It is a cliché of intellectual history that the United States is a product of Enlightenment optimism. ‘Next to the introduction of Christianity among mankind,’ the contemporary English commentator Richard Price argued, ‘the American revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive cause of human improvement.’ It was on the basis of a tradition of such commentary that Leslie Fiedler wrote 180 years later: ‘Insofar as America is legendary, a fact of the imagination as well as one of history, it has been shaped by the ideals of the Age of Reason.’

By contrast, Australia came into being at the end of a century of intellectual pessimism inaugurated by the counter-revolution we call Romanticism: a counter-revolution with which in substantial measure we are still coming to terms. ‘We hold these Truths to be self-evident,’ Thomas Jefferson and his co-authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote in 1776, ‘that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’. When the Commonwealth of Australia came into being on New Year’s Day, 1901, very few truths were self-evident any more; this included the core truth of Australians’ ideological choice between ‘The Land that belongs to the Lord and the Queen’ (as Henry Lawson put it in ‘A Song of the Republic’, 1887) ‘And the Land that belongs to you.’