'State-of-the-nation’ books are a tricky genre: for every The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne’s bestselling indictment of 1960s Australia, there must be at least a dozen more which fall swiftly into obsolescence. Yet this common fate is not necessarily a bad thing: such books are meant to be timely, not timeless. As an intervention into the contemporary moment, such texts’ success or value resides in fresh and useful analysis which is currently lacking elsewhere; and the ability of the author to capture a mood that is, if not ‘national’, at least pervasive enough to be widely recognisable. At the same time, it helps if that mood has not yet been properly articulated. To raise the bar further, the best of them offer both vital historical perspective and a path forward, and are written in a persuasive and accessible style which stops short of polemic but resists hesitant equivocation.

Historically, the ‘state-of-the-nation’ book has been a masculinist genre, dependent on a notable degree of established cultural authority, though there have been feminist challenges or alternatives, and notable exceptions and shifts (Julianne Schultz’s widely praised publication The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation [2022] springs to mind). Relatedly, the authors are typically invested in something called the ‘nation’, however critical they may be of its present manifestation. In Horne’s case, it was a nascent sense of what the nation could be or was slowly becoming, as it unshackled itself from decades of complacent parochialism, epitomised by the White Australia policy, then still in effect, but under increasing public scrutiny as well as political reform.