But Stephen Alomes and Catherine Jones have produced a book that overcomes most of my apprehensions about such compilations. I have read my copy from cover to cover. The pages are now littered with scribblings and underlinings. In every section I found remarks and reflections which happened to be useful for my own work, and pieces which were interesting in their own right.

The scale of the book – 454 pages of text – has allowed the editors to include quite long pieces and to dramatise particular nationalist traditions and debates with several extracts. The result has all the dynamism of a really good anthology.

The order is broadly chronological, with the book being organised into thematic sections. Each section dramatises the particular nationalist discourses and disputes that the editors believe have characterised the period under review. Thus we are shown the struggle between rival notions of home, ideologies of war and pacifism, the conservative resurgence of the 1920s, the Cold War, and so on. The collection opens in the first half of the nineteenth century under the heading ‘exile and home’. We hear Louisa Ann Meredith in the 1840s rhapsodising over the aspects of Tasmania which remind her most of England. There is a 26 January celebration in which a patriotic song toasts Australia, Macquarie, the King, the Prince Regent, and Old England. We hear Thomas Mitchell foreseeing the Australia Felix flourishing in a Murray basin irrigation system.

But the reader will also find continuities that transcend the periodic categories. Thus, in the first chapter, we are regaled by Barron Field’s ambivalent celebration:

Kangaroo, Kangaroo!

Thou spirit of Australia,

That redeems from utter failure,

From perfect desolation,

And warrants the creation

Of this fifth part of the Earth.

That’s on page nine. But its paradoxical sense of empathy and alienation resonates nicely against A.D. Hope’s more famous and savage poem ‘Australia’, 238 pages and 124 years later, which moves from:

They call her a young country,

but they lie:

She is the last of lands, the

emptiest,

A woman beyond her change of

life, a breast

Still tender but within the womb

is dry …

To the salvation of:

Yet there are some like me turn

gladly home

From the lush jungle of modern

thought, to find

The Arabian desert of the human

mind …

The Hope poem is presented under the heading ‘Celebrations’, a section which includes war memorials, historical re-enactments, Aboriginal protests against the 1938 sesquicentenary, and the celebration – and derogation – of Australian literature. It also contains a forceful extract from P.R. Stephensen’s classic The Foundations of Culture in Australia in which Stephensen denounced the English-born Professor George Cowling, who told readers of the Melbourne Age in 1935 that an Australian literature could not exist. Stephensen retorted: ‘The Empire is in greater danger from patronising Englishmen than from insurgent colonials. Professor Cowling’s critique is a wet blanket applied to the fire of Australian literary creativeness.’  

It’s rousing stuff. And the teacher anxious to pursue this theme into the 1950s would find a hearty chunk of A.A. Phillips ‘Cultural Cringe’ in a section contrasting home-grown literary aspirations with the post-war fervour for Royal Tours.

If these are familiar and expected inclusions, the editors have also turned up less well-known material. A subject close to my own heart, the conservative mobilisation against labour in 1931, is represented, not by the over-exposed Eric Campbell, but by the quiet, articulate Adelaide academic Grenfell Price, who organised the so-called ‘Emergency Committee’ which orchestrated conservative political strategies in South Australia throughout that decisive year.

There are some very curious omissions, however. I suppose a reviewer of any such collection is odds-on to make that observation. But it does seem strange to find no extracts dramatising convict aspirations or notions of place (not even ‘True patriots all; for be it understood, / We left our country for our country’s good.’). There is plenty of discussion about Aborigines, but precious little writing by them. (The book does open with two small reproductions of Aboriginal art, but their significance is rather cryptic.) As for gender, the index contains the names of 283 men (284 if you count Mickey Mouse), but only twenty-nine women; perhaps this is a fair indication of the nexus between nationalist discourse and patriarchy rather than an editorial oversight.

Teachers of standard Australian history courses may consider the book’s visit to the gold-fields astonishingly brief – it consists of no more than a ‘wanted’ poster for Peter Lalor. But presumably the editors felt that such gold-fields material was already widely available. In any case, the same teachers will be refreshed by the way in which the book chooses, instead, to create a wider context for goldfields democracy, representing the 1850s (under the heading ‘Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia’) through anti-transportation debates and talk of new constitutions.

More difficult to account for is the paucity of humour. The editors have a good ear for evocative prose and a good nose for neglected topic. But they’ve left out the comedians, the eccentrics, and the ratbags. There’s no Mo, no Tandberg, and no Patrick Cook. No ‘Loaded Dog’ or ‘Mulga Bill’ … no sense of the bush as (in Lawson’s words) ‘the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds’. Barry Humphries and ‘Dad ‘n’ Dave’ come in for some earnest discussion, but their voices are never heard.

If these omissions mark one of the boundaries of the editors’ definition of ‘nationalism’, then it’s a definition that might be debated. But such a debate would be a difficult one to mount – definitions in a book such as this are bound to be slippery items. If the book has any theoretical underpinnings then they are simply the tacit liberal assumption that independence and freedom are desirable and that racism, imperialism, and war are not. If we want argument, then we are invited to look to Alomes’ earlier work, A Nation at Last? (Angus and Robertson, 1988). The extracts are not concerned to demonstrate ways in which ideologies or perceptions are generated by economic interest and struggles. Nor is there a strong sense of power structures, nor of the sanctions against dissent. And yet all of these dimensions are present in some degree, like familiar faces glimpsed briefly in a crowd, that feeling of animated conversations connecting with and diverging from each other which is the source of the book’s great energy. This is a collection which eschews the myth of an essential Australian tradition, preferring instead to dramatise Australian debates and to celebrate the diversity and pluralism of Australian national consciousness.

Presumably there is some hope that this book will become required reading in schools. It might do – but at $35 a copy I suspect that many teachers will – be doing a good deal of surreptitious photocopying rather than blowing $900 on a class set. That’s not to say the cost is unfair. The book is well produced, nicely laid out, and introduced in clear, though unexciting, prose. It provides a stimulating ride through the fairground for anyone undertaking research in Australian history; it’s a useful resource for teachers; and it will provide a stout companion on cold wintery evenings.