This follows from Flanagan’s belief that modern Australia is essentially soulless: passive, indulgent and indifferent to the cause of social and moral progress. On the other hand the past – the time that Uren and Flanagan’s father lived through (both worked on the Burma Railway) – is a place where straight-talking, larger-than-life characters dominated, where the experience of life was tougher and more earthy, and where people were committed to community values and not merely to self-interest.

The curiosity is that in a book hoping to shape the future, Flanagan’s tone is overwhelmingly elegiac. In reference to one of Uren’s speeches, Flanagan writes: ‘What Tom had written was an appeal to the past, to a drama that was gone.’ The same could be said generally of The Fight. Interestingly, one of the few passages that suggests the potential and worth of the future appears in Uren’s own words. It is a remarkable statement of his political vision of the future, formed in a style of language that is seldom heard in contemporary Western politics. However, the overall impression left is of a world lost, rather than one that might be gained.