I chanced recently to consult again Graham Freudenberg’s large and insightful volume Churchill and Australia. Freudenberg achieves a scrupulous fair-mindedness in his two assessments: first, the great man’s towering stature as a lionhearted democratic leader in the Second World War; second, his longstanding petty meanness and spite towards Australia which, Freudenberg tells us, extended all the way back to 1907. I confess to having myself nurtured a near-personal grudge against Winston for his churlish refusal to pay this country even so much as the compliment of a visit, despite Australia’s extraordinary services to the Allies in the anti-Fascist war of…