So it gives you a strong sense of how early settler colonists thought not only about the continent they were arriving in but also what they thought history was.

History is a narrative that has to have characters.

So who have been the central characters in the stories that Australians tell about their own past? In the 19th century, I think that Australian historians who were then emerging would have had a very strong sense that the central figures were the delegates of the imperial power and also the free immigrants.

Later, it became possible to, especially with the rise of the labour movement, to think of the ordinary Australian, and particularly the ordinary Australian male worker, as the central figure in the narrative, that is, the person whose agency made the greatest difference to how Australia had turned out.

And incidentally, I should say in parenthesis that Russell Ward's The Australian Legend, which came out in 1958, is the kind of classic statement of the idea that that Australian history and the Australian ethos is a product of a male working man.

Then subsequently, in the post-World War II era, There's a series of challenges to the idea of the centrality of the male worker as the figure who really embodies Australianness and Australian history.

That idea, that presupposition, came under attack from, firstly, a number of historians who said, well, what about businessmen and middle-class people? Why is their contribution to the making of Australia being overshadowed by this focus on the ordinary Australian worker? And they threw up a challenge to pay more attention to the middle class and the professionals and the businessmen or women who made Australia successful.

how do historians, how do they strike a balance between empathy for the subject that they're studying and dispassion, if you like, you know, not coming with a bias, I suppose?