Excerpt from The First Decade of the Australian Commonwealth: A Chronicle of Contemporary Politics, 1901-1910
It is generally held that personal predilection, or unconscious bias, renders an impartial review of contemporary history an all-but-impossible task; that anything written in the full glare of publicity can, at best, only be regarded as material for a year-book or the columns of a daily journal. The whole truth about political events seldom lies on the surface. The true inwardness of some of the moves on the political chess-board is often not discerned for years, and in the meantime the motives of the actors are possibly unfairly decried or unduly exalted.
Yet, if history is "philosophy teaching by examples," it must surely be desirable that the record of those examples should have the chance of verification before the distorting influence of subsequent events has blurred their outline, or minimised their importance. The setters-forth of those facts, "the hodmen of literature" are not without their value to the philosophic historian, who, in another century, may seek to work out the harmonious relations of cause and effect in connection with national development.
The narrative in the following pages will be but as an oft-told story to the readers of to-day; but, by its concentration and consecutiveness, it will help to focus in their minds the sum of what has been done, and what has been left undone, by the Commonwealth Government in the days of its infancy. I hope it will be found not altogether useless in the present, as well as in the future.
The year which closed the first decade of the Commonwealth was one of unprecedented prosperity for Australia. The steady growth of immigration, which, after a long period of stagnation, set in during 1910, augurs well for the future.
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