The forty one poems and drawings in Darlinghurst Nights are drawn from the weekly national newspaper Smith’s Weekly and were written by Kenneth Slessor as an occasional series between 1928 and 1933. Slessor was a regular journalist, satirist and film critic and in the 1930s became editor and editor in chief. The artist Virgil Reilly was one of the many black-and-white artists and cartoonists working on Smith’s alongside Slessor–these artists made Smith’s one of Australia’s most visual newspapers of the time. Some of those involved in the publication later claimed that Smith’s artists like Reilly were the highest paid in the world at the time.

For the readers of Darlinghurst Nights the images were seen as ‘Virgil’s Girls’–they were apparently used as pinups. Slessor’s poems focused on women in order to provide Reilly with his favorite subject matter. The erotic and fantastic elements in Reilly's illustrations recall Vision and the influence of Norman Lindsay can be seen in the literary as well as the graphic components of Darlinghurst Nights.