Perhaps all books should be preceded by a confession. This book most certainly warrants one. For most of my working life I was committed to what I believed to be a forward-looking type of economic history of Australia. My object was to exploit above all what I regarded as ‘hard statistical evidence’ and to build history around it. (This did not include high-level model building and econometrics.) Where a relatively simple portrayal of statistical evidence was insufficient, I preferred to fall back on institutional records to confirm or deny the relevance of statistical inference. I continue to sustain that protestation.

But the statistical condition imposed a limitation on all my work — it had essentially to be related to experience after 1860, for which reasonably coherent Australia-wide data are available. From this came my estimates of Australian national income after 1860 and my studies of investment in growth and, in general, of growth conditions leading to the present. The work was designed to track the longterm path of the Australian economy and in the process to throw light on the present and the future — how far the past constrains the present, how far history does or does not repeat itself, how far we continue to replicate past mistakes, how far we took false fits and starts and continue to do so.