After a few orienting comments about the larger context of the empirical enquiry (which are offered mainly for the reader who is not familiar with the Australian situation) this chapter begins the task of representing some general images and perspectives of contemporary Australia that prevailed in 1985 and early 1986 among one-half of the top bureaucrats in the key departments of the Canberra state apparatus. Since no one is especially interested in ephemeral impressions that are here today and gone tomorrow, we are looking for the more basic enduring outlines of an interpretative and explanatory perspective that these public servants bring to their work of steering and shaping a nation. Progressively, in the succeeding chapters, an increasingly differentiated picture will emerge from these first orienting outlines. This picture points both back and forwards in time to later changes and to a trend line of ‘development’ that is the object of the enquiry as a whole.

From the top of Canberra's Black Mountain tower one can look to the east over the Brindabella and the Tidbinbilla Ranges and south towards the Snowy Mountains. To the west one looks over an equally breathtaking landscape into the vast distances of an island continent. It is not without some relevance that the city below is an island of another kind. It is remote from the the rest of Australia because, in order to ensure that federal government would not become the pawn of the two largest states of Victoria and New South Wales, the Australian Constitution of 1901 decreed that the capital must be at least 100 miles (160 kilometres) from Sydney.