This book explores an unprecedented phenomenon: coast-to-coast Labor governments in the states and territories. The peculiarity of the current situation is magnified by Labor’s continuing failure at the national level. Where state politics can boast political ‘stars’ such as Bob Carr and Peter Beattie, federally the cupboard seems bare. Yet this collection reminds us of the unfairness of comparison between Labor’s national failure and sub-national success. Victory is great for your image. It takes considerable historical imagination to appreciate that there was a time when Carr was regarded as ‘a stopgap leader’ – as he was in the aftermath of Labor’s 1988 electoral humiliation. David Clune shows that Carr’s first year or so in office, when the government had a majority of one seat, was no raging success.

The true believers, proud of their history and with hope for the future, assembled in Melbourne on 27 April 2004 to celebrate the first time the Labor Party formed a federal ministry a century before – and, of course, to attend the launch of the obligatory book commemorating the event, So Monstrous a Travesty.

‘He looks a bit like Marty Feldman with two good eyes.’ So wrote a journalist of Geoffrey Blainey in 1977. In The Fuss That Never Ended, a collection of essays on Blainey arising out of a Melbourne symposium, Bridget Griffen-Foley no less irreverently compares the historian to a character played by Steven Seagal in a movie she saw on television – not because he shares Seagal’s ‘fake tan, ponytail, high-pitched voice, rippling muscles, kickboxing prowess or lurid, technicolour knee-length leather coat’, but because of his ‘style of investigation’ as a young historian. Blainey, she suggests, was neither bookworm nor archive rat. He went into the field, spoke to real people, visited historical sites. His work even helped his first employer, the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, to exploit long-forgotten mineral deposits. Since producing his history of that company in his early twenties, he has been Australia’s leading mining historian, and one of that industry’s staunchest defenders. It has probably been easier for most people to swallow Blainey’s historical and economic arguments in favour of mining than Hugh Morgan’s biblical ones.