The one Oxford volume thus far issued is number 4, spanning the period 1901 to 1942; from the proclamation of a Federated continent to the fall of Singapore. Stuart Macintyre, now rising 40, and recently installed in the editor’s chair of Historical Studies, was an obvious choice for this period. His first five books treat many themes of early twentieth-century life in Britain and Australia.

Macintyre’s first book, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain 1917-1933 (1980) was a revision of the doctoral thesis he had written under Henry Pelling at Cambridge in the early 1970s. From this scholarly account of the Communist Party, he turned to a popular account of South Wales and other militant communities in Little Moscows: Communism and Working-class Militancy in Inter-war Britain (1980).

Returning to Australia in 1979 Macintyre found similar inspiration in Fremantle for Militant: The Life and Times of Paddy Troy (1984), a vivid biography of the port city’s best-known trade unionist and communist. In 1980 he was appointed to a History lectureship at the University of Melbourne. Then followed an edited anthology of Ormond College Centenary Essays (1984), which included an anthropological study of college initiation ceremonies, and the general Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History (1985).

Macintyre researches and writes quickly: his personal style is hard-headed and independent, detached emotionally but intellectually committed. (This is obviously the combination of qualities which drew him to a study of Paddy Troy.)

Born into a well-heeled Melbourne family at the very start of the postwar baby boom, Macintyre grew up in Hawthorn and was sent to Scotch College and Ormond College at the University of Melbourne. This largely explains his confidence in his own judgements, even though his opinions are a far distance from those held by contemporaries from a similar social background. His decision to accept the commission to write about the 1901–42 period is thus in many ways a coming to terms with the time and place of his own immediate origins.

In personal and historiographical terms Macintyre stands at the break between the old Melbourne School of left-liberal historians and the younger New Left whose approach was laid down in the heady days of the antiwar movement. It is the playing out of the tensions between these two historiographical traditions which largely explains the dynamic quality of this book.

It has many of the Melbourne School virtues: a prose style which is precise and disciplined, and economy in its explanatory strategies, and a thorough exhaustion of the sources. There are occasional moralistic flourishes, one of the key motifs of historians such as Keith Hancock or R.M. Crawford, and three or four references to ‘today’ or ‘now’, which serve to return us abruptly to the  contemporary point of certain issues.

New Left historians have been less concerned with formal political processes in their accounts, having come to maturity in an era when political reform seemed less consequential. Macintyre contests the general tendency of younger social historians to eschew political history, and also brings narrative back into the centre of historical explanation.

He does this in a number of ways. His account has a strong materialist base: there are parts of chapters 2 and 3 which securely anchor the account with the economic and social structures of the early Federation, as well as a corresponding account of the 1930s Depression in chapters 11 and 12. These vivid sketches of social groups and class fractions activate the political contestations which make up a large part of the narrative sections.

At no point does politics appear as a mere spectacle: the public squabbles are inevitably linked back to their social genesis. Many social movements which failed to achieve a registration in the political sphere are given due weight regardless. More importantly, the insti­tutional barriers to further reform which were set up in this period (often by reformers themselves) are carefully explained. Reverberations of problems facing the Hawke government can be heard in the spaces between Macintyre’s words and their meanings.

Macintyre orchestrates a rich variety of facts: he is able to achieve considerable ironic effect from the unusual description of commonplace historical events, such as Gallipoli or the Egon Kisch episode. There are certain ‘facts’ which cannot be left out: Frank Cowley compelled Ian Turner to re-write his chapter on the 1910s in A New History of Australia because the submitted draft had no battle scenes. The three-volume history of Victoria produced for that state’s 150th made no mention of Ned Kelly. There is no ‘fact’ of Australian history between l 901 and 1942 which has been ‘left out’, but many are re-told in a new way and in a novel context.

Finally, Macintyre uses the biographical method favoured by Manning Clark in a strikingly new way. Chapter 1 treats the lives of five very different Australians living in 1901, ranging from plutocrat R.G. Casey to Aboriginal stockman George Dutton. We meet them first as individuals and then as representatives of a diverse society.

The sub-title of this volume is ‘The Succeeding Age’, a reference both to that era of urban middle-class affluence which produced Macintyre and also in an ironic twist, to that Me Decade of which he is a contemporary critic.