In the late 1950s, Honours students at Melbourne University could take Geoffrey Serle’s Australian History course only after completing John La Nauze’s full-year subject on Hanoverian and Victorian Britain (aka England). Those who questioned this restriction were informed that, since Australia was a small, derivative society, understanding its history required some knowledge of the culture, ideas and institutions exported here from Britain. While we may have discounted this rationalisation, with all the withering cynicism of late adolescence, at the time it hardly seemed worth making a fuss about.