Methuen Haynes

It is, of course, impossible to separate this book from the debate partly initiated by Professor Blainey’s comments at a Rotary conference in March of this year, nor is it feasible to judge the book’s merits without considering its likely impact on the continued controversy about the size and composition of Australia’s immigration programme. In many ways, this slim volume will contain few surprises for those who have followed the debate with any degree of interest.

Somebody recently told me that Geoffrey Blainey wrote much of the text of this history of Victoria while travelling in aircraft. If true, Blainey has an enviable knack of finding seats with elbow room, but otherwise there’s no reason to complain. Sir Charles Oman, the great military historian of the Napoleonic wars, was said to have drafted one book during a summer spent waiting for connecting trains at French railway stations. Those fortunate enough to possess a lot of intellectual capital should make the most of it. In the central four chapters of social history, perhaps the most satisfactory part of this book, Blainey cites his evidence as ‘the accumulation of years of casual reading of old newspapers, looking at historic sites and talking with old people’. Disarmingly, he adds: ‘Most of the explanations of why change came are probably my own’.