New dustwrapper for two of the volumes, uniform type (almost, the Nomads looks a bit different), and a slipcase, and we have ‘A vision of Australian History’. Up to now we thought only Manning Clark was allowed visions: it is a sign of Blainey’s increasing confidence that he can win the big two-miler that he has allowed his own publishers to let him become a seer.

But, thank goodness, the old Geoff, give or take a small paragraph or two, is still there. No seer or visionary, really, he, but a sharp-eyed storyteller with an eye for ‘the small snippets of detail’ culled from ‘hundreds of different sources’ to enliven his episodic narratives. He doesn’t, as does Manning, cite his footnote references to these hundreds of sources so, so far, no latter-day Malcolm Ellis has risen to chide his attention to detail, but one always feels that one can trust Geoff, there’s none of this high-flown romanticism, funny bits of King James Version prose, psychoanalysis of the dead, or moral judgements on the grand scale.

Not that Blainey doesn’t exercise judgements: the Irish tend to be the fastest money losers in Australia; the refusal to create a separate colony of North Queensland in the late 1880s was probably a turning point in our history; the Aborigines had no alternative but to wander systematically; the greatest effect of aircraft has been on the craft of war. There are not many pages, and never a chapter, of Blainey that go by without an A.J.P. Taylorian apothegm of like kind. It is one of the great pleasures of reading him, that the certainty of picking up the curious fact and the unlikely detail.

These, the sharp judgements, and the possibly almost wilful refusal to accept current cant mark Blainey out as an historian of a particular sort of distinction. Re-reading these three books as a package one perceives the limitations and the omissions, one also notes the inevitable overlaps between A Land Half Won and The Tyranny of Distance, the reasons for settlement, the impact of sheep, opening up of the country by road and rail cannot help but be dealt with in both. These books were never intended to be part of a set, but they do possess coherence as well as overlap.

They are essentially economic history in the sense of the Greek origin of the word: they are concerned with housekeeping – how a living is earned, how a society chooses to spend it. Blainey does not see politics as a branch of economics; the trade union movement is of more interest to him than the ALP; he sees Parkes more as a small businessman, albeit a hopeless one, than a politician; to hell with the Dreamtime, let’s look at birth control among the Aborigines; Australia’s’ disadvantages in the first world war came not so much from 360,000 dead but from being such a long distance from Europe – and its markets.

Politicians are, in the Blainey view, prisoners of their roles as economic men, hence the thrust of his writings on Federation and flax, and, now, his readier espousal of the China route explanation of Australia’s white settlement. Even Aboriginal politics (warfare, child killing, geronticide) are seen as economic responses. People as such fascinate him as economic animals rather than as lost or striving souls. He is not against people, or uninterested in them, as his crisp but poignant portrayal of Barcroft Boake indicates, but even he is used to exemplify hostility to the pastoral lands, a hostility based upon economic disenchantment.

Yet Blainey is not Marxist, save in the sense that all historians must recognise that there is a relationship between the superstructure of a society and the way it earns its living. Had Marx stuck to such simplicities and not gone in for teleology he might, as the Eighteenth Brumaire showed, have become as good an historian as Blainey. Teleology and determinism have no place in Blainey’s historical armoury. History is full of chance: he delights, as a lengthy fantasy on the North Queensland issue shows, in the what might have been; he avows from, time to time his explicit faith in the importance of the wrong turning as an historical tool. One might suggest that visions, illustrated versions, television series, company histories and slip-cased trilogies being exhausted he should write a completely new series of fictional histories of Australia as it might have been if the French had settled, if the Germans had conquered, if the Japanese had won and so on. One always has the feeling, reading Blainey, of seeing a slightly unreal reality, a view through another man’s spectacle, a sense of having taken a swig from the Drink Me bottle. It is curious that one so hard-headed and knowledgeable about facts should so induce the thought that fiction might be as suitable a medium as fact for the dispensing of his views.

In his aversion to political history, to biographical analysis, to Marxist structuralism, Blainey has always been unfashionable, even if widely read. He’ll have no truck either with social history, Australian Rules football being useful only to show the spread of the Melburnian financial ink stain across the map of Australia. He is, to his peril, not as enchanted with the Aboriginal achievement as current Aboriginalolatry would have us be. He praises with an even hand, not with pious gesture and averted eye. He sees warts on the face of the persecuted goldfield Chinese, he brands the tax dodgers the rebels of Eureka, he accepts, with only the calmest and briefest of explanation the place of women in colonial Australia.

There’s obviously some joyous coat trailing in Blainey, one can feel the relish with which he trumps the ace with a two no one had noticed had not been played. And there’s part of the secret. Blainey, since the mining histories, has not done a great deal of archival research. He finds his jam recipes in official government publications. The journals nobody looks at provide material on weeds and Aborigip.al cosmetics. He is a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles; but then he considers them, rearranges them, thinks of the effects of an alternative arrangement, then says what he has to say with clarity and simplicity. And that’s another part of the secret: if we want to know what good Australian prose looks like we should tum to Blainey. No author now writing has such a command of straightforward, immediately comprehensible prose. It makes what is always worthwhile reading a pleasure as well as an instruction. We might be surprised, even shocked, but we are never puzzled.