AustLit

'In Geoffrey Blainey: Writer, Historian, Controversialist, Richard Allsop provides a welcome study of a remarkable, and remarkably polarising, intellectual figure in Australian public life. Placing Blainey with Keith Hancock and Manning Clark in the pantheon of Australia’s leading historians, Allsop observes that, unlike them, Blainey’s body of work has not been comprehensively examined. He sets out to remedy this and to meet the need identified by Graeme Davison 20 years ago for a “more mature” review of Blainey’s writing—one that resists “reading his earlier work for signs of the emerging controversialist” (xiii). From this perspective, Allsop largely succeeds.' (Introduction)