'The history of the Victorian Age,’ wrote Lytton Strachey a century ago, ‘will never be written: we know too much about it.’ Instead, he continued, he would ‘row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen … to illustrate rather than to explain’ (Eminent Victorians, 1918).

How much more difficult, then, is it for a contemporary historian to master the huge resources of the information age in a feasible narrative of Australian political history from pre-European settlement to the present? The great Australian historian, the late Stuart Macintyre (to whom Frank Bongiorno’s new book is dedicated), once told me: the trick is ‘to paddle furiously, and never look down [into those submerged canyons of detail below], or you’ll never get to what you are aiming for on the distant shoreline’. Macintyre, however, garnished his considerable gift for synthesising vast tracts of reading and research with the stories of ‘characteristic specimens’ whose experience brought his histories to life.

Bongiorno has learned well from his mentor. Committed to archival research, and a voracious and retentive reader of everything else, he is a master of his material. As a prolific essayist, commentator, reviewer, and habitué of Twitter, with a large following, he has honed his capacity to escape the strictures that often hobble academic writers attempting to engage a broad audience. This is a history that will be enjoyed by the curious reader, carried by a fluent and accessible stylist able to capture the essentials of a period, while enlivening even the most familiar material with fresh vignettes, multiple voices, correspondence, and much more.