In his own historical writings, Hirst has challenged orthodoxies and produced many new insights. Most notable here have been his studies of colonial New South Wales: Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (1983) and The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales (1988). Some of his shorter analyses have also been notable. ‘Distance in Australia – Was It a Tyrant?’ (1975), his response to Geoffrey Blainey’s most famous concept, deserves much more attention than it now receives; and his ‘Egalitarianism’ (1986) also challenges received wisdom about colonial life. At the same time, Hirst’s shorter pieces have appeared in a variety of forums. He was for years the only person to be able to publish simultaneously in those polar opposites of Quadrant and Overland; and he has contributed many articles to The Age and The Monthly.

To my knowledge, John Hirst has never held an ARC grant. (His explanation is that he was able to undertake his required research with modest support for photocopying and travel to major Australian libraries; and that he didn’t believe in using public funds unnecessarily.) On the other hand, he has obtained large funding for his longest-lived project, the indexing of The Argus (1860–1909), which is now nearing completion, and which will be an invaluable resource in the future. And if all this weren’t enough, Hirst has advised ministers on civics and history curricula, and has served on various government bodies.

It is good now to have many of Hirst’s shorter essays collected together, with this present volume following Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005). Seventeen are printed here, their composition ranging from 1994 to 2010. Many appear more or less as they were first written, though a couple are truncated, and others somewhat modified. This practice has the virtue of presenting Hirst’s insights largely as he first developed them. However, with a couple, subsequent events have created new circumstances which it would have been good for him to have taken account of. Most notable is the Howard government’s 2007 intervention in Aboriginal affairs in the Northern Territory. How have the intervention and its consequences altered his thinking about the large issues he raises? How would he now answer his question: ‘Here is a great dilemma. Can Aborigines live as other Australians do and yet retain their own culture?’

There are points which could have borne further investigation. For instance, while I agree that in the Australian colonies the performance of manual labour ceased to be a class signifier, I am doubtful that society was as déclassé as Hirst represents it to have been: ‘Black was “a squatter of the old school who’d shared the early hardships with his men, and couldn’t see why he should not shake hands and have a smoke and a yarn over old times with any of his old station hands that happened to come along”.’ Here, I think of how workmen in the bush might well eat at the same table as the boss, but also sit ‘below the salt’; and of Catherine Kirkland’s indignation that a former convict inveigled himself into their home and their confidence: ‘in the bush it is not an easy task to tell who are gentlemen and who are not from their dress.’ As is Hirst’s way, most of these essays resonate either with his earlier work, or with landmark studies of Australian history and society. In ‘The Life and Work of Russel Ward’, though he still listens intently to the burden of Ward’s song, Hirst reiterates Graeme Davison’s point that what Ward enshrined as the Australian Legend had its origins in the work of urban Sydney’s writers and artists.

The parallel pieces, ‘Making Voting Secret’ and ‘Making Voting Compulsory’, wherein Hirst shows how colonial politicians developed ideas current in Britain, extend insights in his earlier studies of colonial New South Wales. In ‘The Convict Legacy’ and in ‘Labor’s Part in Australian History’, he continues what has been one of his major themes, which is that many of the features of national character and culture which commentators in the twentieth century identified as distinctively Australian in fact derive from Britain. I think Hirst is absolutely right on this point and that others have fallen into error because they have not looked closely enough at the society whence ours came, nor attended properly to the intricacies of cultural transmission.

Perhaps the most important essay in this collection (partly because it is previously unpublished) is ‘Was Curtin the Best Prime Minister?’ Here, after a careful consideration of the evidence, Hirst answers firmly No. In the process, he exposes two of the nation’s enduring beliefs for the myths they are. The first of these is that Curtin ‘had to fight Churchill to get the soldiers of the AIF returned from the Middle East to defend Australia against the Japanese. Churchill himself proposed the move.’ The second is that Curtin decisively altered the course of our history by turning us away from Britain and connecting us to the United States. Rather, Hirst points out:

Curtin was simply unlucky. His press secretary wrote the statement – though he approved it – and it was not addressed to the two allied leaders. It was addressed to the Australian people as a report of what was in train and the challenges ahead … ‘Free of any pangs’ was then flashed around the world to the dismay of Roosevelt and Churchill and the delight of the propaganda outfits in Berlin and Tokyo, who had a story about Australia deserting Britain.

In collecting these essays, Hirst has quietly pursued another of his general themes: that there is a distinctive Australian character, which has not been obliterated by the mass immigrations of the past sixty years. This is a character which involves, variously, independence, irreverence, economic and political opportunity, and commitment to a ‘fair go’, but also living within a largely common matrix of law and custom.

His prose mercifully unburdened by faddish jargon, Hirst writes in a clear, informative way. At times, his tendency toward aphorism puts one in mind of Francis Bacon’s essays: for example, ‘We are better off thinking that Australian characteristics are those of the English working class writ large.’

It is good to have these essays available again, for they are repeatedly both insightful and stimulating. There are moments when the reader is left wishing that Hirst had gone further and analysed at greater length. For example, when he says that while we have never had a great prime minister, ‘there has been one great prime ministership, the partnership of two men who disagreed over Curtin and came to hate each other: Hawke and Keating’, it would have been very good to have had an extended exposition of this point (which I take to turn on the fact that this pair flew in the face of Labor policy to undertake structural reform).

And when he says that ‘The Australian Legend in itself is a work of mythic power for it is an account of a revelation, of a moment when a people came to know fully what was previously half known or hidden. Ward wrote so compellingly because he was writing of his own revelation, which he projected onto the nation and backdated to the 1890s’, he raises a point which has wider applicability – just how much did Manning Clark project his metaphysical landscape onto our past, and thus distort it?

It is to be hoped that John Hirst will in the future discuss such important questions at length.