When Alan Atkinson reads, voices echo in his head. When he writes, words and voices—the flow of print and the web of conversation—form the substance of his work. The three volumes of his Europeans in Australia are “meant as a history of common imagination in Australia” (xii). This second volume, like the first, is composed of myriad whisperings of voices from the past, and his argument is heavy with the weight of discourse. Not that Atkinson would ever be guilty of using that word. Elegantly avoiding jargon of any kind, his book is at once a rich compendium of contrasting voices and an argument stitched through with Atkinson's own direct and distinctive voice. As he elaborates his historical vision of European Australians, their voices echo once more in the present. In so doing he gives a voice to their consciences and to his own.

In methodology Atkinson claims to adapt the techniques of the “new” social history to his particular purpose of writing a history of the imagination. This is a task of growing complexity. In his first volume, a small number of highly influential individuals could legitimately be thought to encapsulate the flavor, direction, and thought of the age. The period covered by volume 2 poses the challenge of new colonies founded in Australia, the rise of provincial centers to challenge the absolute dominance of the capitals, and new frontiers to transform the complexion of rural society. Beyond this it requires a “coming to grips with the imagination of large numbers of people considered altogether” (xii).

In part these are the difficulties attached to writing any general narrative history—the challenge of first selecting and then sticking to themes. Atkinson's themes are broad brush. The first part, which deals primarily with the 1820s and 1830s, is mainly concerned with the continued arrival of people, books, and ideas from Europe—contrasted with the first generation of native born, “bound by birth” to the soil of Australia. In part 2, Atkinson echoes some central paradigms of his first volume—men and women, black and white, and God and humanity. The final part, titled “The Masses Unpacked,” endeavors to give voice to the increasingly dense, complex, urbanized, and literate European population in the period 1840–70. Gold and charity, writing and feeling, “system,” and storytelling thread these chapters, which conclude with reflections on the “outer edge” of the Europeans’ world. These are large themes, and each chapter is packed with a web of connected discourse. Just occasionally the effort to connect seems a trifle strained—as when Atkinson moves from railways to lunatic asylums via a tricksy metaphor of derangement and derailment. But for the most part his assured touch binds together the bewildering array of speech and thought, intellect and conscience, and faith and feeling into a perceptive analysis of the anxieties of an age.

Threaded enigmatically throughout is the theme Atkinson has selected to unite this second volume: “Democracy.” There is little, he acknowledges, about the emergence of distinct political structures in this book—indeed, considering the intense preoccupation of Australian colonists with political forms and governance throughout the mid-nineteenth century, this theme is remarkable for its absence. He is more interested in the democracy of language and thought than of politics. In this light, he reveals a distinct preference for the earlier over the later period. While democracy is, in Australia, “most obviously” a phenomenon of the 1850s, Atkinson is more entranced by the preceding decades, finding them “really more interesting—hopes were more generous, exploratory, and open-ended” (xiv). Indeed his book almost seems to become elegiac in tone, with the achievement of democracy in particular forms presented as the foreclosing of alternative possibilities, the narrowing of moral thought, and the triumph of self-interest. In comparison he celebrates the unrealized moral vision of conservatives like the Macarthur family, determined to found a village society, or Saxe Bannister, attorney general in Sydney in the 1820s, with his vision of an empire “just at every step” and spreading universal justice (40). Such men, Atkinson argues, adopted a “deeper and richer pattern of thought” that “ought to mean more today” than the power and passion of vocal democrats (xx).

There is a hint in this of Inga Clendinnen's nostalgic evocation of the early years of white settlement in Australia, Dancing with Strangers, with its pious wish that things could somehow have turned out differently if Governor Phillip's beneficent intentions toward the Aborigines had not been corrupted and undermined by failures of understanding. There is a hint of nostalgia for the idea that “our original aggression,” as W. E. H. Stanner famously termed it, might have proceeded in a more gentlemanly fashion. Atkinson certainly does not blink at the crimes, the violence, the brutalities, and the injustices that accompanied the expansion of the European colonies across Australia. He is unambiguous in his repudiation of the continuing right-wing attack on history in Australia, which, led by Keith Windschuttle and underwritten by the conservative media, has endeavored to deny the injury done Aboriginal people by the European invasion of their country. On these points, Atkinson is firm, as is his insistence on a history marked by compassion, humanity, and conscience. But in seeking to return to the moral vision of those who had imagined it happening differently, he seems to allow, or at least wish, that a more beneficent imperialism might have proved possible. Thus his condemnation falls more heavily on those who oversaw the impact of dispossession in practice than on those whose faith in the spread of civilization helped to make it happen in the first place.

Atkinson's other main preoccupation is with the accelerating circulation of ideas, words, stories, and images. A premise of his book is that social behavior has its inspiration in imagery more than logic, in snatches of language and familiar patterns of thought, more than in trains of reasoning. This is his answer to his imponderable question—how to “measure the impact of ideas that are never translated into action but which disturb conversation so much in their passing” (xii). The book as a whole tends, perhaps inevitably, to reproduce rather than to measure the impact of those patterns of thought. What it does magnificently is display the complexity and open-endedness of the conversation. It also shows how profoundly that conversation was grounded in the broader cultural, intellectual, and moral world of Europe, to which Australian colonists were connected by the webs of empire.

Graphically demonstrating this, Atkinson also shows how far removed from the world of Aboriginal Australians the Europeans were. He has not attempted to write a shared history, and perhaps such an enterprise remains impossible. Instead he evokes a world of “us,” bewildered and repelled by “them.” Perhaps to mark his own sense of moral complicity in the ill-doing as well as the enterprise of empire, he occasionally refers to the attitudes of the Europeans with a comfortable, enclosing “we.” It is a “we” that I find strangely discomforting, here in the twenty-first century when the Anglo-European cultural heritage of Australia is continually contested and continually, and disturbingly, reasserted. It is also a “we” that invites me, compellingly, to share in Atkinson's own moral reasoning. To be invited into the complexities and certainties of Atkinson's moral world is often entrancing, usually edifying, but just occasionally unsettling. There are moments when the sound of his own voice rings with too complacent assurance about the verities of justice and goodness, denying the possibility of an alternative way through his material.