Exemplifies the black armband school of Australia history, lamenting race, sex, and class in a Whiggish, frequently polemical narrative of illegitimacy and ignorance. Major topics such as Australian geography and continental exploration or the particulars of sport are dismissed as ‘colonial history’ or ignored. Though tainted by willful ideology, as well as tendentious glosses of world history, these points emerge:

Founding to circa 1850

• There are two ways to interpret Australia’s founding, as a convict colony succeeding North America, or a as supply of naval stores
• Aboriginals were found to be in a ‘state of nature’ and therefore lacking title to land
• Australia attained self-sufficiency in food more quickly than North America, and began to supplant North America in attracting British migrants with the revision of land grants in the 1830s
• Sealing and whaling led the economy to 1830. Pastoralists (‘squatters’) employed many on the fast-growing sheep stations. Following the introduction of merino, Australia captured half of the British market for fleece by 1850
• As the early social divisions between convicts, freeborn, and natives faded, social order grew egalitarian

Circa 1850-90

• Following the discovery of gold in Victoria, surplus wealth lifted Australia’s intake to 15 percent of all British exports, and the country began attracting private British capital. The first railways, telegraphs, and steamships from Europe reduced the tyranny of distance. However, all of the major cities were 800 kilometers from one another: inter-colonial travel was by ship
• The debate over the low-cost availability of land for settlers was intertwined with the first colonial (i.e., state) constitutions. Macintyre laments the nature of upper houses in some states, overlooking democracy’s contemporaneous rarity
• The character of Australian democracy is attributable to the Chartists: universal suffrage, the secret (‘Australian’) ballot, rough equality of electorates, no property qualification
• Government powers were highly centralized, emanating from capital cities via courthouses and schools (the colony having replaced the church in 1850). The economic effect of towns was to create specialists in the professions and trades
• The recession of 1891, kicked off by a miner’s strike, ended the midcentury ‘bargain’ between employers and labor, growth in exchange for job security. The economy contracted by 30 percent, demonstrating (according to the author) Australia had outstripped the land’s capacity, goaded by London capital

Circa 1890-1945

• The economy remained geared to the Britain: 3/5 of exports to the UK, 1/2 of imports from there. The government promoted migration when labor was scarce and vice versa. Jobs were safeguarded by tariffs on goods competing with Australian manufactures – but protection only extended to employers meeting wage standards. The tactic effectively coopted the labor movement
• Australian identity appropriated the socioeconomic mythos of the swagman: independent, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian. (Why was this a poor, unjust outcome?) The ANZAC represented unobtainable sacrifice and redemption of the convict stain.
• Australian nationalism was a response to protest-minded socialist and feminists, both of which are ‘universal’ and international. The author expresses surprise that political leaders persuaded the electorate to unify, as he glosses the details of state formation
• Despite fin-de-siècle setbacks, unions sidelined doctrinaire socialism. By 1914, electoral success made Australia’s Labor Party a world leader. This prompted the consolidation of protectionists and free traders into the rival Liberal Party. However, the push for conscription, which failed, split Labor and sideline the party for most years until 1941
• The racially homogenous ‘south’ was urban, polarized by class, and an export-led economy. The harsher climate of the north required cheap labor, meaning jobs for Aborigines, Chinese and islander immigrants, and so society downplayed racism. Race, in the authors view, is not genetic but cultural; prevailing sociocultural norms are inherently hegemonic and oppressive. In the interwar years, rural development failed to halt migration to the cities.

Postwar

• That social insurance wasn’t extended in the 1930s is attributable to inter-state rivalries. John Curtin traded wartime sacrifice for government power to pursue full employment, social welfare and pensions, and labor representation in management. His colleague Herbert Evatt was Australia’s first great statesman, a liberal international prominent in founding the United Nations
• Robert Menzies stood for ‘forgotten Australia’, neither management nor tribal labor; he was dedicated to the British Commonwealth. But Aussie foreign policy moved into the orbit of the USA’s ‘informal imperialism’, which was not to be relied on any more than the UK… which country’s integration into the nascent European Union hurt the Australian economy.
• Most of the final chapters are polemics. Gough Whitlam is treated favorably, Malcolm Fraser praised to the extent he was tolerant of social democracy. Paul Keating’s ‘bargain’ limiting wages in exchange for job creation evinces the author’s belief that the role of Australian business is to provide employment
• Deregulation, exemplified by the floating currency, betrays the suspect role foreign capital and ‘neoliberalism’, i.e., participating in the world economy. As above, Macintyre complains of Australia’s dependency on exporting natural resources, but does not suggest an alternate approach for a country of 25 million; and is favorable to engagement with Asian economies, but fails to notice they are most interested in minerals and often totalitarian

Macintyre seeks both equality of opportunity and outcomes. His hindsight is splendid but historiographical method more wanting. Evidence is poorly presented in unnumbered endnotes, making it the more difficult to assess whether more contemporary evidence has been cherrypicked.