The contrast between our practice and theirs became evident when I asked for the assessment guidelines. Here again, Australian universities have elaborate rules that specify how, when and in what form the components of assessment will be conducted, along with explanation of grades, rules on second marking, and dire warnings against plagiarism. None of this appeared in the sample guide, and my inquiry about Harvard’s policy met with a puzzled response before I was assured that I should do whatever I judged appropriate for the course.

Of all the differences between the American university and the Australian one, the difference in attitudes towards academic autonomy is the most striking. We have adopted methods of performance management, appraisal and accountability that sometimes remind me of my training as a tram conductor during the summer months when I was an undergraduate. A gnarled senior inspector took us through the rule book, warning us of the dire consequences of a variety of petty criminal practices that not even a doctoral candidate in physics could have conceived; it was as if all of us had come from the Fagan labour-hire service.

Having worked as an academic administrator, I can appreciate the need to ensure that teaching and research are conducted appropriately. And having conducted audits for the Australian Universities Quality Agency, I understand the need for ensuring appropriate procedures. But there is something peculiarly demeaning and debilitating in the imposition of elaborate rules on intelligent professionals that require them to justify even the most mundane academic activity. Harvard operated on the assumption that the professor was competent and responsible, capable of determining the appropriate practice.

Harvard is, of course, a leading research university, with eminent faculty and few of the financial constraints that shape our eleemosynary practices. The American system of higher education is a large and variegated one, with its own low-end providers and a lumpenproletariat of part time and sessional teachers. Yet it is a country with a long- standing commitment to learning, and accords respect to academics. Try as I might, I could not persuade my students to use my first name; I was invariably addressed – in class and in e-mails – as ‘Professor’.

In the Fall semester, I taught a survey course in Australian history, but to make it more intelligible to them and more interesting to me, I gave it a comparative dimension, using American history as a point of reference on every aspect from geography, indigenous history, settlement, exploration, the gold rushes, immigration, urbanisation, international relations and religion.

There is of course an asymmetry here, as there is in other aspects of the Australian-American relationship. No Australian can help but have a familiarity with many aspects of American life, for it is omnipresent in our reading, listening and viewing, our business and our imagination, whereas American undergraduates have at most a fragmentary awareness of Australia.

When I asked my students to name an Australian, I thought Rupert Murdoch might find favour, or perhaps Nicole Kidman or Robert Hughes; but Steve Irwin won hands down. Australian media give close attention to the presidential primaries; the New York Times had one article on the 2007 Australian federal election, though my students followed it with interest by means of online editions of the Australian press.

This imbalance of awareness is hardly surprising, given the differences in size, situation and status of the two countries, and for me the more striking discovery was the in- crease in American knowledge of Australia and Australians.

My baseline is a highly personal one, namely my American godfather. Aubrey Dingley, a native of the rural Massachusetts town of Northborough, was one of the million American servicemen who were stationed in Australia during World War II. He was a naval lieutenant based for some time in Cairns, where he met and courted my mother, a signaller with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. They were briefly engaged, until my mother decided it was not going to work. As a consolation prize he became the godfather of her first child, born several years later.

Aubrey B. Dingley – he preferred to be known as ‘Ding’ – returned to Northborough and operated a successful construction business. He never married and during the 1950s used to visit us regularly in the northern winter, combining the trip with a holiday on the new Queensland beach resort of Surfers Paradise. He was a man of limited education – his postcards always spelt it as ‘Surface Paradise’ – but had a shrewd eye for business opportunities, especially the opportunities to apply American expertise to the rudimentary Australian service sector; if only we had heeded his suggestion to get a franchise for the food chain McDonald’s. We might have made our fortunes.

Ding was an old-fashioned man of very conservative views. His final present to me, when I visited him and the mobile home village he had built on a disused gravel pit in his eighties, was a message-plate with the slogan ‘Born Free, Killed by Taxes’ that he attached to his fleet of vehicles. He was also extremely generous. On his visits he brought gifts for all, so my brothers and I were the envy of the street in our denim cowboy suits with studs and glass ornaments. Throughout the 1950s he had the Saturday Evening Post sent to us, with its cornucopia of advertisements and Norman Rockwell’s sentimental depictions of American life.

But he clearly didn’t talk much about Australia to his compatriots in Northborough. When members of our family visited him, the locals regarded us as exotic aliens. My mother has recalled that, on her first visit, Ding’s family were astonished by her fluency in English.

Americans are now far more likely to recognise an Australian accent, though not always. On my early-morning runs I would come back past the newspaper-stand in Harvard Square. One morning, after several months of this routine, I bade the vendor my usual good morning, to which he replied with unusual enthusiasm. A brief glance was enough to explain why: it was the morning after the last game in the World Series and he wore a large red B on his jacket. So I congratulated him on the success of the Red Sox. He paused and then remarked that, as I bought the New York Times, I must hail from beyond Boston. Yes, I explained, from Australia. He reacted as if this was an obscure suburb of New York and we completed the transaction.

Australians are more familiar to Americans than they used to be: in part because of their impact on Hollywood; in part because of increased movement between the countries; in part because of the internationalisation of education, business and the professions. One of my Harvard students had an Australian father, another had spent his childhood in the Solomon Islands with his missionary parents; yet another had been here on a study abroad programme. The others enrolled out of interest.

Australians have been travelling to America since the early nineteenth century, sometimes to stay, more often as visitors, and repeatedly they have found models to emulate, as in the Reverend John Dunmore Lang, whose tour in 1840 informed his vision for Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia (1852). But in its scale and its forms the contemporary phenomenon of the work-ing expatriate is unprecedented. There are more than a million Australians working and living abroad, and a significant proportion of them are based in the United States.

Greater familiarity does not necessarily mean greater understanding. In teaching my class at Harvard, I had to make a point of observing local usage (labour unions, not trade unions; graduate students, not postgraduates) and I was sometimes surprised at the misunderstandings. I remarked in my first lecture that Oscar Wilde had described England and America as two countries separated by a common language, and then made the mistake of asking them if they knew of Wilde. No, not even when I added that when passing through Customs on his first visit to the United States he said he had nothing to declare but his genius.

This was not my only failure when using the Socratic method. I prepared a lecture comparing the Californian and Victorian goldrushes, drawing heavily on David Goodman’s fine study Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850’s (1994), but made the mistake of asking the class if they could tell me the American term for alluvial gold. No response. You do know about the Californian gold rush, I inquired. Sort of, they said, but we are Easterners. But Australian school students all know ‘My Darling Clementine’, I insisted, and sang them a verse. They didn’t.

There were other surprises. The students took a keen interest in Aboriginal history – many had seen Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) – but found it difficult to draw comparisons with native Americans. They were astounded to hear of the recent claim that very few indigenous Australians were killed in frontier violence, but remarkably unsure when I asked them about the much larger number of fatalities during the settlement of New England.

Harvard’s museum of anthropology has a large collection of Aboriginal artefacts, and some of the students followed my suggestion that they look at them. But the anthropology department no longer works on the South-West Pacific. My wife, Martha, was a fellow of the department during our year there, but she had to travel to Amherst in western Massachusetts to find colleagues who maintain such research. On the other hand, there is a keen interest in Aboriginal art, and we visited a fine collection down at the University of Virginia. Equally, there is attention to settler colonialism: I participated in a colloquium on the subject at the University of Chicago in which the majority of speakers, from the south-west, Hawaii, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, were indigenous.

My students were intrigued by the convict foundations of Australia, and it took some time to dissuade them of their assumption that the early settlers worked in chains. Perhaps I was too successful in this endeavour as they took to the meliorist arguments of John Hirst, Stephen Nicholas, Peter Shergold, Deborah Oxley and others like ducks to water. Here, however, they seemed to know their New England history too well, so that they drew a sharp contrast between penal transportation and a godly errand into the wilderness. I had to remind them that three quarters of the early settlers of Virginia were indentured servants.

The Anzac Legend holds a fascination for some of them almost as strong as it does for their Australian counterparts. The idea that a country would commemorate an ignominious military defeat struck them with particular force. Quite a few have seen Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981), and its depiction of innocent heroism sacrificed to British military incompetence struck a chord, but this only intensified the puzzle of a colony that never felt the need of a declaration of independence.

There were other acute observations made by these students as they encountered Australian history. With limited prior knowledge and few preconceptions, they offered perceptive comments on matters that would pass unremarked by Australian students. And if I have dwelt excessively on the lacunae in their understandings of American history, I am not suggesting that they do not know their own history. Rather, they do know it as their own history, and it is this that makes it difficult for them to stand outside it and see its distinctive features.

Our time in the United States took in the presidential primaries. When we arrived, Hillary Clinton held a lead in the race for the Democratic nomination, and there was a rash of Clinton posters on the windows of the student residential buildings, as well as in the front gardens of Cambridge houses. Neither of us was greatly taken by the Clintons, but Martha was struck forcibly by the demeaning character of commentary on her appearance, her pantsuits, her stridency, her gender.

Barack Obama’s surge was remarkable, tapping the rhetorical idealism that is a feature of American political discourse, and reaching out to others. We had quite a bit to do with the substantial number of Australians who are studying in Harvard’s graduate schools. One group in the Kennedy School of Government consisted of slightly older graduates who had spent some time in public service, usually in policy units or perhaps as ministerial staffers before crossing the Pacific to take up advanced studies. In disposition and training, these young and exceptionably able compatriots were shrewd observers of politics, yet when they talked of Obama they seemed to discard every semblance of critical judgement. To their shocked disbelief, Martha remarked that his policy on medical insurance was far more limited than that of Hilary Clinton. She was told to read The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006).

Hope was undoubtedly in the air. This was in the early months of the ‘credit crunch’, though some of my students who had expected to go to Wall Street were already nervous. There was an unmistakable mood for change. The cost of the intractable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weighed on public opinion. The deterioration of infrastructure and the failure of essential services were everywhere apparent. The United States spends more than sixteen per cent of its gross domestic product on health, but lags far behind other developed countries in health outcomes: life expectancy has fallen in a number of states. The transport system is crumbling – for low fuel taxes means low maintenance – while air travel is a shambles.

We were grumbling about the impossibility of transacting official business at the post office on a visit to Patrick McCaughey at New Haven, when he pointed out that the rich don’t queue. But an increasing number of Americans are caught up in the inefficiencies of the residual services, and wonder why the richest country in the world can’t match the facilities of Europe and Asia.

It was while driving in rural Connecticut that I first became conscious of an allergy to the Stars and Stripes. They were everywhere: on public buildings, private residences, seaside and main-street standards. There were two of them flying on our local garbage truck – there was even one in the Harvard Yard – and I found myself trying to explain to locals the protocols of national regalia.

We do not have the Australian flag flying at the University of Melbourne, at least not yet, for it is a civic institution established by the state of Victoria, but there is a whopper down at the corner of Royal Parade and Flemington Road. It is a practice we have adopted. Just as European countries imitated Britain’s national anthem by arranging their own words to the same tune, so nations around the world have followed the United States in turning their flags into a decorative motif and a sacred symbol.

Nor have we invested our nationalism with the same bellicose symbolism. The British military historian Michael Howard once remarked that when he first visited Washington in the early 1960s he saw more uniforms than in London during World War II. Australia has not been backward in joining the United States in its military ventures over the past sixty years, but has never matched the contribution of its senior partner. Hence Obama’s riposte to John Howard when the former Australian prime minister condemned his commitment to withdraw troops from Iraq. Obama suggested that Australia send twenty thousand, ‘otherwise, it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric’.

The arithmetic was wrong; ten thousand would be a proportionate contribution. I would like to think that my Harvard students would know that and also understand why it is unlikely to happen.