 Hirst produced a large number of important articles , chapters and books on Australian history . His academic interests were wide @-@ ranging , including social , cultural and political history . Hirst 's goal was to elucidate the qualities and characteristics of Australian society and how they had developed . Jeremy Sammut has described him as " an elegant and outstanding stylist , as adept at clarifying complex issues by reducing them to their essentials as he was at crafting the pithy line that eliminated all doubt his interpretation was true and correct " . In his historical work , Hirst 's colleague at La Trobe University , Alan Frost , has noted that Hirst " challenged orthodoxies and produced many new insights " . He wrote two seminal books on colonial New South Wales which Frank <unk> has described as displaying " a raw intellectual power " : Convict Society and its Enemies ( 1983 ) and The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy ( 1988 ) ( both reprinted as Freedom on the Fatal Shore in 2008 ) . Convict Society and its Enemies was particularly influential , arguing that rather than being a brutal slave society , early New South Wales was a place where rights and freedoms were well @-@ established from the beginning . Hirst 's study of Federation , The Sentimental Nation , was also a ground @-@ breaking work , arguing that national sentiment was more important than economics in uniting the nation . Alan Frost has described Hirst 's shorter analyses as notable : " Distance in Australia : Was It a Tyrant ? " ( 1975 ) , his response to Geoffrey Blainey 's most famous concept , " deserves much more attention than it now receives " ; his " Egalitarianism " ( 1986 ) challenges " received wisdom about colonial life " . Many of his best shorter pieces were collected in Sense and Nonsense in Australian History ( 2009 ) . A major achievement of Hirst 's was a project to index the Melbourne Argus newspaper ( 1860 – 1909 ) . 
