From the coal blockade frontline of the Liverpool Plains to Hobart’s Cat and Fiddle arcade, from being on the road with last chance Malcolm Turnbull to the fossil fuel fantasies of Adaniland in the north, Guy Rundle gives a first-hand history of Australia in the 2010s, after the brief and hopeful haha insurgency of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era and the descent of another decade of reaction.

Through multiple elections, rubbing shoulders with the major players and upstart independents, Rundle describes a country changing and fracturing as the global wave of populism swept across conventional politics, and the culture wars solidified. He goes into battle, both against a corrupt, cynical and nihilistic right, and an increasingly elitist and fantastical progressivism. And he steps back into the past, looking at how we got to here, in memoirs and analyses of the shifting personal, cultural and political faultlines of the past half century.

Between the Last Oasis and the Next Mirage is a raw, thoughtful, very funny and sometimes moving account of a nation dependent on the continuing good graces of history and the plain old dumb luck that is the land’s curse.