Playing with words too, frolicking like a dolphin – punning (‘the club went CHOGM on’), rhyming (‘Bigge the prig’), brandishing a rare one (mythomoteur), making them up (revelationary – a favourite, indignacious, goaheaditiveness, Sydbourne syndrome – helpfully defined for Australian National Dictionary collectors as ‘generalising nationally from Sydney /Melbourne data’, a habit the author elsewhere confesses). And sliding easily from past tense to present and back. Who else has written our history, from rockchoppers to knockers/ockers, in such style?

‘Every man can write at least one good book’, says Archibald of the Bulletin reported by McLachlan, whose eye for quotes is unerrring. What goes through his mind as he shoe-horns that one in? He and we’ve been a long time waiting for this good book. Generated, he tells us, by fourteen years’ expatriation (1950–64), thought hard about ever since, here and (1977–79) in Ireland (that spell helping, I imagine, to create the brilliant portrait of Peter Lalor). Narrative informed by memory once it reaches his lifetime (he’s sixty one, and there’s a wonderful account of May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, read to him in second grade), and by family history much further back than expected when he set out, Victorian descendant of gold seekers unearthing late in life two convict great-great-grandparents who make him not just student but inheritor of the Stain, the Botany Bay Complex. (If they didn’t exist, necessary to invent them?)

The Stain one of his three themes: our nationalism largely about it, ‘divisive continentally at home but unifying abroad’. (People in clean provinces reluctant to identify with stained, but outsiders, above all Poms, see us all as Botany Bayers). Second theme: The American revolution and its profound impact, one way and another, first as cause of British settlement here, then beacon for high Australian hopers. Third theme: Threats, imagined and real, not taken seriously till 1941–42 because we so remote from threateners and Royal Navy so mighty: hence ‘national consciousness … almost always dangerously low’. Puzzle: if nationalism virulent virus as he calls it at one point, why ever say dangerously low (and elsewhere ‘healthily high’)? He confesses finding ‘moments of nationalist charm and ardour’ as well as all that bragging and bigotry in Australia’s story, likes Russel Ward, barely mentions Humphrey McQueen, finished too soon to read Stephen Alomes’s A Nation At Last?, quizzically cool on Richard White’s ‘A National identity is an invention’: ‘That smacks more of nihilism than of the not so New Left, but we’ll see.’ We see first and last, as never before laid out, all Australian nationalism’s complexities.

Those stylistic devices build authorial presence. Colloquialisms and passages grabbing reader (‘There’s still much to unfurl. Have you, for example, heard of ...?’) suggest speech rather than writing, animating voice of lecturer/master of ceremonies/chorus/fairground barker/ancient mariner. Italics and exclamation marks say: ‘Listen to this!’ Sloping lines (‘guts/indominability’, ‘independent/indigenous’, ‘reassuringly/misleadingly’) may offer, as here, near-synonymity, complementarity, or two meanings at once: take your pick. Parentheses help pack sentences tighter and let author interrupt, if need be in italics: ‘(profoundest irony of our history)’, he nudges, inside argument that our constitution drew only on conservative features of the republican one written by American revolutionaries.

Question marks point up pithy speculations about e.g. public opinion (on cheers for a royal duke in 1901: ‘Bourgeoisie cheer the loudest?’; on fewer women than men republicans in 1986: ‘Reluctant to dethrone a female?’) but also, more profoundly, question and answer is basic to McLachlan’s historiography. As to that of R.G. Collingwood, Oxford philosopher of history ingested by young Noel in the Theory and Method course at R. M. Crawford’s Melbourne history school. Used here both heuristically and pedagogically in every chapter and at beginning and end.

Beginning:

1. What does being Australian mean?
2. Is it something to be proud or ashamed of ?
3. Has the nation a future?’

End: Same questions listed ‘for final assault’. Answers:

1. Many things beside nationality – sex, class, religion, age, ethnicity – but still egalitarianism, mateship, love of liberty – ‘the blessed convict trinity’ – something of it, he says, shared by women though not yet by Aborigines. Self-recognition heightened by multiethnic immigration and swarming Australian tourism abroad.
2. No future for traditional fantasies of New Britannia or New America. Threats less evident than ever – Libya scores highest in 1987 poll! – but against possible long-run enemies (France? Indonesia? Japan? India?) armed neutrality a rational option. Let’s humanise the constitution, add a Bill of Rights as last trans­Pacific salute to once-revolutionary Americans, affirm one person/one vote/one value as essential to Australian democracy, recognise strong government necessary to preserve convict trinity. Abandon the absentee queen of England, agree on a wholly Australian flag, tum Anzac Day into an anti-war festival old enemies may join, celebrate the tide-turning at Imita Ridge, Papua, in 1942 (28 September – Spring festival) and give Maurice Margarot, Scot Jacobin convict of 1794, a niche in the new Parliament House.

No revolution in sight then, even stretching the word as I think McLachlan does from time to time while surveying the waiting. So what revolution(s), after the American one he’s made a theme? First, ‘ours against the Aborigines’. Surely a misnomer, and not pursued after that one phrase. Then the French, by invasion or insurrection, its hope and threat embodied in Margarot. Irish rising at Castle Hill in 1804 (Margarot possibly implicated) – ‘the closest, almost certainly, this continent’s ever been to successful revolution’. Why almost? If that’s our closest, we’ve always been far, and by page seventy, ‘Emerging truth: Australia possibly the most hopeless country in the world for revolution.’ Still, there’s Macarthur in 1808, and McLachlan asks what if Bligh had drawn that pistol when the soldier pushed a bayonet at him? Then the convict revolution imagined by Frank the Poet and others against gaolers. (Revolution, or carnival, saturnalia, dream?) Resistance to new transportation c.1850, when American revolutionary rhetoric was certainly used. (Bluff?) Eureka, powerfully described, and why shooting yielded no revolution, cogently analysed. Barcaldine 1891, inspiring (when fight already lost, though McLachlan doesn’t say so) Lawson’s line about blood staining the wattle: nearest thing to ‘revolutionary reality’ in that bitter decade, but still a long way, and in 1901 ‘near-nationhood without revolution’. Remembrance Day 1975? If Whitlam had drawn his pistol (reviewer’s metaphor, author’s point) and dismissed Kerr, ‘Australia would almost certainly have achieved a bloodless revolution and perhaps republicanism in one go.’ And as always when historians go perhapsing, perhaps not. The G.G. evidently feared it’, but did Whitlam ever imagine that outcome?

McLachlan’s generous to earlier writers. He draws on plentiful sources, prose and verse, published and not. He’s a connoisseur of unpublished theses, as well he might be: his own on larrikinism in 1950 one of two best I know in Australian social history, and he cites in end-note the other, Edgar Waters’s on popular arts in 1962.

The endnotes are such capricious guides to particular sources that reader could easily give up – a pity, whereas they are a good read. Many observations at the back deserve promotion to text, such as that H.R. Nicholls’s 1854 paean to universal revolution ‘makes delicious his recent choice as eponym of a New Right political society, because of his attack on the Commonwealth Arbitration Court in his dotage’.

I fell over three mistakes in one sentence before reaching page one: ‘The Australians, the official, multi­volume, bicentenary history (Ken Inglis, general editor)’ appeared, McLachlan says, too late to use. That series has – deliberately – no The in title, isn’t official, and has three other general editors (only one named in McLachlan’s letter listing errata in the 1ast ABR). So I’m relieved to find few errors after page one, none substantial except perhaps the propositions that a Japanese destroyer decently allowed the Sydney to take on the Emden off Cocos in 1914 (the Japanese ship, actually a cruiser, was forbidden by the British commander to attack the German raider) and that conscription was resumed in the mid-1960s ‘to help the U.S. out in Vietnam’ (the decision had more to do with confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia). McLachlan is accident-prone in Melanesia, leaving New South Wales out of the colonies which helped pay for the early protectorate, having Hubert Murray rule New Guinea and not just Papua, putting Lae in Papua instead of New Guinea, and saying no journalist accompanied Australia’s force to German New Guinea in 1914 (the Sydney Morning Herald had a man on board). If he spots as little wrong in any book I write, I’ll be pleased.

The book divides two centuries into ten chapters, each with apposite epigraph from Tocqueville and each broken into sections, some very short, many vignettes/episodes/ scenes written with skill rare in academics (honed when he worked for The Times?) reminding me of three best-selling Australian historians: Geoffrey Blainey, Manning Clark, Gavan Daws (whose episodic strategy in Shoal of Time, history of Hawaii, is rather like McLachlan’s). Characters live, in prose dense, clear, lively, sparkling wise wit: ‘Hughes’s cockatoo-voiced crusading’ abroad, ‘London clarified Archibald’s identity but curdled Henry’s’ (Lawson), Menzies ‘cock-a-hoop when Charles came to mix with ordinary, upper-class blokes at Timbertop.’ Now and then a sentence stuffed so full I can’t easily unpack. Some flashy, some fizzers, but you whizz on.

Illustrations? Three dozen or so, all passing first test: visual text, not decoration. Most are cartoons, some familiar, some fresh. Crisp captions. Nice contrast: John Trumbull’s painting of Bunker Hill, ‘Christ/Warren down from the Cross above Boston’, and J.B. Henderson’s – used on cover – of Eureka: ‘No Trumbull, he shows soldier vs civilian: bravery, cowardice, messy death, ugly reality.’

Structure, prose, punctuation, persona; all pursue general readers, as by other means do multi-volume Australians. Our tally so far approaching 15,000 for each of eleven volumes at $720 the lot, reprint possible. How’ll this one do at $24.99? It deserves to go like a bomb. It’s revelationary.