On politics, Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, his biography of Paul Keating, featured in the reckoning, as did Paul Kelly's March of the Patriots: the Struggle for Modern Australia.

BBC: Essential reading for new arrivals in Australia

So the great tradition is not dead, even if Britain's politicians still have much to learn to reach the standards of Australia, where a future prime minister, Paul Keating, told an incumbent one, Malcolm Fraser, that he looked like an Easter Island statue with an arse full of razor blades.

ECONOMIST: Desiccated calculating bores

For that, there is a powerful precedent in previous Labor governments' free-market reforms, under prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, which helped pave the way for the economic boom of the Howard years.

ECONOMIST: Labor's defeat has unleashed an internal war