The first draft of chapters 2 to 9 of Educating Australia was finished in March 1996, one weekend after the election of the Howard Coalition Government promised another lurch in the never very stable settings of education policy. The text was revised again in late 1996 as the Liberal–National agenda in education and elsewhere – new in some respects, familiar in others – was taking shape. However, the book was much longer in the making. Educating Australia is the first fruits from the larger doctoral project on ‘Markets in education’ which preoccupied me from 1988 to 1996. Educating Australia was prepared as a discrete text, a history of government and education in Australia in the postwar period that was designed to situate the emergence of educational markets in the last decade. Chapter 9 provides a hint of the larger project (Marginson 1996a), to be published as Markets in Education (Marginson 1997d). Compared to that study, Educating Australia is less concerned with theory and more with history, with telling the story of education, government, economy and citizen.

The advantage of the narrative form is that it draws our attention to change and the historically relative character of all phenomena. For the narrative historian, time is like an ever-flowing river, in which nothing is fixed, and everything is always becoming. The disadvantage is that particular currents (‘historical laws’) are too readily seen as determining and fundamental in relation to all other developments.