Meanjin was founded in 1940 in Brisbane as Meanjin Papers by Clem Christesen, the name (pronounced as Mee-An-Jin) derived from the Aboriginal word for the land where the city of Brisbane is located. From 1947 to 1960 it was called Meanjin, from 1961 to 1976 Meanjin Quarterly, and again Meanjin from 1976 to the present day. Christesen pursued a nationalist agenda, an attempt at claiming a space for Australian literature in an environment where there were no courses in Australian literature in universities and the great majority of books published and sold came from the United Kingdom. He assembled around him a group of like-minded intellectuals such as Geoffrey Searle, Vance Palmer and AA Phillips. Phillips's famous essay, ‘The Cultural Cringe’, first published in Meanjin in 1950, persuasively argued that ‘we’ were still cringing in the face of our British forebears: that the centre of culture is ingrained in our psyche as being somewhere else. Meanjin's relationship with the University of Melbourne was often fraught, yet Christesen forged on, as detailed by Lynne Strahan in Just City and the Mirrors: Meanjin Quarterly and the Intellectual Front, 1940-1965. Christesen established the magazine as Australia's pre-eminent literary publication by the close of the 1960s.

The Realist Writer, a cultural offshoot of the Communist Party of Australia, was the precursor to Overland. From 1954 it was titled Overland: Incorporating the Realist Writer, but after 1956, Murray-Smith, along with other intellectuals such as Ian Turner, resigned from the party after Khrushchev exposed the crimes of Stalin, and it became purely Overland in 1956, attracting artists and designers such as Vane Lindesay and Noel Counihan (who designed the first cover, depicting gold-diggers). Overland, then, grew out of a strong left-wing and working-class tradition of economic and cultural mobilisation prior to, and including, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War through organisations such as the Australasian Book Society, Worker's Educational Associations and radical newspapers, establishing as it were the magazine's ongoing agenda to develop a radical community of ideas.

That first issue in Spring 1954 (Overland: Incorporating the Realist Writer) published a rollcall of left-wing writers, among others Nettie Palmer, the shortstory writer, John Morrison, Katharine Susannah Prichard, John Manifold, David Martin, the historian Brian Fitzpatrick and Eric Lambert.