In 1976, a famous economist found himself standing in a farm paddock in north Queensland. Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian-born economist, had been invited to Australia during the biggest economic crisis in decades, when inflation was soaring globally and unemployment was jumping higher. Hayek's ideas about how to kill inflation had been gaining notoriety, and he'd come to Australia for a speaking tour. In the middle of the tour, he'd stopped at the farm for a four-day break. It was on the Atherton Tablelands, and it belonged to the miner Ronald Kitching, one of the organisers of the tour....