Mark McKenna’s The Shortest History of Australia is a timely and quietly radical look into how Australians understand their past, and by extension, the forces shaping work, rights and democracy today. In an era of insecure employment, weakened public institutions and renewed culture wars over national identity, this book reminds us that history has never been neutral terrain

The book gives us a concise yet expansive and fresh vision of Australia’s past that is thoughtful but delivered in refreshingly tight and highly accessible writing. Rather than offer a dry recitation of dates and events, McKenna reframes the nation’s story to show how multiple the threads of Indigenous presence, colonial legacies, cultural myths, environmental forces, and contemporary anxieties intertwine to shape who Australia is today.

Despite its brevity, McKenna delivers a sharp account of Australia as a nation formed through dispossession, exclusion and uneven power, rather than the comforting myth of effortless egalitarianism. For union readers, this framing matters. It exposes how working life in Australia, from wages and conditions to who is included or excluded from protection, has always been shaped by political choices, not natural outcomes.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its consistent centring of First Nations history. McKenna treats Indigenous presence, resistance and survival not as a preface to ‘real’ history, but as foundational to the Australian story. This is great reading for anyone in the labour movement: the Australian economy was built on stolen land and coerced labour, and those foundations continue to shape inequality today. McKenna doesn’t bully us with guilt though, just clearly explains these facts in an unambiguous way.

McKenna also dismantles the long-standing myth that Australia was born fair and classless. Instead, he traces how race, empire and capital structured early society, even as democracy and labour politics emerged here. The result is a familiar contradiction for unionists: hard-won advances for working people repeatedly constrained by entrenched elites and selective national storytelling.

While the book does not dwell extensively on trade unions themselves, it powerfully illustrates how labour history has been marginalised in favour of safer national myths, particularly militarism. The elevation of ANZAC over industrial struggle is not accidental; it reflects a political preference for unity through sacrifice; without demands from those who are sent to be sacrificed.

By questioning these myths, McKenna creates space for union readers to ask harder questions: whose contributions are celebrated, whose struggles are forgotten, and who benefits from that forgetting?

The Shortest History of Australia is ultimately a book about the present. It shows how unresolved tensions over sovereignty, authority, belonging and fairness continue to resurface in debates about public services, workplace rights, migration and economic security.

For union members, the message is clear: the conditions we face today are the product of history, and history is shaped by collective action. Nothing about work or fairness in Australia has ever been inevitable.