The second great step in the story was the establishment of democracy, which at that point meant manhood suffrage – votes for all adult male citizens, at least in principle. This reform was secured in New South Wales in 1859. The leading men at this stage, by Cochrane’s account, were Charles Cowper and Henry Parkes. Wentworth and a few others appear as the opponents of progress. There were, of course, other opponents. Some educated women, for instance, were ambivalent about the idea that political rights should be attached to manhood alone, with no regard even for literacy or moral character. Why should the most ignorant wife beater in the colony be given the vote when it was denied to women like, say, Caroline Chisholm – at that time a figure of enormous popularity throughout eastern Australia?

This is my rhetorical question, not Cochrane’s. Mrs Chisholm makes no appearance in the book, and indeed, women in general appear only incidentally. Lady Mary FitzRoy, a governor’s wife, is vividly described, but only because of her dramatic death in a carriage accident, with her husband driving. In some nicely written passages, we come to know Robert Lowe’s spouse, Georgiana, because her letters about Lowe are used at some length. Wentworth’s wife, Sarah, although a shadowy figure herself, is skilfully used to add a little depth to her husband’s character. In this last case, Cochrane acknowledges his debt to the pioneering work of Carol Liston. Liston’s book, Sarah Wentworth: Mistress of Vaucluse (1988), was an unpretentious but remarkable achievement because it showed how much accepted truths about a public man could be reshaped and recoloured simply by telling the story of the woman he lived with.

Cochrane offers little sense of the dynamics of married life. Nevertheless, the touches of intimacy conveyed by reference to these three women make a considerable difference to the group portrait. The result is an interesting variation on an old but sadly unfamiliar story.

Following in the footsteps of Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore (1987), Cochrane makes much of the physical appearance of his characters. Robert Lowe was ‘thin-nosed, with palpitating temples’. The British Secretary of State Earl Grey was ‘a stick insect of a man with the face of a frog’. Sometimes such detail is offered as a key to personality. And yet, as Hughes’s book demonstrates, it is often dangerous for an historian to rely on appearance as a guide to the inner man or woman. The immediate result may be colourful and plausible, but it often collapses into caricature. Cochrane sees himself as a methodological revisionist. Impatient, apparently, with the theory-bound methods of the current generation of historians, he intends this book as ‘a return to narrative’. He wants ‘to deliver to the reader something of the drama that resides in our parliamentary origins’. His publisher goes further. This book, so says the blurb, ‘moves like a fast-paced novel’. The brief sketches of married life and the many remarks on what people looked like are designed to drive the story.

This book is meant as unashamedly old-fashioned history, though vividly framed, full of ‘brio and verve’, as the blurb says. It deals with a fundamentally important subject, namely the foundation of democracy in New South Wales – or rather in Sydney, since the rural population figures very little. It thus seeks to answer an urgent need. Today, popular knowledge about the origins of Australian democracy is virtually nil. Australia’s performance in war is much better remembered. Books about war sell more quickly, too, and any hopes Cochrane might have that his history of democracy will make a splash, as, say, Les Carlyon’s The Great War (2006) has done, are likely to be short-lived.

The fact is that Australia no longer possesses a properly articulated democratic tradition. Virtually no one knows or cares how the Australian people learnt to rule themselves. In an age of exaggerated nationalism, we tend to think that we achieved democracy when we became a nation in 1901, or perhaps at Gallipoli. Its actual emergence (though for men only) half a century earlier than these iconic events, under British auspices and even in parts of the country untouched by the libertarian tumult of the Eureka Stockade, looks like a mystery indeed.

In penetrating this gloom, Cochrane follows in the brave footsteps of John Hirst. Hirst’s book, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales 1848–1884 (1988), contains a powerful argument for the British origins of Australian democratic understanding. Cochrane dwells especially on the British idea that liberty and public order are interdependent, attributing it to Edmund Burke. He might have taken it back to Algernon Sidney and others, in the second half of the seventeenth century. If we want sweeping narratives, there is certainly considerable mileage in linking Australian democracy with the post-Civil War settlement in England, in which Sidney played a leading part. The connection would have been obvious to an earlier generation of Australian historians – the sort of historians, indeed, who figure largely in Cochrane’s footnotes.           

However, Hirst’s point certainly needs repeating. In Cochrane’s book, it is driven home with some power. Ideas about loyalty to the British heritage and Constitution were at one time much more than clichés. Similarly, the intricate relationship between common liberties and constitutional monarchy was once part of the fundamental lessons of citizenship. These issues are interwoven with the ethnic background of many Australians. Cochrane deals with them well, though he undoubtedly overburdens them with stories of speech-making and so forth.

The historian Greg Melleuish has recently written with regret about the decline of large narrative in Australian history-writing. In the process of castigating one of my own books, he suggests to readers of the Australian Literary Review that many ‘academic historians’ writing today ‘find narrative history a little too simplistic, too lacking in theory’. Cochrane clearly agrees. As Melleuish says, stories of the past, if they are well told, can say a good deal about the human condition, and he gives as examples the ‘powerful narratives’ of David Hume and T.B. Macaulay. It is an important point. But how is the job to be done, and has Cochrane managed it?

Melleuish is certainly wrong in thinking that the trick simply lies in including, besides the main sequence of events, ‘the occasional contextual chapter or passage’. Nor does Cochrane himself make such a simple mistake. His characters may sometimes lack conviction, but he clearly understands the importance of literary structure and imagery in getting his story across. He has tried to shape the work as a whole around the decline of one large personality (Wentworth) and the rise of another (Parkes), and he describes a certain amount of thunder and lightning as these two stellar careers cut across each other. This is mainly where the strength of his story lies.

But is the result a ‘powerful narrative’, such as Melleuish might approve of? Probably not. The very term ‘powerful narrative’ assumes a receptive audience. Certainly, Cochrane tries to speak a language with which readers of the current generation might engage. The cameos of married life and the descriptions of physical appearance make a real difference to the old story. Whether it is an effective difference – a difference in step with the tastes of a twenty-first century readership – is another matter. Also, it is one thing to point out the British antecedents of Australian political life. It is another to argue as a British historian would in Britain, which is Cochrane’s chosen method. This approach was worked out to describe events within a fairly self-contained political class, such as Britain has possessed for centuries. No such class existed in mid-nineteenth-century Australia. It is no surprise that some of Cochrane’s best passages relate to English decision making about Australia, with a small number of men making up their minds within a universe almost hermetically sealed about events on the other side of the world. (His chapter about the under-secretary in the Colonial Office, Herman Merivale, is especially good.)

This British model usually relies on a wealth of letters and diaries, which convey the sinewy substance of relations among political figures. Unhappily, historians of colonial Australia have to depend instead mainly on newspapers, including reports of speeches. These are Cochrane’s staple, and the result is an impression of theatre, colourful enough yet of doubtful substance. Impassioned statements are summarised or quoted – whole chapters are constructed around them – but with no very clear sense as to what they really signify. Sound and fury notwithstanding, a spirit of suspended animation hangs over the story, while we wait for rhetoric to become reality.

Cochrane is certainly aware of this problem. He makes some important points about the need to recapture the contemporary power of language. ‘The command of written and spoken English,’ he says, ‘was an essential part of celebrity in the mid-nineteenth century.’ In fact, the same is just as true today – in the ‘age of spin’. The challenge lies in working out how control of language works within each generation. This challenge Cochrane seems to avoid. In fact, in the mid-nineteenth century, speeches in newspapers were set out at even more length than he attempts. They must have been read with a strong sense of the drama they embodied, but that sense is now lost. Again, literary and histrionic sensibilities have changed. The historian has to work hard to show how such sensibilities worked and why they mattered – an unwelcome task for anyone aiming at grand narrative. Cochrane is clearly aware that passages of explanation can be like commercial breaks. Readers wander off and unhappily forget to come back. But long quotations, unexplained, are likely to have the same effect.

One point certainly needs explanation: what is democracy, or what was it in the mid-nineteenth century? At one point, Cochrane refers to the ‘democratic inclination’ of Wentworth’s early life – in contrast with his later hauteur. And yet when Wentworth made his first considered statement on the colonial Constitution, as far back as 1819, he said that the right to vote ought to be restricted to substantial householders. Was that democratic? Sometimes, in Cochrane’s writing, ‘democratic’ seems to mean populist rather than anything strictly constitutional. Such vagueness, and the lack of anything about women and the vote, narrows the usefulness of his imaginative and scholarly efforts. Would ‘powerful narrative’ about the origins of Australian democracy be hemmed in if readers were given the chance to think about the subject in a precise and critical way? Is intelligence so much at risk from the workings of imagination?

Except in the most skilful hands, large stories about the past need to be propped up with cliché. Too much novelty is exhausting. Hence Cochrane’s tendency to avoid the work of newer historians in the field. Since World War II, the leading authorities on this area have been Michael Roe and John Hirst. Roe’s book, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835–1851, published as long ago as 1965, Cochrane justifiably calls ‘the finest work on this period in colonial history’. But its larger and more difficult insights, its exploration of the idea of moral progress and its sense of the future as open-ended do not register in his work. Hirst, as I say, is a very important source of ideas. And yet in Cochrane’s text, especially towards the end, Hirst’s idea of the Britishness of Australian politics is submerged by older stereotypes. The narrative echoes with caricatures and categories from an earlier age of Australian scholarship. Most obviously, the old contest between Anglophile snobs and forward-looking, genuine Australians is played out once again. In an important book such as this, it is sad to find the best discoveries of the last two generations of scholarship so much ignored.

The book’s main justification lies in the strength of its storyline. But if a powerful narrative is such an all-consuming virtue, why not write fiction? Kate Grenville, in The Secret River (2005), has shown what might be done by interweaving historical fact with pure imagination. There is indeed, a certain amount of pure imagination in Colonial Ambition. Note, for instance, Cochrane’s account of James Macarthur and the squatters in the 1850s: ‘He [Macarthur] would never say it now, but in their language and swagger they reminded him of the young Wentworth.’ This and many similar passages (all of them brief and inconsequential) are mere fantasy. They are reminiscent of Manning Clark’s fictionalising, but Cochrane does not manage that deep engagement with the quality of humanity which (some might say) justifies Clark’s imaginative excesses.

Indeed, Melbourne University Press seems to apologise for the overwhelmingly factual content of the book – ‘Colonial Ambition moves like a fast-paced novel’. If the market wants fiction, give it fiction. If it wants scholarship (and perhaps it doesn’t), scholars have to be brave enough to flaunt the eccentricities of their trade. Cochrane, like MUP, seems to want the best of both worlds, but with all his literary strengths he falls a little awkwardly between the two.