There aren’t many histories or biographies written by Australians that sociologists and anthropologists will turn to in the future in order to discover how we became who we are as a people.

Journalist Tony Thomas, whose work has been appearing most lately in The Spectator Australia and Quadrant, and who has been producing lively and provocative pieces for more than fifty years, first in the West Australian and then the Age, probably didn’t intend for his pieces for daily newspapers to last longer than the immediate edition when he bashed them out on a typewriter in Newspaper House, St George’s Terrace,...