‘Some of the ideas for this book were first tried out,’ writes its editor, David Carter, during the 2001 conference of the European Association for Studies of Australia at Lecce, in southern Italy. Displaying interest in Australia as a way to get one’s fare paid to leave the country is not the only reason why this bain-marie of a book has not found a reason to exist.

Salted through the collection is an identification of intellectuals with those academics who promoted the category of ‘public intellectual’ to justify their existence in the ideas market. They soon found that many of the most prominent commentators were right-wingers, often funded by thinktanks independent of tax revenues, but not of corporate strings. To defend corporations against damages for past crimes – notably the occupation of traditional lands – history has been added to the disciplines accepting bids in the ideas market. Carter charges Keith Windschuttle and his ilk with having ‘turned themselves into historians’. Why is it forgivable for a ‘clerk’ to get quotations and footnotes wrong but unspeakable for the laity to point out those failings? The fact-grubbers who cheered on Windschuttle’s abuse of the postmodernists and deconstructionists in The Killing of History (1994) are miffed because he has turned his empiricist/positivist definition of ‘the truth’ against their mates.