From this historical account, Blainey extracts a core truth: a combination of technology, capital, ingenuity, and hard work are the prerequisites of a vigorous, prosperous, and fully human society. It is this vital interaction which, according to Blainey, modern Australia has lost. He looks back longingly to the years between 1850 and 1890 – a glorious period when incomes were high: a time when Australians ‘worked wonders’, using machines to develop ‘the minerals (gold), soils (for wheat), grasslands (for wool) and the other untapped resources of a vast continent.’

In l891 the rot set in. Heavy overseas borrowing left the economy unable to survive a severe drought. Banks collapsed. Unemployment soared. The philosophy of social levelling suppressed the old competitive spirit and elevated the newly formed Labor Party into a major political force. ‘Tall poppies’ were cut down. And a new faith in protectionism, government spending and welfare began to sap ingenuity and vigour from Australian life. Only in the national fervour for sport did the enthusiasm for competition survive. So chronic did this collective delusion become, says Blainey, that by the 1980s, the phrase the ‘Lucky Country’ expressed ‘a canon of faith that Australia’s abnormally rich resources would allow prosperity to live side by side with lethargy and inefficiency.’

Nevertheless, heroes of the Blainey stamp continue to prosper. A.G.M. Mitchell was a ‘bold problem solver’ who invented the thrust bearing essential to large modem ships. F.J. Lyster devised the selective flotation process used in metallurgy. Eric Ansell started making condoms in a backyard factory in Richmond in 1915: today his company is the largest maker of condoms and surgical and industrial gloves in the world.

Unlike Blainey’s newspaper columns, this book is rarely overtly polemical. The prose is constantly searching for balance, moderation, and reasonableness. It is this facility for reasonableness, combined with the nicely turned phrase, the apt example, or the telling international comparison, that makes this so potent a legitimation of the free-enterprise ethos.

Blainey’s reasonableness is partly the result of his apparent readiness to concede points to what might be regarded as the other side. It’s a rhetorical strategy he uses several times. In his account of Aborigines, he returns to the ideas and images he first used in The Triumph of the Nomads, celebrating the richness of Aboriginal culture compared with the culture of Europe at the time of settlement. Thus, in one of those numerical comparisons which Blainey uses so masterfully, he points out that in 1800 there were more languages spoken in Australia than in Europe: that by the measure of linguistic diversity, Aboriginal culture was richer than its European counterpart.

He acknowledges too that the process of white settlement was sometimes violent and destructive that the losses were great. But in the same reasonable, carefully argued manner, he goes on to explain that the damage to Aboriginal culture cannot be compensated for after the event. The Mabo decision, he explains, is a misguided and undemocratic exercise in judicial legislation; and the government’s Mabo legislation compounds the error. It grants land to Aborigines, he writes, ‘under terms perhaps closer to a Soviet than an Australian system of land tenure’. This polemical use of the word ‘Soviet’ forms a tiny crack in the surface of Blarney’s temperate prose a crack through which we glimpse the politics which lie beneath.

Of course, Blainey would disagree. Like most effective conservatives, he argues that his world-view somehow precedes politics that it is a statement about how the world actually is. Even in the closing moments of the book, Blainey is still presenting himself as a historian in search of balance: he poses what he calls ‘that insoluble dilemma: how do we weigh the loss suffered since 1788 by Aborigines with the gains made by perhaps one hundred times as many human beings?’ The rhetoric purports to leave readers free to decide for themselves. But by now the Blainey view is clear: the moral balance between Aboriginal and European claims on the land will tip under the weight of ‘history’. Mabo is an assault on the logic of progress: it jeopardises that free-enterprise development of resources which is the only sure way to achieve prosperity for all.

I’ve focused on the land rights issue, but the book ranges much more widely. It is enlivened by Blainey’s reflections on such topics as sport, the influence of climate on historical events, mining, agriculture, defence, immigration and the rivalry between the proponents of nature and the admirers of technology a kind of recapitulation of everything Blainey ever wrote. His opening chapter on continental drift and Aboriginal migration is clever and evocative writing. His efficient prose is rich in one-liners, ingenious statistical comparisons, and startling rebuttals of those conventional wisdoms which represent Australian history as a series of acts of oppression or amelioration. Thus, to Catholics who grizzle about discrimination, Blainey points out that for all but two of the years between 1929 and 1949, the prime ministership of Australia was held by a succession of Irish Catholics: ‘in few if any Catholic parts of the world had Protestants enjoyed a comparable success.’ He puts in a kind word for the infamous dictation test used to exclude unwanted immigrants, and doubts claims that the Australian government attempted to discriminate against southern Europeans before 1945, observing that only once was the test used to exclude a Greek immigrant. He rejects the view that Australia’s involvement in World War I was a craven colonial venture which had nothing to do with Australia’s national interests: Australia needed to commit itself in order to secure British support in case Japan changed sides. He dismisses the Labor commonplace that the Australian Constitution is a vestige of Imperial authority, arguing that the method of its drafting (through a series of representative conferences) and popular endorsement (by referendum) was more exhaustively democratic and consultative than that employed in any other comparable nation.

He gives no space at all to the arguments for a Republic. But his own position is clear. We are already a de facto republic: our democratic constitution has served us well. In any case, for Blainey what threatens us most is not the ghost of the British Empire, but our own laziness and our vulnerability to military attack from our northern neighbours.

Much as I find myself at odds with the political values which inform this brisk tour through Australian history, it is a book to be taken seriously. My hunch is that it will attract a considerable readership (unless potential buyers are put off by the truly dreadful cover on which an irradiated Blainey seems to grin at us from the inside of a microwave oven). Its very reasonableness may well provide conservatives with a rhetorical resource which they sorely lack. And it will give the levellers amongst us a workout which can only do us good.