'Nineteen Seventy-three was an auspicious year for the arts in Australia. It saw the announcement of a new structure for the Australia Council for the Arts by the newly minted Whitlam Government. And, more importantly, it was the year when Overland revived its regular [sic] editorial column, Swag, absent from the preceding few issues, and intermittent throughout the journal's history. The tension between governments and artists, and politicians and their public, and any number of permutations of those combinations, is everlasting and in many ways inevitable. While this discussion is almost half a century old, anyone working in the arts will see the contemporary parallels. The specifics are no longer entirely relevant, but the issues raised still hold true, and are, even fifty years later, yet to be resolved, if indeed they can be.' (Introduction)
