Forty thousand is the square of two hundred years, but such dark socio-mathematics are not commensurate with Paul Carter’s idealistic account of spatial history in Australia. His exploration of exploration stresses the imaginative, or perhaps delusory, processes through which the explorers named, described and fantasised into being narratives about Australia, systems of geo-vital meaning that have conditioned much in white Australians today.

Through that sense of productive mental formation this book creates its most powerful impact, generates its own repositioning originality. But to liberate itself from the pragmatics and materialism of conventional history Carter’s text also must, or feels it must, eschew the brute politics of land-taking.