When I was young, in Year 12 at Croydon High School, Melbourne, there was a culture of cheek and effervescence, at least as I remember it. My mate Mitchell Faircloth seized the time; in retrospect, it was no surprise that he later became the cowboy troubadour and stand-up smart-arse Slim Whittle. Mitchell established the School Apathy Committee. It never met. Australians have a reputation for apathy, lethargy. Sometimes it’s thought that we are a nation of bastards, though whether we think this or others think it of us is never entirely clear. When it comes to the politics of refugees and detentions, or voting for Malcolm Fraser after the removal of Gough Whitlam, or against the republic or for John Howard at all, this much seems right: self-interested, indifferent bastards. This is not the main theme of Adam Jamrozik’s book, but it is one of its horizons. Jamrozik has a popular and sociological purpose. It is to debunk certain aspects of Australian society by following the advice of Zygmunt Bauman that we need to ‘defamiliarise the familiar’. What is familiar is our subservience to great powers. This, of course, raises the question of the criteria of judgment. Are we toadies? The charge is that ours arc the chains of colonial inheritance. We are British derivatives, and now an American satellite; the Deputy Sheriff secs to that. More generally, ours seems to be a culture of closure, of the inert and smug.