Yet Hancock’s 1930 classic Australia, with its eschewal of an orthodox chronology and its often censorious commentary on contemporary policy and society, was something other than a conventional short history, if it actually deserves the designation at all. By way of contrast, Ernest Scott’s much-reprinted A Short History of Australia (1916), a chronological work, famously began ‘with a blank space on the map’. Mark Peel and Christina Twomey’s A History of Australia – the latest manifestation of Shist – instead contains a pointed reminder in its opening chapter that the Aboriginal people of Australia were not ‘awaiting the arrival of the Europeans so that history could begin’. Their sense of Australian history as a series of visions, paths, and choices – some taken, others ignored or shunned – helps draw their rich material together into the ‘extended kind of explanation’ that Sinclair rightly saw as the aim of good Shist.

Yet Shist is a conservative genre, and publishers’ expectations that such books will earn a large proportion of their sales among university students doubtless preclude much experimentation. This book is part of a Palgrave Macmillan Essential Histories series, and it is clearly aimed, in part, at a non-Australian audience. Playing the gadfly in these circumstances is probably not a good look, if only because your audience is unlikely to be familiar with the pieties you happen to be questioning.

So while Scott began his account with the European explorers, they only have to wait until the second chapter to make their début in Peel and Twomey’s book. The big change in the basic structure of such texts since 1916 is the fifty thousand or so years of human history in Australia before the appearance of Captain Cook. Yet the habit of compressing that long history into a dozen or so pages at the beginning of a book, as Peel and Twomey have done here, is also becoming a tired formula – from both a literary and an intellectual point of view – a suggestion at which John Hirst has recently hinted in ABR.

If we are looking for freshness in a short history of Australia, it must come from elsewhere than its essential organisation. Here, Peel and Twomey’s A History of Australia has much to commend it. Their well-written book instils confidence that these are two historians with a strong command of what is known – and understood – about Australian history today. They have not produced a dull textbook that simply synthesises the work of others; yet anyone who has followed the major twists and turns in Australian historiography over the last quarter of a century or so will find some of the most important ones quietly registered here.

One of the most impressive qualities of this history is that Peel and Twomey have looked beyond the most obvious sources and quotations in building their account. They have a great eye for the telling quotation and anecdote that, without detailed unpicking on the authors’ part, nevertheless illuminates much about the Australian past. With its tables, graphs, and lists, the book does have some of the qualities of a textbook, but it admirably fulfils one of the criteria Sinclair set down for a successful Shist: it is intended to be read – as one might read a novel – not merely consulted.

As a reviewer, I found myself asking a different set of questions about a short history than I should have asked of a history book of a different – and more specialised – kind. Could I set this book as a text for my students without embarrassment? Can I imagine a businessperson on a long-haul flight reading and enjoying it? Will a Belgian reader close the book with a better understanding of the things that matter most in Australia’s history? My answer to these questions is ‘yes’, though at times there is too much name-checking and a degree of compression that obscures as much as it reveals. I wonder, for instance, if a reader unfamiliar with the extraordinary decision of a group of Australian socialists to found a utopian colony in South America called ‘New Australia’ would really have gleaned what it was all about from the following comment: ‘For William Lane, the struggle between socialism and capitalism could be furthered only by a utopian separation and a New Australia; with writer Mary Gilmore, activist Rose Summerfield and more than two hundred others, he left for Paraguay in 1893.’

The mention of Summerfield underlines one of the pitfalls of the short history game. Summerfield, in fact, did not travel with Lane to Paraguay in 1893; she went there with her second husband in 1899. There is little reason to doubt that this book is mainly accurate, but the demands for breadth, readability, and economy in Shist are exacting and sufficient to stretch even the best historians. Is it simply pernickety to point out that John Curtin’s famous appeal to America in December 1941 was not ‘the most famous speech of his political career’, as claimed here, but actually an article in the Melbourne Herald? Or that Sir Otto Niemeyer was not Jewish? Or that wages for those on Commonwealth awards were cut by ten per cent in 1931, not twenty per cent? Or that ‘The Blood Vote’ was first produced for the 1916 anti-conscription campaign – not in 1917? Or that the claim that half the men who joined the Australian Imperial Force in World War I were British-born is a gross exaggeration? (The figure would be closer to one-fifth.)

These mainly minor slips admittedly need to be set alongside the sentence, here and there, that deftly summarises a complex history and historiography. There are many ways of conveying the growing public hostility to the so-called socialist regimentation of the Labor Government after World War II, but I can recall none better than the ‘perception [...]that Labor appeared to be building a fortress, when the forecast appeared fine and a shelter would do’. The idea that women in the 1920s were being told ‘that if they were going to breed less, they needed to clean more’ is marvellously perceptive, as is the description of Ned Kelly as both ‘a product of grievance’ and ‘one of the first to be subjected to a new kind of celebrity’. When I encountered sharp, witty, and intelligent judgements of this kind – and there were many more – I was reminded that I was in good hands. Some of the character sketches are quite brilliant.

Both authors have been academics at Monash University, but Peel has now moved to a chair at the University of Liverpool in Britain. He wrote the chapters on Australia before Federation, Twomey those on the twentieth century and beyond. Peel’s expertise in American history emerges from his frequent comparison of Australian with North American experience. He is more insistent on the open-endedness of Australian historical development, that the ‘future was not cast in stone’: it is possibly easier to imagine such a history for colonial Australia than for the era since the 1890s, when the scope for Australian choice in a dangerous, globalising, and highly competitive world was arguably reduced. Yet I came to wonder whether the book makes too much of choice and contingency, to a point where it becomes difficult to see why any historical patterns emerged at all. Social scientists have developed useful concepts such as ‘path dependence’ to remind us that ‘policy makers are heirs before they are choosers’, as Richard Rose has perceptively commented. It is a judgement that can usefully be extended to historical actors more generally.

Still, this book is an impressive achievement, and a distinguished contribution to a genre that only experienced historians on top of their game would be sensible to attempt – if they value their reputations. On this count, Peel and Twomey have nothing to fear. Australia’s Shist remains in safe hands.