But in the 1990s a voice from the past emerged attacking Australia's new diversity. If you look at polls of Australian attitudes to Aborigines, there's not much evidence we've moved on from assimilation. We still want Aborigines to settle down, forget about the past and be just like us. And surely what makes Pauline Hanson such a challenge is that she is not some Wollemi pine growing in a lost valley of contemporary Australian politics. Her ideas are everywhere, have been with us all along, and we can't, now, simply wish them into the past tense.
Polls can be so boring.
The last thing anyone would want is this series trudging through reams of such statistics. But by about the third hour, I was struck by how little evidence was being presented of the great shifts in public opinion claimed in Kelly's commentary. This is a series that turns on events, not character. It doesn't dig down into the psyche of the country. This is not the biography of a nation, but a rich, solid, somewhat official history.