Full-blooded democracy still remains a brave new experiment, the history of ancient Athens notwithstanding. It would be unwise to assume that its vic… - Geoffrey Blainey

Even in the 1860s and 1870s most Australians did not feel fully at home in their land. So many of them were new migrants, mostly from the British cities, and so they found rural Australia strange and even hostile at first. Above all, in the long European see-saw of ideas and taste, the wilderness and untamed nature were falling somewhat from favour; to be revived late in the century. Attitudes to Australian landscape reflected this see-saw.

Unpredictable events, or the coincidence of vital events happening side by side, play their part in history. In the emerging of the United States of America, the South American nations, South Africa, Canada and Australia the unforeseen mixture of events was especially powerful in the final decades of the 18th century. Many of those events pirouetted around the fortunes of France, whose influence was as decisive when it was losing as when it was winning wars.

On the immigration issue the suspicions towards democracy and the distrust towards free speech have come largely from the Left. The distrust of free speech has been especially noticeable amongst a small scatter of academics, members of a profession that by its very nature depends on freedom of inquiry and speech.