Stephen Alomes has not been so evasive. His concern is as much with the ‘good’ as the ‘bad’, and as much with the present as the past. Although the book deals with the period since 1880, about half is concerned with Australian nationalism since 1960. The first half crosses a fairly familiar landscape: the Bulletin and the Heidelberg School, the limits of Federation and the national symbols favoured by 1900s advertising, Anzac, Niemeyer, and Bodyline, war with Japan and post-war reconstruction, the idea of ‘the Australian way of life’ in the 1950s. He is at his best after 1960, when he deals with the ‘schoolkid of a country’ who had obeyed too long, the new jingoism of TV ‘jingle-ism’ (Alomes is clearly a loss to the advertising industry), the narcissism of the bicentenary, the efforts of multinationals to ‘naturalise’ their products with Australian images, and the use and abuse of nationalism by the New Right. His achievement is not in any original research, but in the relative weight he gives to contemporary nationalism and his readiness to establish continuities, between Spofforth and Lillee, Parkes and Menzies, the Bulletin and Nation Review, a sunny and a nuclear-free Australia.

In seeking to explain the character of Australian nationalism, its hesitancy and its limitations, he looks in the right places for the answers: the experience of colonialism, the particular white relationship with the land, and the development of an international culture and international trade. But the problem is that he consistently asks the wrong questions. Consider the question in the title, A Nation at Last?, which refers back to Henry Lawson ‘s Federation poem ‘Jack Cornstalk’. Despite his stress on contemporary nationalism, Alomes is in many ways an old-style unreconstructed radical nationalist. The title’s question mark contains no irony that might question the notion of nationhood, but simply asks whether Lawson’s hopes have been realised, on the assumption that all will be well when ‘Australians are first where Australia was last, / And the day of the foreign adventurer’s past’. For Alomes the real Australian nationalism is a working-class nationalism continually betrayed by respectable middle-class Australians in thrall to England and then the United States. It leaves out the middle-class base of a lot of radical nationalism (among professionals and manufacturers), a working class tradition of facetiousness at national as well as imperial sentiment, a tradition of English admiration for Australia (they are only allowed to be contemptuous); and it marginalizes the role of racism. The ultimate test remains whether people like gum trees.

The problem is that no questions are asked of nationalism itself. Nationalism, of the right sort, has a universal and unproblematic value; it is presented as a natural development opposed by the unnatural, the intoxication’ of imperialism, and the manipulations of sectional interests. He admits that BHP’s Australianness was never any guarantee of humanity, but implies it ought to have been. His favourite texts he uses well, the brave cris de cœur of the colonized, Fanon and Memmi, for whom nationalism is a necessary hope of salvation. But he leaves out the sort of challenges posed by Benedict Anderson – what are nationalism’s roots and why do people die and kill in its name?

We are also left up in the air as to what nationalism is, despite the rich variety of nationalisms Alomes offers. The wrong sort include ‘military’, ‘ersatz’, ‘celebratory’, ‘orchestrated’, ‘T-shirt’, ‘mainstream’, and, at times, ‘popular social’ nationalisms. The right sort are too vague: ‘a true sense of national interests’, ‘self-awareness’, ‘fundamental Australian self-confidence’, a sense of ‘Australian destiny’, and ‘a genuine and thoroughgoing nationalism which involved national self-criticism and a stocktaking about national direction’ (Alomes is also a loss to the speechwriting industry). Sometimes his nationalism is worrying. Why does his blurb stress that he is a ‘sixth generation Australian’ ? He complains that Australia did not ‘do well ‘ in post-war carve-ups of territory. He fails to notice that New Zealanders in Australia fit the same pattern as Australians in England. And the suggestion ‘that white, like Aboriginal, Australia has also been a victim’ is, to put it mildly, rather glib.

He fails to ask how his various nationalisms really relate to each other; or who the nationalists have been. His focus is on the presentation of nationalism, but to understand it we should also know how it has been received. Society only appears in the book as versions of ‘the nation’ – vague terms like ‘the Australian people as a whole’, ‘Young Australia’ and ‘ordinary Australians’ who are not the same as ‘most Australians’. He assumes a simple relation between nationalism and its object, the nation, accepting that the Bulletin ‘was Australia in concrete form’ and presenting the Heidelberg School as ‘the voice of Australian experience’. What is surprising is how little consideration there is of the nation as contested ground.

Other questions are simply left out. What are we to make of the rich complexity of the anti-American tradition in Australia? Alomes is too much part of the tradition to see it. He evades the question of the relation between migration – British, non-British, and the Australian response – and nationalism, though he calls for vigilance in assessing ‘foreign influences’ and suggests integration is ‘possibly desirable’. And finally he asks no questions about the gender dimensions of nationalism as the province of men; interestingly, the years he looks back to with favour, the 1890s, the 1940s and the 1960s, were the years radical nationalism most actively excluded women.

Why the failure to ask questions? One reason is the focus on the telling illustration, Alomes’s great strength. He rescues some wonderful one-liners: Lennie Lower’s ‘When I’m under the house I feel Australian’; Archbishop Loane, in the 1960s, declaring himself happy to serve ‘the colony’; Bob Ansett’s introduction of Leigh Matthews as ‘one of the truly great players of Amer – ah – Australian football’. Another reason is a certain literalness: Alomes’s interest tends to be in what is said, not the fact that it is said. For example, to demonstrate that colonial élites thought colonial products were inferior, he quotes ‘one W.J. Sowden’ saying that they did, without noticing that Sowden was a newspaper proprietor (later knighted) addressing an élite audience, the Australian Natives Association, who would have agreed with him. Later he quotes Lucy Frost on the arrogance of English academics in Australia without even mentioning she is American. Dare I suggest a third reason though? Could it be, in one so sensitive to the phenomenon, a kind of cultural cringe? Has he accepted that the role of an Australian intellectual is to discuss how an issue relates to Australia, but not to ask anything about the issue itself? It is a worrying thought, but it is comforting, and important, that the old radical nationalism is still alive and kicking.