The men who drafted the Australian Constitution in the 1890s may have thought that they were filling in blank pages, but in fact those pages were already inscribed with the dominant values and ideas of the times. This imaginative and resonant book looks at the Constitution as a cultural artefact and attempts to understand the period during which it emerged, culminating in Federation in 1901. The book argues that Australians displayed an ability to reconcile the demands of pragmatism with the spirit of romanticism in constituting their nation