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.

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.

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.

"[6] 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.

"[7] After his discharge in early 1945 he resumed his studies at Melbourne, completing an honours Arts degree in history followed by a Dip.Ed., while taking a prominent part in student politics with his close friend Ian Turner.

In early 1948, in a civil ceremony in Melbourne, he married Nita Bluthal, whose Jewish family had arrived in Australia from Poland in 1938.

Murray-Smith worked as the organising secretary of the Australian Peace Council from 1952 to 1958, and became a prominent member of the Melbourne Realist Writers' Group.

Murray-Smith worked for the Victorian Teachers’ Union from 1958 to 1961, then returned to the University of Melbourne, as research fellow, then as lecturer, then as reader in education by the time of his retirement in 1987.

I am grateful for my years in the Communist Party and for my involvement with the Jewish community, because these events have prevented me from being just another middle-aged, middle-class ex-public schoolboy, but deep down and far back my Australia is an Australia of the work ethic, of the dunny in the back yard ... of men going to football matches with hats on; and of the expansion of the Australian suburb, surely in many respects an original and beneficent Australian "invention".