Effectively a series of essays treating Australian society and culture, borrowing DH Lawrence’s conclusion that ‘the land is too big for the people’ – that is, British settlement on the eastern coast has generated bourgeois wealth but neither distinct culture nor identity. The Scottish-born, erstwhile editor of the Sydney Morning Herald observes the country in the mid-postwar era, when it was emerging from isolation via auto, radio, and plane. Politics comprised small matters, comparable to 18th-century England, when a man could launch a party and come to power in a lifetime. The Santamaria affair, which drove Soviet Communists from the Labor Party, receives the most specific attention. Wealth makes Aussies feel they are better off but not better. The Aussies were content with middle-class suburbia, there being nothing higher or transcendent, though all express longing for the Outback. Until the advent of TV, it was always better to be outside. In some of his best passages, from p115, he writes:

[In the Outback] Time resumes its ancient majesty of years and seasons. … There is nothing yet in the towns and cities which can compare with this lonely, privileged life of the graziers in the bush. Urban life is still essentially a second-hand version of urban life in England, America, and Europe. It would be hard to point to anything which is specifically Australian except, perhaps, the universal enjoyment of the pleasures of an outdoor life. … This open-air life has many virtues. It produces a strong, health, contented population, remarkably free from the worries and neuroses of most Western civilisations. … But it does tend to depress still further the general standards of education and the arts. … Unfortunately in Australia this low standard of cultural awareness seems to extend much higher in the social scale.

The country required an educated class, Pringle thought, for the rich especially graziers had declined to lead. But the country had no firmly established, nationally idiomatic arts – many of the most talented decamping to England. There was an emerging Rousseauan fetish of the Aboriginal, an observation well struck. Worried about Indonesia and Asia, unsure of its relationship with the UK, Australians are ultimately said to be lonely and disappointed (as per Lawrence’s Kangaroo). The concluding essay on Sydney rings true. The Lawrencian conclusion less so. Absent profound political crisis, crafting a unique, strong identity inside 250 years would be indeed miraculous.