I say ‘might’ because there is little that is conventional about Watson’s career. Indeed, the most influential of his work cannot be collected here because it was produced while Watson was Prime Minister Paul Keating’s speechwriter. Some of Watson’s words are literally set in stone, on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Australian War Memorial. As he explains in the afterword of the tenth-anniversary edition of his splendid Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A portrait of Paul Keating PM (2002), this is the ‘contract’: once its words are uttered publicly, the speech belongs to the politician, not the writer. Watson does not demur, but this did not save his relationship with Keating, who accused him of having breached the so-called contract. Keating ‘has a strong claim to being the greatest storyteller Australian politics has seen’, Watson says, but it is idle to deny that Keating, like all major politicians, employed speechwriters, or that Watson wrote some of his best.

There are several short political portraits gathered here, but it is hardly surprising that it is the portrait of Keating that is the most full-bodied, as well as the most ambivalent. Indeed, ambivalence is the keynote in this collection. There are reasons why Watson does not occupy a place in the culture comparable with a popular storyteller such as Peter FitzSimons. Watson is a craftsman of musings, impressions, and speculations, more than one of the rollicking story or the grand argument. It is the images, and the larger realities that he gently evokes with them, that remain with you. At his best, he does this remarkably well – yes, the Claremont and Carlton footballer Ken Hunter was rather like ‘a vertical greyhound’.

Don Watson (photograph by Susan Gordon-Brown)

Watson crafts a beautiful sentence. And the man who wrote material for the comedian Max Gillies is often genuinely funny, as he reminds us his hero Mark Twain was. But like Twain, Watson is a great deal more than a ‘mere humourist’. He trained as a historian and, in many ways, a historian he remains. His doctoral thesis and first book was a biography of the Melbourne radical publicist and historian Brian Fitzpatrick, who, he explains, ‘bore aspects of a surrogate father – or at least a renegade uncle’. He then went on to write in Caledonia Australis (1984) of the Scottish highlanders who colonised Gippsland, and of the settlers’ violent relations with the Indigenous people whose lands they stole. Here is more ambivalence: how is this son of Gippsland to treat these dispossessed Scots, who in turn became the disinheritors of the Kurnai?

Here, as in so much of his writing, Watson’s skill as an observer lies in his being able to locate himself both inside and out at the same time. Unlike most of us, he has been inside the whale of political life as part of a prime minister’s inner circle, but he retains in his prose the wonder of the outsider, the fascination of an anthropologist trying to decode the behaviour of a native reluctant to divulge secret knowledge. This liminality occasionally gets him into trouble. In a 1999 public lecture, he reflected: ‘I don’t know how modern political history can be written by anyone who has not actually lived inside the organism’, which, if taken seriously, would rule out Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson, if not Judith Brett on Alfred Deakin. But this is just another of Watson’s musings: he does not appear to be deeply committed to it. By 2011 he was writing: ‘Not having experienced events in person is of course no barrier to conventional history.’

There is similar ambivalence about political ideology and tribalism. Watson is tribally left – inner-Melbourne left (some distance, as it happens, from suburban Watsonia, which lends this book its clever title) – but one senses that he was never quite completely in harmony with the undoubted attractions of that world to a rising academic, writer, and intellectual. He does not share its anti-Americanism – since childhood he has loved America’s mass culture, its literature, and its vibrancy – but still sees its frailties. He pays conservative, patriotic, and devout America the respect of puzzling over its parochialism and weirdness.

The defensive might regard Watson’s 1991 essay on the venerable Meanjin’s ‘noble failure’ as defecation in the Carlton nest, even allowing that its central criticism – that ‘the magazine was at birth cut off not only from many of the riches, but much of the reality, of Australian life’ – is not without foundation. But is it reasonable to criticise Meanjin for not being the New York Review of Books? Chips Rafferty wasn’t Jimmy Stewart either, nor the T&G Building the Empire State Building. But I’m not sure this tells us anything except the glaringly obvious point that Australia is a small former British colony and the United States a gargantuan republic and empire, although Watson mischievously suggests admission to the Union as an option for Australia in his 2001 essay, ‘Rabbit Syndrome’.

A country upbringing is one of the vantage points from which Watson looks out on the world. As evident in The Bush (2014), and here in an essay on bird-life, he writes evocatively about nature and our relationship to it. But as Manning Clark knew only too well, ‘the boy from the bush’ image is also a valuable commodity to any writer reflecting on a country that has regarded its soul as rural even while its reality has been urban.

When Watson condemns the management-speak ascendant in modern English, with much of the vehemence and urgency with which George Orwell lambasted the language of totalitarianism, it is a specifically urban language that is in Watson’s sights: one to be contrasted with the earthiness of the cowshed. Similarly, his preoccupation with modern narcissism, while lending his writing an elegiac and even nostalgic quality, seems rooted in a sense of the greater authenticity of life in a past more bucolic, everyday, and ‘real’ than the present – a world that he has experienced at first hand even as he moved beyond its most onerous limitations and disciplines.