complete his schooling in 1940. Murray-Smith later described Geelong Grammar as "a good but conservative middle-class school". In his position as secretary of the Public Affairs Society at the school he "invited Ralph Gibson of the Communist Party down to talk to us at school—under J.R. Darling it was that kind of school".
He spent a year at the University of Melbourne before enlisting in the army at the end of 1941. An avid reader from childhood, he recorded that in the three years before he enlisted he read 314 books, of which only one, Francis Ratcliffe's Flying Fox and Drifting Sand, was Australian.
In July 1942 he embarked for New Guinea, where he served as a Bren gunner in a commando unit, the 2/5th Independent Company. His unit fought the Japanese at Wau. He contributed to the Company's history after the war, of which John McLaren says, "His accounts of the travails of the track, the disastrous attack on a Japanese post, the hazards of allied air support, and the hilarious mismanagement of the retreat from Wau describe vividly what it was like to be an infantryman in trying conditions and at the end of a long chain of command." Murray-Smith later recalled: "The army consolidated the two important lessons I had already learned from boarding school: how to stay alive under difficulties, and the idiocy of authority."
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