If the past is a different country, the near past is utterly strange. Because the causes and passions, and many of the actors, remain with us, we expect it to be familiar, but when we try to return to it we find that everything has completely changed. So, if we turn to the works published in 1950, we find ourselves in a remote world. Hardy's Power Without Glory, and novels by Gavin Casey, ‘Brian James’, Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard and John Morrison provide a range of social realism in a world that remains quite confident in its certainties. They all look forward to a radical change that will release the human potential of society and eliminate its oppression, but not otherwise challenge our understanding of what it may be to be human.

The confidence of the progressives was about to be challenged, both by the exponents of traditional order on the right and by the transcendentalists who looked beyond the material constructions of society for justification for their humanity. Yet this challenge was blunted by the intellectuals and political activists who marginalized themselves by their own extremisms. On both the extreme right and the extreme left, controversialists like Frank Knopfelmacher and Frank Hardy, supported by organizational men like B.A. Santamaria, Richard Krygier, Jack Blake and Ted Hill, used a rhetoric that demonized their opponents and so excluded the possibility of reasoned debate.