During his floruit from 1941 to 1970, Moorehead was to become the most acclaimed Australian writer in his lifetime. He was significantly better known both at home and abroad than Patrick White, whose Voss and The Tree of Man had appeared in small editions in the 1950s, and who was still complaining to Geoffrey Dutton ten years later: ‘I am even told that Moorehead is not very good, but of course journalism is what the world wants to lap up.’ By then Moorehead had run through a number of biographies and other bestselling publications and had moved on to a succession of seminal works, including Gallipoli (1956), The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962). There were more to come.

Based at the Villa Diana, Moorehead took himself off to observe an Italy recovering from a war that had seen invasion by seven armies, endured multinational bombing of its churches and monasteries, and whose people were emerging to resume their old familiar town and village lives. Alternatively witty, penetrating, sad and wise, his essays uncover the social mores and closely woven threads of Italian rural life. ‘In my part of the country,’ he writes, ‘few people will willingly volunteer bad news or tell you things that they think you do not want to hear… it is part of good manners … An elaborate game goes on and you have to know the rules if you are going to get anything done.’ In Venice, in 1949, he took a gondola to the island of San Michele, the island of the dead. ‘No lavish mausoleums or marble sculptures rise up here as in other Italian cemeteries,’ he observes. ‘Instead the dead lie in long neat rows, with little undemonstrative tombstones, standing barely a foot from the ground as though the people wanted to make as little parade of death as possible.’

The major essay of the collection, ‘The Ghost in the Machine’, prefigures the interest in historical writing that would become the hallmark of Moorehead’s career. Here, through careful research, he illuminates the life of the brilliant and predatory Angelo Poliziano, Renaissance scholar, poet and protégé of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Poliziano lived in the Villa Diana from 1483 to 1494 and is commemorated on its stone façade as ‘the greatest humanist of his time’.

With its sense of timelessness, The Villa Diana marks a stepping stone in Moorehead’s progress to his most important work. Conditioned by long and exciting wars, he was soon reduced by the absence of professional structure and the honeyed Tuscan life to a state of frustration and self-distrust. His disquiet was symptomatic. From boyhood, Moorehead had believed that he ‘had to make things happen’; this creed vivified and shaped his days. Thereafter, journeying lies at the core of all his work. In the mid-1950s, he paid a visit to the precipitous hills of the Dardanelles and began writing Gallipoli, which would establish him as a major literary figure. The book is strung with tales of high policy, sea and land conflict, disjointed leadership, commitment, muddle and adventure, and on both sides with brave men braced for fierce and often ill-judged encounters. Steeped as he was in battlefield conflict and honed in military analysis, there could be no better writer than Moorehead to tell this story in all its complexity and human drama:

A strange light plays over the Gallipoli landing on 25^th April 1915, and no matter how often the story is retold there is still an actuality about it, a feeling of suspense and incompleteness. Hardly anyone behaves on this day as you might have expected him to do … the great crises of the day appear to have gone cascading by as though they were some natural phenomenon, having a monstrous life of its own, and for the time being entirely out of control. For the soldiers in the front line the issues were, of course, brutally simple. Confronted by some impossible objective, their lives suddenly appear to them to be of no consequence at all; they get up and charge and die.

Moorehead’s enlightening and elegiac book won several prizes in Britain, in a notable literary year, and remains at the forefront of writings on Gallipoli today. It was Africa, however, embedded in his mind from his wartime forays, that now became his creative fulcrum. The White Nile centred on the intrepid journeys of those passionate nineteenth-century explorers Sir Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, and Samuel and Florence Baker, intrepid men (and one woman) who sought to untangle the enduring puzzle of the source of the Nile. In his compelling prose, Moorehead engages the reader in an extraordinary reconnaissance, absorbing the travellers’ journals, following arduously in their footsteps, capturing their distinctive characters, their ambitions and failures, and amplifying his story with a bizarre procession of missionaries, soldiers of fortune, military men and diplomats. Africa held Moorehead in thrall; in The Blue Nile he steps back to examine the British and French expeditionary drives of the eighteenth century that opened up the sleeping continent and made contact with a company of African rulers – cruel, murderous and ambitious – whom his writing enshrines. Through it all Moorehead is present, and it is the personal linkage he establishes with the past and its diverse characters that distinguishes his work.

It was his friendship with another Australian expatriate, Sidney Nolan, that brought Moorehead on a journey to his own country and to the legendary expedition of Burke and Wills. The subject held all the themes that engaged Moorehead: exploration, travel, landscape, intrepid men committed to discovery, and the fearful challenge of the unknown. It was his first real encounter with his own country and the sense of antiquity, mystery and curious beauty revealed in Nolan’s canvases. Once again, Moorehead was there tracking the explorers’ path through the unrevealing bush and the empty desert to the edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria. When, back from their desperate journey, voicing their ‘Cooees’ into the eerie stillness, Burke, Wills and King were fatally thwarted at the ‘Dig Tree’ and began their desperate trek south, Moorehead writes: ‘And from now on we must picture them walking very slowly, exploring the dry channels of the Cooper … walking in Indian file through the silent gum trees … a very concentrated little group, not speaking very much, each one intent upon an inner world of his own discomfort  … They were aliens in this hard indifferent country, this gaol of interminable space.’

In the end, Moorehead’s was a very personal view of this Australian epic. It was, he believed, unlike the story of deeply motivated men, the giants of exploration in Africa, or of man pitted against man as he had seen in the field of battle. Rather, these were ordinary men lifted into extraordinary circumstances. ‘This was just death, stark, despairing and meaningless.’ The quarrel, he concludes, was with that ‘old indestructible’, the Australian bush. Cooper’s Creek, published in 1963, was an instant bestseller. As Manning Clark discerned in his review, it served as a pathbreaker in anticipating and promoting the groundswell of interest in Australian history.

Moorehead had moved into his own hemisphere. When I met him in Canberra in 1965, he was concluding his research for his visionary and controversial book, The Fatal Impact, An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific 1767–1840 (1966), in which he probed the effects of Captain Cook’s three journeys of exploration into the Pacific and Antarctic waters, which had such severe outcomes for the culture of the Tahitians, the future of Australian Aborigines and, physically, for the wildlife of the sub-Antarctic islands, soon to be opened up to the plunder of the whaling and sealing fleets. It was a book that carried Moorehead’s special signature: a compelling historical narrative that lit up a phenomenon at the heart of human, economic and environmental change.

As British biographer Richard Holmes observed in surveying Moorehead’s collective themes in his 2008 HRC Seymour Lecture in Biography, Gallipoli, Cooper’s Creek and The Fatal Impact alerted the world ‘to a different Australian cultural viewpoint and helped to establish a new postwar Australian identity’ (ABR, November 2008). The ‘Mediterranean man’ had found his true roots.