Abstract

A Free Country: Australians’ Search for Utopia covers the years 1861–1901 and is the second of the five-volume series about what the publishers call “Australian liberalism.” The author is a well-known and respected Australian academic and was for some years a senior federal cabinet minister with portfolios in education, environment, and employment.This weighty tome provides superb coverage of the Australian continent’s political transformation from six more or less independent and competing British colonies into the independent nation of Australia in 1901. It does this by focusing on the political and cultural tensions...