William Charles Wentworth, 1872 (photograph via Wikimedia Commons/James Anderson)

One of the central themes of this volume, as of the first, is the transition from a world of talk to the world of writing. The documents that Atkinson most prizes are those that record the talk of those who never wrote or read a document. A convict at Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania murdered another convict to effect his deliverance. Why did he not commit suicide? ‘If I kill myself, I shall immediately descend to the bottomless pit, but if I kill another I would be sent to Hobart Town and tried for my life; if found guilty, the parson would attend me, and I would be sure of going to heaven.’

In these years, the world of writing and print made a great advance. Atkinson is interested in the content and reach of newspapers (read more widely than in Britain), the letter-writing promoted by the growth of postal services (with women, he guesses, writing more than men) and the reading of novels (almost exclusively imports). The reading of novels and newspapers firmed up and standardised notions of gender and of race. The spread of literacy enabled governments to exercise firmer control over the people.

Atkinson’s preoccupations recast the standard events in our history. In the parade celebrating the separation of Victoria from New South Wales in 1851, his eye lights on the leading float that carried a working press to honour the newspapers and their printers who had led the campaign. The huge influx of the gold rush required new methods to be adopted for the distribution of letters. The movement against the revival of transportation was creative in its mode of protest.

The subtitle of this volume is Democracy. Atkinson is not overly concerned with politics. Certainly, democracy was constituted in part by the granting of manhood suffrage in the 1850s, but the democratisation of the culture in various ways was more important. There was economic opportunity of ‘getting a start’; the rapid rise of women’s literacy and their prominent role in religion; and, paradoxically, the firmer drawing of gender boundaries because it was a levelling thought to see a similarity in all men and a similarity in all women: ‘ideal manhood cancelled rank.’ But when he deals with the introduction of manhood suffrage, Atkinson is very misleading, for he makes this the work of men whom he labels ‘democrats’. There is a scholarly consensus that they were nothing of the sort; the men who introduced manhood suffrage were solid bourgeois who disowned the name ‘democracy’. It is a strange lapse in a scholar who generally is wary of all labels and who makes no attempt to defend this one. The point is not inconsequential: that there was only very limited talk about democracy throws doubt on Atkinson’s characterisation of this society. Democracy in a British colony bore the taint of disloyalty. Manning Clark is a better guide to the introducers of manhood suffrage: ‘The colonial bourgeoisie believed it was possible to achieve material progress, promote equality of opportunity and abolish the privileges of birth while remaining loyal subjects of Her Majesty.’

Atkinson assumes in his readers knowledge of the broad course of Australian history and of its leading characters. He refers incidentally to Governor Macquarie’s enemy Commissioner Bigge. Atkinson has treated Bigge’s enquiry into Macquarie’s administration in detail, for he sees Bigge as a proto-modern man, collecting a mass of detail and statistics to carry back to Whitehall. But he has omitted to mention Bigge’s recommendations and his criticism of Macquarie – which would have made Macquarie’s enmity understandable. The governors who succeeded Macquarie – Brisbane, Darling, and Bourke – appear with scant reference to their background, their instructions, or the governments to whom they reported.

The writing is generally open and accessible, enlivened by stories and episodes, but it is interspersed with delphic pronouncements where the themes of the book are reduced to code. This is the opening of Chapter 14:

The democratic settlement, as I call it, did not offer uniform and perfect happiness. Votes for all men did not meet many of the deeper needs of the Europeans in Australia. The ‘chemistry of life’ was not obviously identical with the myriad undercurrents of human affection though some men and women, who appear in the final chapter, said it was. Reason often contradicted faith. Few of the best things here and now, let alone in the hereafter, were to be nicely embraced by iron and glass.

I had no trouble with the first two sentences, but even with knowledge of the book I puzzle over the rest.

The book proceeds chronologically, but the chapters are given thematic titles, and the linking of themes within them is frequently forced. Chapter 6 is titled ‘Conscience’, which first refers to a new sensibility about suffering and proceeds to ‘good fathers are people of conscience’; ‘Talking itself depends on the mix of impulse and conscience’; and ‘He [Wentworth] was not always a man of delicate conscience’. This confuses rather than illuminates. Chapter 13 finds a link between railways, the treatment of the insane, and the founding of Queensland: ‘In some sense Queensland was itself a kind of hallucination, a mixture of waking and dreaming.’

I prefer a more prosaic ordering, but I welcome the book. Atkinson is our most intrepid explorer and, though I can’t fully follow this report of his discoveries, I have been instructed by his fresh observations and novel theories, which repel that ever-returning blandness.