A ‘mate’ is a mate, right? Wrong, argues Nick Dyrenfurth in this provocative new look at one of Australia’s most talked-about beliefs.

In the first book-length exploration of our secular creed, one of Australia’s leading young historians and public commentators turns mateship’s history upside down. Did you know that the first Australians to call each other ‘mate’ were business partners? Or that many others thought that mateship would be the basis for creating an entirely new society, namely a ‘socialist’ one? For some, the term ‘mate’ is ‘the nicest word in the English language’; while for others it represents the very worst features in our nation’s culture: conformity, bullying, corruption, racism, and misogyny. So what does mateship really mean?

In Mateship: a very Australian history, Dyrenfurth explains why Australians from all walks of life have been so fixated on mateship and repeatedly claimed it as a uniquely national value. He brings to life mateship’s extraordinarily rich and paradoxical history, showing how over more than 200 years of white settler history, shearers and soldiers, brickies and bankers, poets and politicians, and even the odd feminist, including the former prime minister Julia Gillard, have all identified with the national creed.

As Dyrenfurth shows, if there is one aspect of Australian mateship that is unique in global terms, it is the inordinate time we have devoted to talking about it.