A very late-90s Australian intellectual artefact all of its anxious, argumentative, transitional declarations, trying to map a country mid-shift.

Edited by Philip Adams and published by ABC Books in 1997, the collection gathers writers like Marcia Langton, Catharine Lumby, David Marr, McKenzie Wark and Meaghan Morris to examine nationalism, pluralism, media panic, union decline, identity, conservatism, and the changing shape of Australian public life.

Don't expect that every argument aged perfectly — many didn’t — but do expect to see how clearly you can see the emergence of tensions that still structure Australian discourse nearly thirty years later. Pauline Hanson appears as symptom rather than anomaly. Globalisation hovers in the background. Media fragmentation, resentment politics, multicultural anxiety, and the collision between liberalism and nationalism all sit there in partially formed language before social media flattened everything into slogan and outrage cycle.

There’s also something refreshing about the format itself: essays written by serious public intellectuals for a broad audience, assuming readers could tolerate ambiguity, disagreement, and long-form argument. A surprisingly rare thing now.

1997 ABC Books paperback edition. Very good condition with light shelf wear and clean internals.