Women’s fashions change every year. History fashions change every decade. When I was at school and at University history books told me to be grateful for being British. Out on the streets I was told ‘Buy British and be proud of it!’. Times change, brother – as Colin Cartwright, Barry Humphries’ creation, pointed out. Now, in the season of the sere and yellow leaf, I am asked to read a history quite different from what I read when young.

This first volume in McPhee Gribble’s four-volume People’s History of Australia is a measure of the revolution in the writing of history in this country. In my youth the History of Australia began with Captain Cook, quickly followed by the story of the great gift the continent of Australia was about to receive – the benison of British institutions: individual liberty, the rule of law, tolerance and decency; or a code of what to think and what to do; a list of who were the ‘goodies’ and who were the ‘baddies’.