‘Historical events, like mountain ranges, can best be surveyed as a whole by an observer who is placed at a good distance from them.’ So wrote an early professor of history (the chair I occupy is named after him) in the closing pages of his concise history of Australia. Ernest Scott wrote those words more than ninety years ago and the idea of the historian as an observer of events has since fallen into disrepute. The historian is now inside the history, inextricably caught up in a continuous making and remaking of the past. History once served as an authoritative guide to decision-making. The great nineteenth-century literary historians produced compelling accounts of the forces that had shaped their civilisation; through these lessons in statecraft and morality, they provided contemporaries with the capacity and the confidence to anticipate their destiny. That idea of the historian as guide or prophet has also lapsed. Futurology is the province of the economist, the environmental or information scientist; whatever the future holds, it will be utterly different from what has gone before.

Scott applied his caveat to the final fifteen years of his narrative. For him, the first years of the Commonwealth period constituted a ‘closer range’ of ephemeral change, but then his history of Australia spanned only five centuries. Completed in the year that his compatriots returned on imperial service to scramble up the slopes of Gallipoli, it began ‘with a blank space on the map’ at the dawn of European discovery and ended ‘with a new name on the map, that of Anzac’.