It was launched in 1972 after independent publisher Gordon Barton bought out Tom Fitzgerald's Nation publication and merged it with his own Sunday Review journal.
[1] Nation Review featured contributors such as Michael Leunig,[2] Bob Ellis, Germaine Greer, Phillip Adams, Richard Beckett a.k.a.
The paper's satirical tone matched the style of Australian university newspapers like Honi Soit and Tharunka, from which publications many of its contributors and editors had graduated.
[6] The paper was pro-Labor, or at least, pro political change but, after the Federal Labor victory of 1972, "disillusionment set in", according to former editor Richard Walsh.
[clarification needed][7] At times derivative broadsheets and offshoot publications like George Munster's response to the new Medicare in Medibunk appeared.