Last year, George Megalogenis and a film crew took John Howard back to his old school, Canterbury Boys High in Sydney's south-west, and captured a compelling snapshot of Australia's longer story.
Howard, who derailed his own political career in the 1980s when he suggested Asian immigration to Australia was growing too fast - a view he later recanted publicly - found himself surrounded by students of Asian, Pacific and other regional multicultural heritage. There was just one identifiably "Anglo" face among the students.
Megalogenis recalls the former prime minister asking one of the boys where he was born. "Westmead Hospital, sir," responded the young fellow.
Westmead is one of Sydney's largest hospitals. The boy's descendants may have been Asian, but he was Australian, born and bred.
Here was middle Australia's man, whose formative years were the 1950s and who led his nation from the 20th century into the 21st, face to face with the future.
Howard's meeting with the students is one of many exquisite images illuminating Megalogenis' latest excursion into the Australian story, and his first on film - a three-part ABC-TV series called Making Australia Great: Inside Our Longest Boom.
Megalogenis himself is the son of immigrants from another period of what was called new Australia: his heritage is Greek, and his parents arrived in the post-World War II European tide during John Howard's childhood. Like Howard, Megalogenis attended a selective high school, Melbourne High.
After 30 years as a journalist and author, Megalogenis has emerged as something of a polymath. He slaps history and politics and culture like mortar in and around his knowledge of economics and numbers to build compelling, even thrilling, theses about the country of his birth and where it stands in the world.
He is, unlike many who practise the dismal science, an optimist, and he clearly wants others to understand the reasons for it.
"We know we're the world's greatest people, but we don't want to admit it," he declares boldly. It is, like the TV series, an extension of the central idea of his award-winning book of 2012: The Australian Moment - How We Were Made for These Times.
The film is a three-part essay filmed over a year. Megalogenis casts himself as interpreter of the experiences of those who played very large roles in shaping contemporary Australia.
He nudges national figures to provide the explanation of how Australia, a nation that lost its way and turned in on itself in the 1970s, rebuilt its confidence in the 1980s, suffered a crippling recession in the early 1990s … and then re-emerged in the first decade of a new century to become the last rich nation standing after the Global Financial Crisis.
"We have a brilliant story to tell ourselves and the world," Megalogenis declares. "But we don't tell it to ourselves.
"I really wanted to show people how to have a big conversation again.
"It would be a shame to blow our chances as a country because we're afraid of success."
And so he managed to persuade all the prime ministers since Whitlam - excluding the serving Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, judging it too soon to place either Abbott or Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in the big picture - and many of the key economic figures, including former Reserve Bank governors, treasurers Peter Costello and Wayne Swan, former Treasury chief Ken Henry and even the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, to tell their own stories from the times of bust and boom.
There are many revealing - and sometimes humorous - anecdotes, particularly regarding high anxiety and near panic around the political halls and within the Treasury as economic and social disaster loomed during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the much larger Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008.
Wayne Swan, who was in Washington as the GFC crashed its way across the world, recalls the urgent need of a secure phone line to the Australian Cabinet. The only available room turned out to be the bedroom of a teenage son of an Australian embassy official. And so the Australian Treasurer, fearing catastrophe, found himself trying to save Australia while perched below a large poster of the late Jimi Hendrix. It seemed, he recalls on film, about as weird as it could get.
Yet Australia came through, as Paul Keating relates, without losing any skin.
Australia, Megalogenis proposes, prospers when it opens itself to the world.
He delves back to the 1880s for evidence, when the gold and wool-rich Australia gave its citizens by far the best standard of living in the world, and had opened its doors to people from across the globe and the region. In Melbourne, Chinese were the third largest ethnic group after Britons and Irish.
Then came a backlash against Chinese arrivals, the embracing of a White Australia and an isolationism that sent the nation backwards, decade upon decade until, post-war, Australia began opening again, prompted by the cry of "populate or perish".
It is here that Megalogenis, a child of that period, begins his three-hour journey.
In an age where weekly and fortnightly polls shape throwaway responses to serious national questions, Megalogenis' longer view offers a valuable and absorbing contribution to the bigger story about where we've been, and leaves the viewer to ponder where we might go.
Making Australia Great: The first of three weekly episodes screens on ABC on Tuesday, March 17.
