Karl Schlögel, Moscow 1937, Australian Journal of Politics and History 59, no. 3 (September 2013): 493-494

Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 59, Number 3, 2013, pp.468-500.

Australian Journal of Politics and History © 2013 School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.

Book Reviews

Jews, Christians and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities. By Jacob Lassner (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. xviii + 312. AU$61.00 (hb), available in Australia through Footprint Books.

As its title suggests, this book is really two short books in one. In the first part, Lassner examines the history of western scholarship on the foundations of Islam, and its connections with Judaism and Christianity. He brings out well the tradition of intellectually powerful work that has been done in the field, while his comments on recent scholarship are judicious and persuasive, although I found myself wondering whether the term “Christianity” could be finessed, for in its origins Islam has a surprising amount in common with non-mainstream forms of that religion. We learn of the prominence of Jews in the field, the labours of the Orientalists, and the response to western scholarship among Arabs, among them such westernized figures as Edward Said, whose much-discussed ideas do not seem to have lasted well and are here subjected to further critique, and the contemporary author Tariq Ramadan, who is responsible for very interesting attempts to position Islam within the contemporary West and a recent biography of Muhammad.

In the second part of his study, Lassner discusses the position of Jews and Christians in the medieval Islamic world, demonstrating more than once the uses to which the exceptionally rich material found in the Cairo Geniza can be put. Jews tended towards pessimism, he argues, because they were subject to stronger criticism than Christians; nevertheless, there was much less theological baggage in the comments Muslims directed against them than there was in medieval Europe. Lassner is aware of an issue that has not always been given due weight, that of whether theological polemics had an impact on day-to-day relations, and brings out the complexities that would have been involved in any decision to convert (here I missed discussion of the views of Richard Bulliett). He brings out nicely the hardening of attitudes towards non-Muslims that occurred in times of Muslim failure and perceived breakdowns in the Muslim polity, processes not without contemporary relevance, and the dynamics involved in competition for shared space. Considering the apparent lack of intellectual nerve that prevented thinkers in the Near East from making the kind of breakthroughs that occurred in Europe, he points out that it characterized the Jews and Christians as well as the Muslims of the region. Contemporary Israel, on the other hand, is intellectually rich because it draws its inspiration from the West, and Lassner concludes his study by pointing to the need for a cultural as well as political rapprochement between the Abode of Islam and both the West in general and the Jews and Christians of the Near East.

This is a dense study, deeply learned, respectful towards its subject, nuanced, and marked by an interpretative reticence not always encountered in studies of such fields. The summary of its content given here can only provide a guide to the territory it

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covers. Lassner has written an exceptionally important book that deserves a wide readership, within as well as outside the Abode of Islam.

JOHN MOORHEAD History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland

Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin. By Emily O’Gorman (Collingwood, Vic: CSIRO Publishing, 2012), pp.iii-x + 257. $AU49.95 (pb).

In 1904 Dorothea Mackellar touched on two of Australia’s greatest environmental concerns when she wrote “of droughts and flooding rains”. This important environmental study brings the focus to bear on the floods of the extended Murray-Darling river system across a span of more than 140 years. It is a subject on which much has been written, but in this instance the reader is taken on a journey through time to witness changing attitudes and the wider context of what remains a major national concern. Four specific floods are investigated in depth, the first of which is the 1852 Murrumbidgee River flood that devastated the town of Gundagai and finally forced its relocation to higher ground. Ignoring the advice of local Aboriginal people resulted in the deaths of perhaps as many as 100 settlers, though previous floods had already heralded ample warning. Greed and avarice played their part, with business owners determined to remain at this important crossing place on the road between Sydney and Port Phillip through fear of losing passing trade. Ironically, when the government finally — and rather reluctantly — forced the residents to move to higher ground the travel route deviated through the new site.

The emphasis in the 1850s was on the protection of property and for citizens to make their own decisions, and it was not until the Darling River flood at Bourke in 1890 that direct government involvement becomes readily apparent. In this instance the New South Wales government financed the building of massive levees to protect a town which had achieved iconic status in the national psyche. Decisions were taken out of local hands, with the construction of levees also signalling the role of engineering to control floodwaters. Attempted manipulation of Nature replaced the previous system of simply relying on meteorological forecasts to alleviate possible calamities.

Technology took giant strides forward in the post-Second World War period when Australia embarked on a number of massive engineering projects such as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme which completely diverted a number of watercourses. Dams proliferated across the riverine landscape, but none of it prevented the catastrophic Murray River flood of 1956. Here the emphasis was on saving lives rather than property, with the initial involvement of military personnel and the creation of a civil defence force, the State Emergency Service. Humanitarian efforts aside, the post-war years also revealed the serious ecological consequences of over-reliance on science and technology as supposed mitigation measures.

In 1990 it was expected that Cunnamulla in far south-western Queensland would share the fate of Charleville and suffer substantial inundation. Bureaucracy took control, with far-off authorities in Brisbane over-riding local knowledge and authorising the complete evacuation of the town. With the economy already seriously depressed it could well have been Cunnamulla’s death-knell, but evacuation did not occur and nor was the town inundated. Without any legal requirement to do so, Police Superintendent Harry Edwards heeded the knowledge of long-term resident Allan Tannock and called off the mass evacuation at the eleventh hour. Tannock was able to show Edwards that the bulk of the floodwaters would be conveyed away from the town

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along the Warrego River’s western tributaries. Tannock’s knowledge extended over half a century, during which time he discovered a remarkable natural phenomenon: the western rivers were slowly moving further westward. The outcome of the Cunnamulla crisis serves to highlight our lack of knowledge regarding complex and changing river patterns. Despite that, we have continued to over-use and abuse one of the nation’s most precious resources, and it is the documentation of these flaws in our behaviour which this study brings into stark relief.

MURRAY JOHNSON History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland

Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Ocean, 1790-1870. By Lynette Russell (New York: State University of New York Press, 2012), pp. 221. ISBN 978-1-4384-4423-9, US$80.00 (hb).

Reading Lynette Russell’s Roving Mariners took me back more than forty years to D.R. Hainworth’s Builders and Adventurers (1968) and K.M. Dallas’ Trading Posts and Penal Colonies (1969) which were standard fare for undergraduate students in the 1970s. These two books first gave me a glimpse of the early maritime industries that were so important to the foundation years of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Although they were my first Australian history books that mentioned Pacific history, Aborigines do not rate a place in the index of either book. Since then, there has been a repositioning of historical debate and a mainstreaming of Aborigines within Australian history, but Indigenous Australians are still seldom written about as part of Pacific and world history. Russell has gone back to the archives on maritime history and re-examined records from an Indigenous Australian perspective, weaving her own ancestry into the search. As well as depicting the hard and rough life on board ships and at shore bases, the book shows Indigenous agency in a way that became usual in Pacific history decades before it has in Indigenous Australian history.

Roving Mariners divides into seven chapters, the first is a 1790-1870 overview, followed by a chapter on Aboriginal knowledge of whales and seals and early involvement in what became two of Australia’s most important early industries. The concentration is on individual involvement and what emerges is a clear view of the multiethnic nature of the maritime industries and the ways in which Indigenous Australians used them for their own enterprise and entrepreneurship. Chapters three to six are case studies, on Tommy Chaseland, Tasmanian Aboriginal men and whaling, sealing in South Australia, and an analysis of domestic space. Chaseland was a New South Wales “mixed-race” Aborigine who ended up integrated into the south island of New Zealand as a ship’s master and family man. The Tasmanian chapter concentrates on three Aborigines, William Lanné, Henry Whalley and Walter Arthur, all of whom became senior crew and in Lanné’s case a captain. Chapters five and six examine the place of women as labourers and in a domestic context in the sealing industry. The epilogue speaks of hybridity, a key note in all of Russell’s books.

Based on solid archival research and the clever joining of fragments, Russell adds literature and photography as well as her own identity and sense of historical curiosity. Individuals emerge who adapt, negotiate and survive, some prospering. The picture is one of remarkable mobility and hybridity, both on ships, through shore parties and in long-term colonial settlement. The book bridges the spaces between Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. It’s a deft study of Indigenous Australasia and its Pacific and New Zealand context. While not undervaluing the harsh, even cruel circumstances in which these people worked and lived, Russell also rescues them as

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individuals and shows the complexity of racial and gender categories in the nineteenth century. The book is a history of the whaling and sealing industries in a new way that leaves Hainsworth and Dallas far behind. These frontier interactions often challenge our ideas on Indigenous Australians and their place in colonial economy and society. Too little historical writing ignores modern national boundaries. Russell’s Roving Mariners does this successfully, and has added to an emerging more nuanced history of Indigenous Australians. The book is challenging, thorough and personal, allowing individuals to emerge and rewriting Aborigines into the early colonial years.

CLIVE MOORE History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland

Phillip Parker King 1791- 1856: A Most Admirable Australian. By Brian Douglas Abbott, with a Foreword by Paul Brunton (Sydney: Glenburgh Pty Ltd, 2012), pp.xvii + 397 ISBN 97806-4657 2949 (hbk).

In bringing alive the remarkable career of an Australian-born Royal Navy officer, maritime explorer, colonial official and politician, the author has rendered signal service to the historiography of early New South Wales. Exploiting chiefly the primary sources and records including maps and paintings held by the Mitchell Library in Sydney, Abbott has woven together both an intimate family history and an exciting narrative of major national significance.

The work begins with a survey of the remarkable life of Phillip Gidley King, father of Phillip Parker King, since his role in the foundation of the colony of New South Wales and especially as the administrator of the convict settlement at Norfolk Island (1791-1796) impinged centrally on the career of his sons of whom Phillip Parker was the eldest legitimate one. He was born on Norfolk Island in 1791. The family returned to England when King was five. He entered the Royal Navy in 1807 at the age of sixteen, serving in Home and Mediterranean waters during the Napoleonic wars and in this role King honed his navigational skills, becoming an accomplished hydrographer.

Through his acquaintanceship with Matthew Flinders he was able to meet Sir Joseph Banks, Admiral Bligh, and the naval hydrographer Captain Hurd. This meeting proved life-changing for King as he was appointed in 1817 to complete the exploration of “that part of the Coast of New Holland which was not surveyed by the late Captain Flinders” (p.xv). The decision was amply justified in that King’s subsequent charts of over 2,800 miles of coastline became the official Admiralty charts that were relied on for 150 years. On his return to England in 1823 King was made a member of the Royal Society and the Linnean Society. Then, at the age of thirty-four when the Admiralty needed an accurate survey of southern American coasts from Montevideo around the Straits of Magellan up to Valparaiso, King was placed in command of three vessels for this historic and hazardous task. The successful accomplishment of his assignment by 1830 led to his posting at the Admiralty to complete his latest charts. The next year he returned to the Colony finally to rejoin his young family.

Here is a biography full of drama, personal sacrifice crowned by brilliant achievement. The Royal Navy was a hard task master, however. Having been relegated to the reserve list in 1831, King returned to New South Wales where he had considerable land interests and in 1839 he became Resident Commissioner of the Australian Agricultural Company, a post he managed during the lean years of the 1840s. In 1849 due to the failing fortunes of the enterprise, King was summoned “home” and relieved of his position, unjustly as Abbott shows. On return to the Colony, King and his family lived the life of the landed gentry at Grantham, North

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Sydney, Newlands House, Parramatta and Dunheved and St Mary’s for the remainder of his life. He died in 1856 but not before having been honoured by the Admiralty which promoted him to Admiral of the Blue the year before, the first Australian-born naval officer to achieve that rank. Abbott has portrayed these events as well as the King family’s domestic life in great detail and has not only erected a monument to his esteemed ancestor but provided an invaluable and detailed picture of Australia prior to the gold rushes. Students of early Australian history are deeply indebted to him.

JOHN A. MOSES Canberra ACT

Men and Manliness on the Frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. By Robert Hogg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 248 pp., £55.00 (hb).

In the mid-nineteenth century, British men streamed out of the metropole and into the “frontier”, to seek their fortunes in a rugged environment very different to the ones they’d known. Men and Manliness on the Frontier transports its readers to Queensland, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Robert Hogg traces men’s journeys from centre to periphery, their lives in new settings, and their engagements with the indigenous populations. In these decidedly rural contexts, Hogg suggests, men sought to leave behind “feminised” city life and express a new manliness.

Hogg’s scholarship is thorough and measured, as he leads us through the literature on masculinity, frontiers, popular writing and the demands of capital. The chapters explore several elements of experience in detail: emotional ties to women and other men, loneliness, mateship, alcoholism, violence, indigeneity and racism. Frontier experience was a meeting of ideology — “manliness” as a concept based on self-discipline, courage and application — and “configurations of practice”, ideas translated into action in new settings.

British popular culture presented frontier life as a sort of boys’ own tale of action and adventure, but the reality was rather less romantic. Hogg catalogues manly endurances and hardships in exhaustive detail, with diaries, memoirs and letters providing the details. “We plodded along through mud and water”, wrote one man, “sometimes up to our armpits”. Hogg addresses questions of race in the frontier “contact zones”, suggesting that non-British men, including the Indigenous inhabitants of these frontiers, were forced into subordinate positions, a subordination sometimes enforced by violence. Middle-class British masculinity, with its boarding schools and militarism, had a complex relationship to violent behaviour.

Individual men’s stories and experiences form the most compelling elements of the book. We meet Robert Harkness, who travelled to the goldfields of British Columbia in 1862, and wrote home to his wife Sabrina. Robert’s commitment to hard work is palpable, along with his love for his wife: “I have grown so tough” / “I think and feel so tenderly towards you”. The same year, in the same province, one Reginald Pidock teamed up with a chap known only as “Fred”, and shared a cosy domestic relationship: “We cut our firewood and make all snug for the night, piled on more wood and laid down and talked over the day’s work”. Some men looked towards home; others forged lives together.

Hogg is clear in his aims and objectives: examining the practices of manliness by British men in frontier societies, in a way that develops more complex narratives of the frontier past otherwise suggested in popular culture — those tourist extravaganzas,

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Australiana and Canadian bull riding and chuck wagon races that stand in for frontier histories. For the most part, Men and Manliness on the Frontier achieves this desired complexity. In places, though, the reader wonders whether an overwhelming image of a harsh past is just a little too totalising — as, indeed, are the cartoonish celebrations of a heroic past that Hogg rightly critiques. I wonder whether there was a little more scope for intimacy and pleasure in nineteenth-century men’s frontier lives than Hogg implies. Pidcock’s and Fred’s experience hints at this, and there may be more to say here. What about entertainment, in an era when settlers made music and fun even in the most trying of circumstances?

On the whole, though, Men and Manliness on the Frontier is an accomplished piece of scholarship. Hogg offers a useful exploration of the ideological and material elements of frontier masculinity and makes good use of the archival treasures at his disposal. This book offers a valuable resource for anyone interested in the interconnections between lives, experiences and ideas in the history of masculinity.

CHRIS BRICKELL Otago University

Larrikins: A History. By Melissa Bellanta (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2012) pp. xxii + 234. AU$34.95 (pb).

As the cliché goes, Australians (still) love a larrikin. From Bon Scott to Bob Hawke, there seems a special place in Australian hearts for jokey, blokey, hard-drinking characters. But how well-known is the historical larrikin from whom the term is drawn? As Melissa Bellanta notes in the introduction to this lucid and elegantly written history, until the 1910s, “larrikin” was certainly not a term that members of the broader community would have wanted to apply to themselves (p.xiv). Australia’s first larrikins, working-class youth from the poorest parts of our largest cities, were, as she demonstrates, prone to deviant behaviour and “leary” dress. These first larrikins emerged from the late 1860s and fell away by the late 1920s, but the term has persisted in our continued embrace of the larrikin streak. Bellanta’s careful, thoughtful research offers a reconstruction of these first larrikins and their urban landscape in order to restore their lives to history, but also to help us understand our enduring fascination with the larrikin archetype.

Bellanta has reconstructed the world of the urban larrikins through newspapers and criminal records. This is a work of urban, as well as cultural, history, and Bellanta’s insistence on the importance of understanding larrikins through the material realities of their lives is valuable. She portrays the textures and amusements of life for the larrikin, but she also argues that larrikins were not typical members of the working class. Larrikins, she suggests, sought not respectability, but small-time entrepreneurship, “the dream of an independent life”. One of the most important new contributions Bellanta makes is in the emphasis she gives to popular theatre as a shaper of larrikin identities. These live performances offered both male and female larrikins the possibilities of performative identities, and for girls, it presented spectacles of “brazen femininity” they could adopt as their own. Bellanta’s work also focuses on style and fashion, and she offers innovative readings of larrikin identity through dress.

The gender politics of larrikinism were, of course, deeply problematic. While Bellanta successfully brings agency to the historically overlooked larrikin girls, the toxic nature of larrikin masculinity is also clear. Bellanta does not evade the sexualized and racialised violence amongst larrikins (there is an entire chapter on the Mount Rennie case, for example), but neither does she speculate on how this violence was

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reconciled as the larrikin archetype moved from criminality to national identity in the early decades of the twentieth century. While she notes that the onset of the First World War made the violent behaviour of larrikin pushes seem less consequential than it had seemed earlier, sexualized violence by larrikins against women and homosexual men persisted. By the end of the war, the larrikin was incorporated into the Anzac myth. The “larrikinesses” of the nineteenth century disappeared and the larrikin’s masculinity was reaffirmed by war. I wanted Bellanta to draw out the implications of this a little more: what did it mean to base the new national type, at least in part, on a masculinity that had gendered violence at its core?

The book’s afterword demonstrates the larrikin’s continuing relevance to Australian identity: as Bellanta notes, we are still in the grip of a larrikin myth, although she is less clear about why it continues to hold us in thrall. Perhaps the reason for the persistence of the myth is its performance of egalitarianism, and nonconformity, as Bellanta notes: but it is also a way to deflect your wealth, as Alan Bond and the Larrikin capitalists of the 1980s knew all too well. Bellanta has fun drawing contemporary parallels to her historical examples: this insistence on her work’s relevance is a great demonstration of why history matters. Larrikins is a beautifully written, resonant and troubling account of a much-mythologised aspect of Australian cultural history.

MICHELLE ARROW Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University

In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden History of Australia in World War I. By Robert Bollard (Sydney: NewSouth, 2013), pp.223. AU$32.95 (pb).

This book begins unpromisingly. A line from Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” is inaccurately quoted on the first page of the Introduction while the Sudan War is placed in the 1890s, instead of the 1880s, on the last. In between, the First World War is confusingly presented as both an example of Australia’s habit of fighting “other people’s wars” (p.23) and — more accurately — a conflict that “was clearly understood as a war for ‘our’ British Empire” (p.13).

Robert Bollard’s book is represented as an antidote to celebratory accounts of Anzac that uncritically accept that the blood sacrifice of the war was needed to achieve nationhood. In place of such an assumption, it posits that the war was a divisive experience for Australian society as well as a radicalising influence on the working class. In place of the myth of the conservative digger, we learn of returned men joining “with energy and enthusiasm in protests and strikes led by men and women who had opposed the war” (p.21). In this way, Bollard revives discussion of an issue that exercised Australian historians between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s but then more or less dropped out of sight; what kind of role did returned diggers play in the politics of interwar Australia? Were they a consistently conservative influence, or did they rather re-embrace their class identity when they returned to Australia?

While Bollard is convincing in his discussion of class-conscious radicalism on the part of many returned diggers, I suspect there is more exaggeration in his account of popular hostility to the war; particularly the suggestion that “by the war’s end it was, arguably, as unpopular as the Vietnam conflict would be by the early 1970s” (p.13). He is surely wrong in suggesting that the Labor Party, through the resolutions adopted at its national conference in Perth in June 1918, was thereby officially opposed to the war. By this stage the ALP strongly opposed conscription and formally supported a negotiated peace. But Frank Tudor, the federal leader, and T.J. Ryan, the Queensland

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premier, continued to appear on recruiting platforms during 1918, the latter even sponsoring the so-called Ryan Thousand. Yet Bollard’s claim, even if erroneous, does provoke a serious question that historians would do well to explore more thoroughly than they have done so far: how robust was national morale by 1918? If the war had continued into 1919 and beyond, what contribution would Australia have been practically able to make?

While marred by occasional inaccuracies and misprints, there is much to admire in this book once you leave behind its shaky Introduction. Bollard writes convincingly on the two conscription crises and, unsurprisingly for a scholar who has produced a well-regarded doctoral thesis on the 1917 strike, with great authority and vividness on the wave of industrial action that culminated in that bitter confrontation. Most importantly of all, he redirects our attention from the battlefront to the class and sectarian battles at home during the war and its immediate aftermath. As recently as twenty years ago, one might have taken for granted the significance of an understanding of this homefront experience for a broader appreciation of the historical meaning of the First World War. But the growing ascendancy of the Anzac cult in the last quarter of a century, while providing an apparently insatiable market for books about military history, has helped redirect attention away from some profoundly important yet unresolved questions in the wider social history of Australians at war.

Bollard’s revisiting of some of the themes that dropped out of sight for Australian historians from around the end of the 1980s is therefore timely and welcome. The centenary of the First World War, supported by bucket-loads of government money, seems destined to worsen the already bad national habit of Anzac worship. On the eve of five solid years of commemoration, Bollard has done us a service in providing this lively, readable and provocatively dissident account of the Australian experience of the First World War.

FRANK BONGIORNO School of History, The Australian National University

Kitty’s War: The Remarkable Wartime Experiences of Kit McNaughton. By Janet Butler (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2013), pp. x + 308. 16 pp. b/w photographs. AU$32.95 (pb).

In July 1915, Sister Kit McNaughton, a member of the Australian Army Nursing Services, boarded the troop ship Orsova in Melbourne, bound for Suez. Kitty’s War is a story woven around the diary that she kept for most of the next four years. McNaughton returned to Melbourne on the Wiltshire in August 1919.

Butler has chosen to reproduce relatively few direct extracts from the diaries. Instead, she draws on multiple nursing diaries and other records to produce a picture of one woman’s war and of how that woman chose to present herself through her diary. This is, among other things, a book about silences, about what McNaughton does not say, and two of the most interesting chapters concern her time on Lemnos. While Butler assembles information about the appalling conditions for nurses and soldiers, freezing in tents with inadequate food and clothing, McNaughton apparently wrote almost nothing about this at the time. Instead her diary entries, we are told, focused on social life and friendships.

After Lemnos, McNaughton travelled to the Western Front and spent some time nursing there, including a period nursing German prisoners. This is, according to Butler, virtually the only time when McNaughton wrote very much about nursing per se. It is as if she was free to mention the terrible German casualties, but unable to write

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about the Australian and Allied wounded with the same freedom. In France, many of the friendships made on Lemnos remained important to McNaughton and Butler devotes considerable space to discussions of the nature of those friendships, with both men and women, comparing and contrasting them with male ideas of mateship.

These friendships remained important when McNaughton moved from nursing on and near the front in France to nursing in England during the closing stages of the war. In this period, she spent time working as an operating theatre nurse with Alan Newton at Dartford and then with Henry Newland at Sidcup. But Butler’s sources of information on this period come from others, for by this time, McNaughton had ceased to keep up her diary entries.

This book is generally well written and well-researched and a particular strength is the way that Butler has been able to illuminate aspects of Kit McNaughton’s war through use of the diaries of other nurses who served with or near her. Butler is particularly interested in the relationships between gender, identity and war and this volume should be understood as making a contribution to that field. This is Butler’s frame of reference and she repeatedly discusses how she understands McNaughton’s changing construction of her own identity, as a woman, as a Victorian, as an Australian and the significance of shared experience in forming the enduring friendships which came out of her time in Europe. In contrast, this is only incidentally a book about the history of nursing. Partly, this is because McNaughton apparently has very little to say about her work in her diaries, but whereas Butler went to considerable trouble to assemble information relevant to other silences in the diaries, she did not do this for McNaughton’s work on the wards and in the operating theatres. Overall, however, this is an interesting contribution to the growing volume of research on the history of Australians during the First World War.

SALLY WILDE Queensland

Australia and the World Crisis, 1914-1923: Volume 2: A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy. By Neville Meaney (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009), pp. xiii + 535. AU$80.00 (hb).

Over the last decade or two there has been a flood of books on the fighting experience of the Australians in the First World War. Other dimensions of Australian history during the Great World Crisis have drawn less attention from historians. This is especially true of the subject of the impact of the Great War on Australia’s relations with the rest of the world. It is welcome then that Neville Meaney completed the second volume of his study of the history of Australian defence and foreign policy from 1901 to 1923. In this wide-ranging and detailed work Meaney undertakes a major reassessment of a crucial era in Australian international history. Australia and the World Crisis concentrates on the attitudes and actions of Australian leaders including Joseph Cook, Andrew Fisher and W.M. Hughes, along with other significant federal ministers, the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson and some senior officials, such as E.L. Piesse. It is a study of the political elite, yet one of the strengths of Meaney’s work is the way he weaves domestic issues, such as the conscription referenda and general attitudes to race on the Australia home-front, into his exploration of Australia’s external policy.

The central thesis of this book is that during these years Australia was simultaneously engaged in a hot war against Germany and its allies in Europe and a cold war against Japan in the Pacific. Indeed for Meaney the world crisis began in

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1904-5 with the defeat of Russia by Japan and did not end until the Washington naval agreements of 1922. He asks the reader to think of Australia’s experience of the world crisis not simply in terms of the 1914-18 war, but rather in a context of a long-lasting and multi-layered geo-strategic conflict against Germany, but equally Japan. While recognising the enormous difficulties faced by Fisher and Hughes, Meaney finds that the Australian leadership, especially the Little Digger, failed to construct an effective policy to meet the combination of hot and cold wars. He is critical of Hughes for not confronting the fundamental problem that the demand for unity in imperial foreign policy could not provide a framework for Australia to deal with the “Japanese problem” which other parts of the Empire did not share.

In this work Meaney continues to build his thesis, established in volume one, that Australia in the first two decades after Federation, despite its membership of the British Empire, did pursue a set of attitudes and actions that is recognizable as an Australian foreign and defence policy. In this way he pushes the concept of Australian independence in external policy well back before the time of the Second World War. The other argument from his previous writings that Meaney purses with vigour in Australia and the World Crisis is that over the twentieth century the threat from Japan, or more generally Asia, was the most significant factor in pushing Australia to develop its own foreign and defence policy. Not all will agree with those conclusions, nor will all historians agree with the application of the term “cold war”, with all the baggage it carries from the American-Soviet conflict, to Australian-Japanese relations in the early twentieth century. Can the fears of Australians and their leaders of Japan at this time be equated with the armed stand-off between the super-powers? Having questioned that, no-one writing on the history of Australian foreign policy will be able to ignore Neville Meaney’s new contribution. Indeed Meaney’s two volumes will remain for a long time required reading for all specialists in this field.

CHRISTOPHER WATERS History, Deakin University

Looking After One’s Own: The Rise of Nationalism and the Politics of the Neuendettelsauer Mission in Australia, New Guinea and Germany (1921-1933). By Christine Winter (Peter Lang: Frankfurt a.M., 2012), xii + 238 pp., bibliog., index, SFR57.00 (hb).

This book is a political history of the Neuendettelsauer Mission, one of two Christian missions that brought Lutheranism to German New Guinea before 1914. When the Australians occupied German New Guinea in the first months of the First World War, control of the Neuendettelsau Mission passed to Australian Lutherans and the Lutheran Iowa Synod in the United States. Some German missionaries were interned during the war, and the Australian administration which assumed control of New Guinea under a League of Nations Mandate in 1921 did not allow Germans to re-enter the territory until 1927.

The focus of this study is the political stance of the mission towards the Nazi party in the late Weimar period. The author, whose great-grandfather was director of Neuendettelsau in the 1920s and who herself studied theology in Erlangen in the 1980s, is well qualified to address this issue. She has a sophisticated, critical and yet sympathetic understanding of the history of Bavarian Lutheranism and of the reasons why mission leaders — men such as Friedrich Eppelein, director from 1928 — were increasingly drawn to the doctrine of national renewal advocated by the fast-growing Nazi party in the early 1930s. The mission’s weekly newspaper Freimund declared in

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1933 that “unbiblical Democracy, which cares only about numbers and masses, but not about quality and true abilities, must finally lead to the ruin of the German people. The German Volk needs strong leadership” (p.154). Theirs was not the Lutheranism of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church, but of a Christian Volk believing in a strong state and defined in national and racial terms. Indeed, Eppelein and others in Neuendettelsau believed the mission experience in New Guinea, exemplified above all by the Volk-centred missionising philosophy of the missionary Christian Keysser, had much to offer Germany alongside Hitler and the Nazis. As the author writes, paraphrasing Eppelein, “The National Socialists wanted a racially pure Germany, and Neuendettelsau could assist, as it knew how to combine Christianity with respect for Volkstum and racial purity” (p.92).

By April 1933, two months after Hitler became Chancellor, Freimund was publishing a birthday song for him composed by Keysser: “A leader has been given us by God”, one verse began, “He storms ahead, we follow faithfully”(p.159). The phrases and themes of the song resonated with those of the Horst Wessel song, anthem of the Nazi party. The Nazis’ Gleichschaltung or “bringing into line” of all institutions and organisations in Germany offered no particular difficulties for Neuendettelsau, which offered its conference and training facilities for the use of Nazi organisations such as the National Socialist Protestant Pastors Federation, the SA and even the SS. Neuendettelsau leaders such as Keysser shared the anti-Semitism of their new government.

Some but not all the German missionaries in New Guinea were caught up in the enthusiasm for Hitler, and when war broke out in 1939, the Australian administration detained and deported sixteen of them, all with openly Nazi sympathies.

Drawing extensively on government and missionary archives in Germany and Australia, especially those in Neuendettelsau itself, Christine Winter has written a remarkably interesting and original account of a little known aspect of the history of Weimar and Nazi Germany, one that intersects in unexpected ways with the history of Australia and New Guinea as well.

STEWART FIRTH Australian National University

W. Macmahon Ball: Politics for the People. By Ai Kobayashi (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013), pp. xiv + 278. AU$39.95 (pb).

Whether because of its geographic isolation or its founding as a British dominion, Australian interest in foreign affairs only ever grew gradually. Australian foreign policy did not even begin to take its own shape until the 1930s; at this stage the Department of External Affairs remained a division within the Prime Minister’s Department. Even after External Affairs became a separate department in 1935, initial foreign policy relied heavily on British — and later American — consultation and protection. Australian foreign policy was no doubt embryonic, yet Victorian-born William Macmahon Ball was one of the few Australians who had not only a deep and abiding interest in political science and foreign affairs, but also a vested interest in teaching these disciplines. Educated and experienced, Ball’s career traversed academic positions, public service, diplomatic missions and frequent media commentaries from 1925 through to his retirement in 1968. His influence over academics of Australian foreign policy remains strong, but a detailed account of all aspects of his illustrious career has been clearly lacking.

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Ai Kobayashi’s W. Macmahon Ball: Politics for the People is a fabulously written and well researched book that offers such an account. From somewhat humble beginnings as a part-time lecturer, Kobayashi follows Ball’s professional career through such prestigious positions as Representative of the British Commonwealth for the Allied Council of Japan and Chair of Political Science at the University of Melbourne. She offers compelling analyses of other important roles Ball held, including diplomatic missions to San Francisco, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. According to Kobayashi, however, he is best remembered as one of the pioneers or “founding fathers” of political science in Australian universities (p.5). At a time when the “academic study of politics hardly existed in Australia”, Kobayashi commends Ball for his contribution to the field through tertiary teaching, radio broadcasts and public engagement (p.34). In his early years, Ball used these outlets to build an interest in foreign affairs and political science. By the time he became Chair of Political Science at the University of Melbourne in 1949, he shifted focus to teaching the importance of the Asia-Pacific region to Australia’s future.

Ball emerges as a man who preferred academia over public service. In his overseas posts, he had to follow instructions from Canberra whereas in academic life he was freer to articulate his own thoughts. Kobayashi gives the reader one fitting example: divisions between Ball and Minister of External Affairs Herbert Evatt in the early post-war period saw Ball resign his post in occupied Japan. This reviewer felt that Kobayashi might here have given more attention to the differences between Ball’s position and that of his own government. This minor criticism aside, Kobayashi’s book is a necessity for any reader interested in Ball, the history of Australian foreign affairs, and the teaching of political science in Australia. It offers the best study to date of an important figure in the history of Australian politics and foreign affairs.

ANDREW KELLY University of Western Sydney

Immigrants Turned Activists: Italians in 1970s Melbourne. By Simone Battiston (Leicester: Troubador Publishing, 2012), 147 pages, £14.99 (pb).

Simone Battiston’s interesting study focuses on political activism amongst Italian immigrants in left wing organisations and parties before and throughout the 1970s. His inquiry looks primarily at FILEF Melbourne during the 1970s in order to gain a greater understanding of migrant politics involving Italians, “their participation in party and union structures, pressure groups and politically minded organisations” (p.xii). As Battiston correctly points out, despite the massive range of historical studies concerning Italian immigration to Australia, there is undoubtedly a dearth of analysis concerning “Italian-Australian political participation and representation” (p.xi). The Federazione Lavoratori Emigranti e Famiglie (FILEF) is an interesting case whose history contributes to a greater understanding of the complexity of ethnic politics in Australia. Formed in Italy in 1967 FILEF aimed to provide working class Italian migrants the organisational means by which they could work together to defend their rights in their new countries of residency. The Melbourne branch was established on 6 July 1972 and the group quickly took a prominent role in left wing migrant activism, organising the first ever Migrant Workers Conference in 1973, for instance, and lobbying the ALP and the trade unions for better policies concerning Italian immigrant workers.

What Battiston does particularly well is demonstrate FILEF’s contrasting fortunes within the context of the changing Australian political landscape of the 1970s that

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clearly shaped immigrant politics during this period. Under the Whitlam Government FILEF won a federal government grant of $10,000 for its welfare services to Italian immigrants. FILEF built up close links with the ALP as the growing importance of the “migrant vote” in the 1970s encouraged strong cooperation between the two organisations in order to increase the involvement of Italian immigrants in Australian left wing politics. However, as Battiston clearly shows, it was FILEF’s close connection with the Italian Communist Party, the PCI, which would eventually undermine its credibility.

The Age published a sensational story in April 1975 that alleged that FILEF was sponsored by PCI affiliates and aimed to take social and political control of Melbourne’s Italian community. Battiston links this to the imminent collapse of South Vietnam and growing fear of communism within Australia. Labour was put under pressure for providing $10,000 to a “communist organisation” and with the fall of Gough Whitlam FILEF found their government funding substantially cut. This was followed by the drawn out deportation case of prominent PCI and FILEF activist Ignazio Salemi. Battiston shows how the long court process brought to the surface divisions between those who supported Salemi and close links with the PCI and others like FILEF secretary and Labour MP Giovanni Sgro who viewed this as an embarrassment of sorts and encouraged greater ties to the ALP. Eventually both the external and internal pressures weakened FILEF and as the PCI became the leading faction within the organisation the focus turned primarily to Italian politics and the association with the Australian left deteriorated.

Battiston’s fascinating study demonstrates the complexity of immigrant political activism. The shifting context of politics in Italy and Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, the infighting within FILEF concerning its connections with the PCI and ALP, the pressures of funding and the differing visions of exactly what FILEF was meant to achieve all shaped its success and overall failure. Battiston’s detailed history of the changing array of Italian immigrant political groups in Australia and the complex political infighting can be difficult to follow at times, but this an unavoidable consequence of the subject of the book which Battiston deals with well. Overall, this relatively short but detailed study is an essential addition to the analysis of immigrant politics in Australia.

DAVID BROWN History, The Sixth Form College Farnborough, Hampshire, UK

Australia and the United Nations. Edited by James Cotton and David Lee (Canberra: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2012), pp.558, AU$55.00 (pb).

This large and impressive volume has contributions from ten authors. The challenge has been to coordinate the many activities of the United Nations (and indeed to do so by tracing Australia’s association with its predecessor, the League of Nations). One wonders whether there can be any coherence in Australian policies towards the UN given the nation’s well-publicised historical dependence on the English-speaking alliance. An associated problem is the fragmentation of the UN’s structure, brought about by the many calls made on the organisation and the ever-present problem of balancing the roles of its many functional and regional bodies. Finally there is the problem of understanding the role of the UN from the Second World War, the Cold War, and the Post-Cold War periods — or as Roderick Pitty writes, from “foundation, decolonisation, stagnation, expectation” and today “disappointment”.

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Security was the focus of the Principal Powers at the foundation UN conference at Dumbarton Oaks and Australia was insistent that any such system take account of its role. To that end Canberra has gained membership of the Security Council as a non-permanent member five times. Moreen Dee argues that Australia has also played a serious role in UN-linked security operations, participating in sixty-four peacekeeping roles from monitoring ceasefires to the recent trend to large and comprehensive peacekeeping missions (such as Cambodia and East Timor). Beyond that, as Matthew Jordan writes, Australia has been active at the other end of the spectrum, working on measures to effect nuclear and conventional disarmament.

Yet the contributors largely confirm the importance of Australia’s role outside the Security Council. H.V. Evatt, as has long been known, promoted the role of the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council. The Assembly’s role in openly debating issues help set the norms of global behaviour. Pitty notes, herein, that after the Cold War the UN Secretariat has responded to the failure of the Principal Powers to change the structure of the UN by strengthening its links to a multitude of Non-government Organisations and other networks.

Activism in the UN has also been prompted by Australian national interest. Evatt pondered the role of the External Affairs Power during the Depression in the Australian constitution in effecting social and economic change domestically. Yet, as Peter Carroll notes, before Whitlam, Australia had a poor record in ratifying international conventions, such as that of equal pay for women. American opposition to commodity agreements has also prompted Australia, as a supplier of agricultural products, to promote international action of orderly marketing and food security. Regional Commissions were also vital in promoting aid and economic growth in the Asia-Pacific. Until Bob Hawke introduced fees for international students in 1985, Australia augmented UNESCO’s role in fostering post-secondary education.

The volume, however, needs to be read against other works on Australian diplomacy since the Second World War. The notion of “strategic denial”, for example, is not only a feature of Canberra’s views on trusteeship, but also its views on regional defence. Trade policy was as much driven by the Sterling Bloc as the GATT. Action on the environment raises questions about the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the Antarctic Treaty and the Law of the Sea — all of which originated outside the UN. Tracing Australian policies to the emergence of new nations also raises, as Humphrey McQueen once pondered, the current issues surrounding the decolonisation of the oceans. As complex as the UN is, Australia’s involvement is a part of a much larger canvass.

WAYNE REYNOLDS University of Newcastle

Transforming a “White Australia”: Issues of Racism and Immigration. By Laksiri Jayasuriya (New Delhi: SSS Publications, 2012), pp. xiv + 180. AU$39.95 (pb).

Transforming a “White Australia” is an edited version of the author’s 1999 publication, Racism, Immigration and the Law, complemented by two new chapters (1 and 5) which provide historical and theoretical context to Jayasuriya’s views on Australian multiculturalism. A significant theme of this text is the author’s desire to formalise Australian respect for individual cultural difference through incorporating multicultural citizenship within an Australian Charter of Rights: “Such an Act [of legislation] will […] facilitate the separate, but linked development of an Aboriginal and multiculturalism consciousness” (p.18).

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Jayasuriya argues that in order to come to terms with being a multicultural nation, the focus must be on reflecting this pluralism through politics and the framework of active citizenship. Formalising in a statutory document Australia’s commitment to pluralistic citizenship may, in the author’s view, “herald a new course for the languishing multicultural discourse” (p.122).

The author’s essays are controversial and contentious. He perhaps under-estimates the tolerance and respect for diversity encouraged by post-1945 politicians, academics, business people and ordinary citizens which has allowed numerous immigrants to prosper, flourish and maintain their cultures. Many might also argue that a formal emphasis on cultural difference in a political sense may lead to cynical abuses of the political process for the benefit of major parties.

On the other hand, the author gives a useful overview of European Australia’s sense of itself as an Anglo-Celtic outpost surrounded by and threatened by the “alien” culture of Asia and the Pacific. While we have seen this perception rapidly die since the 1960s, Jayasuriya rightly notes the continuation of a sense of unease as Australian politicians engage with Asia while trying to articulate a sense of Australian unity to a more diverse population. Nevertheless, the author is perhaps overly dismissive of iconic events such as Gallipoli in maintaining a historical sense of identity. Thrashing out a new national identity through a pluralist political discourse may in fact be reinventing the wheel: are there no unifying values and ideas from Australia’s past worth preserving?

The book would have benefited from a more interventionist editor. The author has a tendency to over-quote his secondary sources, which means that the reader does not get the sense of a strong “authorial voice”. Further, the chapters reprinted from the 1999 volume have not been comprehensively updated, so the subsequent implosion of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and its implications for Australian public life are not fully taken into account. The text would also have benefited from greater reflection on the massive amount of work on the history of racism and immigration which has been done in the past decade by historians and political scientists.

More positively, this book will be a useful starting point for scholars wishing to explore a variety of issues relating to modern Australian society, including immigration, multicultural theory and racism. A detailed chronology of events related to the White Australia policy from Colonial Australia to contemporary times gives the book added context. While uneven in parts, Transforming a “White Australia” has ideas about multiculturalism and citizenship which are worthy of debate and careful reflection.

LYNDON MEGARRITY Brisbane

Australia’s Asia: from Yellow Peril to Asian Century. Edited by David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (Crawley WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2012), pp.377, AU$39.95 (pb).

“We stand at the very beginning of another great cycle of civilization […] that will push the centre of gravity of civilization back to the Orient…” (p.3). More rhetoric from the “Australia in the Asian Century” boosters? The quote in fact comes from a book published by the journalist George Johnstone in 1947. The idea that Australians need to do a better job learning Asian languages, and a knowledge of Asia should be an important part of the school curriculum? Not a visionary proposal of the recent White Paper but the advice of the free trade advocate J. Currie Elles in 1908 (pp.90-91). And

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the exhortation that “every Australian businessman should carry a map of China in his head” (p.6), rather than the theme of a recent Asia business and investment seminar actually comes from the pen of Brisbane Telegraph editor, T.W. Heney, writing in 1919 — almost a century ago.

As this book ably demonstrates, awareness in Australia of its position in the Asian region, and the sense that its destiny depends on its “engagement” with Asia, has a long history. This history has, however, largely been forgotten or overlooked. Each new generation, it appears, is fated to rediscover – and then forget – Asia. Even the narrative we are most familiar with, that for most of our history in this region Asia has been largely ignored or viewed with a mixture of fear and racism, before its recent discovery by a more enlightened generation, is flawed. Australia’s Asia shows that the history of Australia’s relationship with Asia is much more complex than government rhetoric today would have us believe. As the editors write: “Alongside the master narrative of antipathy, there were always stories of adaptation, accommodation and mutual respect as Chinese, Japanese and Malays lived and worked alongside white neighbours” (p.13).

Australia’s Asia fleshes out this history with a rich collection of essays on different aspects of the history of Australia’s engagement with Asia. Themes covered include: nineteenth-century fears that Australia would be contaminated by diseases brought by Chinese migrants — and the lesser-known story of Australians who came to the defence of the Chinese; the ambiguous perception of Asia of Federation founding-father Alfred Deakin, who on the one hand displayed the racist and imperialist views of his time, but on the other held a deep fascination with India; the admiration in Australia of Japan’s rise following the Meiji Restoration, which gradually turns to fear with the rise of Japanese imperialism; surprising ideas of the desirability of a mixed-race Australia in the shadow of the better-known White Australia Policy; the poignant stories of white Australian wives of Chinese men, who often found themselves ostracized in both Australia and China; the popularity in Australia of glamorous Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong, in the 1930s; the differing experiences of Australian military personnel and humanitarian volunteers in post-war occupied Japan and newly-independent Indonesia respectively; the ambivalent image of Australians in Balinese society and literature; early attempts at building Chinese-Australian relations; an historical perspective on current debates in Australia about China’s emergence as a regional power; the place of Asia in settler narratives of Australian history; the depiction of Asia in Donald Horne’s iconic book, The Lucky Country; teaching history in the Asian Century; and the place of the sea in Australia’s relations with Southeast Asia, including, in more recent times, as the source of “boat people”, who represent the latest manifestation of the age-old Asian invasion motif in the Australian popular consciousness.

Contemporary debates about “Australia in the Asian Century” will be enriched by the stories of Australia’s relations with Asia presented in Australia’s Asia. But these essays also raise the question whether Australia can actually escape from this history.

PATRICK JORY University of Queensland

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Roddy’s Folly: R. P. Meagher QC – Art Lover and Lawyer. By Damien Freeman (Ballan, Victoria: Connor Court Publishing, 2012), pp. vii + 510. AU$39.95 (pb).

Australian judicial biographies are often written by lawyers. This book on Justice Roderick Meagher QC is an exception, being fittingly authored by Damien Freeman, a scholar of law, philosophy and the classics and a teacher of ethics and aesthetics.

Meagher was a legendary Sydney barrister, “once greatly loved as the embodiment of all that was best about the Bar” (p.285), lectured at the University of Sydney, and co-authored a seminal tome on Equity: Doctrines and Remedies. He was President of the New South Wales Bar Association from 1979 to 1981 before sitting as a Justice of the New South Wales Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal of New South Wales from 1989 to 15 March 2004.

Meagher’s life did not revolve solely around the law, and Freeman, who met his subject while acting as the judge’s tipstaff, has written about a man and his milieu in a broad sense. Chapters explore Meagher’s marriage, the institutions which helped shape him (such as the Catholic Church and the University of Sydney), his art collecting and his eccentricity. The biographer notes that Meagher held bohemian as well as establishment ideals and documents his subject’s intense love of beauty and art. Extensive information is also provided on Meagher’s personal life, in particular his relationship with his beloved wife Penny, who predeceased him and who appears as a subject in her own right.

The emphasis on Meagher’s eccentricity is complemented by sketches drawn by his former colleague (and later High Court judge) Justice Michael Kirby during his time on the New South Wales Court of Appeal. These present an unusually lively picture of daily life on the Bench; one caricature is captioned “Kirby P: If Counsel drinks any more of our water, he’ll soon be pissing on us!” (p.176).

In the book’s foreword, former High Court judge Dyson Heydon writes that Meagher, who died in 2011, “inhabited numerous different worlds, some overlapping, some not” so “[n]o single observer could know the whole man” (pp.ix, x). Freeman’s book explores these social circles and evokes the gradual loss of the “codified” world from which Meagher came (p.66) and the avowedly conservative subject’s acute awareness of societal change. Among Meagher’s papers were found two lists, one of “Nice Things” that had “vanished in my lifetime” and the other of “nasty things” (p.182). Among the former were “the village blacksmith”, “live-in servants”, and “the Latin language”.

The sympathetic biographer is intent on investigating “the myth, legend, lore and fact” woven around Meagher (p.2), and he addresses the allegations of bigotry that have been levelled at his subject. Meagher is remembered as a charming wit and warm friend, but also for intolerance of those he regarded as stupid (p.454), contemptuous comments about “bearded lesbians” and “victims of discrimination” (p.461), and for publicly lamenting what he perceived as the poor quality of female barristers who appeared before him in court (p.431).

In exploring these statements, the biographer emphasises his subject’s teasing, playful nature and commitment to free speech, but the words leave a sour taste. For instance, of Meagher’s dismissive remarks on reconciliation and his persistence in using racial slurs (“Abos”) to refer to Aboriginal people, Freeman writes that Meagher “intended to offend not Aborigines [sic], but the politically-correct chatterers” (p.426). The distinction seems overly fine: one queries the ethics of making hurtful remarks about Australia’s most disadvantaged people simply pour épater les bourgeois.

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Nevertheless, Freeman’s book is thoughtful and absorbing, illuminating not only multiple facets of an individual life, but also the cultural, political, and legal circles of mid-to-late twentieth century Sydney: some of Meagher’s “worlds”.

SARAH BURNSIDE University of Oxford; University of Western Australia

Middle Power Dreaming: Australia in World Affairs, 2006-2010. Edited by James Cotton and John Ravenhill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp.xiii + 360, AU$97.95 (pb).

This volume is the eleventh in a series sponsored by the Australian Institute of International Affairs “which has reviewed and analysed Australian foreign policy” since 1950 (p.xi). This series effectively dates from the founding of an independent Australian Department of External Affairs in 1948 and traces the development of Australian foreign policy up to the present. As such it ought to provide a valuable insight into Australia’s foreign policy over time. Indeed, earlier volumes in the series, like those edited by J.D.B Miller and Peter Boyce, offered just such a blend of informed and balanced insight.

This cannot be said, however, for more recent volumes. Dating from Seeking Asian Engagement Australia in World Affairs 1991-1995 to the present volume, the series has assumed, as historical fact, a somewhat partisan Labor viewpoint that dismisses the Menzies and, subsequently, Howard era approach to foreign policy as hopelessly tied to great and powerful friends, whilst Labor, at its best, notably under Whitlam and, to a lesser extent, Keating, redefined Australia as a creative middle power, sensitive to the Asian region and a progressive multilateralism.

It is not insignificant, in this context, that the editors and a number of the contributors were undergraduates during the Anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s and imbibed its values. Elsewhere, contributors have served as Labor-leaning scholar bureaucrats like Hugh White and Michael Wesley. Consequently a Whitlam-era leftism permeates the oeuvre and undermines the ostensible objectives of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, namely, to promote an “independent” approach to understanding Australian policy.

Far from independence, the editors advertise their concern with the Labor ideal of creative middle power diplomacy and against this abstraction the various contributors assess foreign policy practice from John Howard through Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard between 2006-10. Across this period the editors find “the instruments of diplomacy” severely neglected (p.3). This despite the fact that Australia under Howard, Rudd and Gillard has perhaps projected its international and regional influence to telling effect.

At its best, the work offers useful summaries of Australia’s interaction with its region and the wider world over the period. It lists in some detail: bilateral trade arrangements; treaties and security dialogues. Thus Ravenhill’s chapter offers a handy compendium to Australian interaction with the global economy. Rodan’s chapter details limitations in Australia’s dealings with Southeast Asia. Rikki Kersten analyses the evolving bilateral relationship with Japan and Andrew O’Neil assesses the foreign policy priorities of the Rudd-Gillard era. Meanwhile Hugh White traces the drift in Australia’s strategy and defence policy since 2006 and Michael Wesley offers insight into Australia’s foreign policy machinery.

This notwithstanding, a somewhat self-righteous Olympianism ultimately vitiates the tome. Geoffrey Barker finds the Howard-Downer legacy one of “militarising and politicising foreign affairs for domestic political advantage”, whilst he considers

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Rudd’s inept spell as Prime Minister a towering example of regional statesmanship (p.30). In an analogous vein, Melissa Connery Tyler and Emma White consider Rudd’s pretentious 2020 summit in April 2007, “as expanding the space for foreign policy deliberations” (p.225). Such a view can only be sustained if international diplomacy is reduced to the level of a kindergarten show-and-tell. Donald Kenyon and David Lee evaluate Australia’s relationship with Europe but fail to mention the Eurozone crisis that threatens to eviscerate the European Union. Meanwhile, Cotton finds evidence of continuity in Australian independent foreign policy thinking, in the neglected social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century eugenic theorist Charles Henry Pearson. Cotton takes comfort in the fact, it seems, that “the black and yellow races” will ultimately “thrust aside” the white race in Asia and elsewhere. Such thinking might have seemed original in1893. To find it promoted in a volume devoted to the independent analysis of foreign policy in the twenty first century is a little worrying.

DAVID MARTIN JONES Political Science, University of Queensland

Inclusive Growth in Australia: Social Policy as Economic Investment. Edited by Paul Smyth and John Buchanan (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2013), pp. xxv + 290. AU$39.99 (pb).

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw dramatic changes in economic and social policy. The triumph of neo-liberalism and the end of Keynesianism led, in Australia, to an abandonment of what Paul Smyth and John Buchanan describe as the “Harvester consensus”, a uniquely Australian solution which came to be understood as a wage-earners’ welfare state, moderating the demands of both capital and labour. However, in the early years of the twenty-first century, they argue, governments have turned aside from the extremes which neo-liberalism involved, in favour of a policy of inclusive growth devised to minimise social disruption. Inclusive Growth in Australia brings together essays by such prominent scholars as Pradeep Taneja, Saul Eslake, Peter Whiteford and Marian Baird, designed to educate Australians as to the way forward, linking economic and social policy in a new and innovative way.

Rather than continuing to fight old battles already lost, the editors argue, progressive social policy advocates need to engage with the new reality, working collaboratively to ensure that the polity that emerges will offer both inclusivity and security while still providing the labour market flexibility that a globalised economy requires. To minimise social disruption and maximise economic success governments need to develop policies which draw a larger proportion of the population into paid work, offer a more flexible approach to the competing demands of work and care and provide better, and less stigmatised, social security provisions to cover periods of unemployment that are considered inevitable in a flexible labour market.

There are elements of this essentially post-ideological solution in the grand plans being advanced by parties of both the left and the right in most Western democracies keen to maintain the social cohesion they see being eroded in countries which have gone through more revolutionary change. While the essays in this collection explain this apparent consensus well, the emphasis on the post-ideological solution tends to avoid confronting the continuing need for a political will to bring about change. Labour market flexibility has proved far easier to achieve than inclusivity or security. Although Gerald Burke’s essay clearly explains the need to develop programs for skills acquisition, it acknowledges only in passing the problems that arose when the provision of such skills was opened to private operators, the quality of which

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government seemed unable to regulate. Similarly, Grant Belchamber's argument for an unemployment insurance scheme offers no suggestions as to how it could be made politically attractive, nor any recognition that even in countries which have such a scheme benefit recipients continue to be stigmatised.

Inclusive Growth in Australia will be welcomed by academics charged with teaching social policy units. It offers a convincing analysis of the way in which social policy debates have been transformed in recent times and of the apparent acquiescence of the left, while setting out a way forward that seeks to reconcile both economic and reformist priorities. Set out in this way the book has the potential to inform the next generation of bureaucrats charged with devising and implementing social policy, preserving the commitment to equality over excess which marked the Harvester consensus. The question remains, however, as to whether such social policy advocates will have the ear of politicians prepared to work for consensus over division and confront the vested interests which currently dominate economic debate.

SHURLEE SWAIN History, Australian Catholic University

Violent Victorians. Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London. By Rosalind Crone (Manchester University Press, 2012), pp.xv + 304, figures, tables and diagrams, AU$39.95 (pb), available in Australia through Footprint Books.

In this engaging, well-researched and lucidly presented book, Rosalind Crone convincingly shows how violent entertainments, and their representations, formed an important part of Victorian popular culture. Far from disappearing with the rise of respectable society, Crone argues that violent pastimes were re-configured in this era, switching from an aggressive and bloody manifestation in sports such as bull-baiting and dog-fighting to cultural portrayals in popular leisure interests, pursuits and activities. Drawing on a range of entertainments, including Punch and Judy shows, execution broadsides, and crime reporting, the book shows “that in many respects, the Victorian popular imagination was bloodier, much more explicit, and more angry and turbulent than historians have thus far been prepared to acknowledge” (p.7).

There is a great deal on which to commend this book. It is well organised. Chapters are structured thematically, but with a keen eye to chronological developments that capture how different forms of Victorian entertainments related to, and fed off, each other. The material is logically presented to highlight how old forms of popular culture, such as those which relied upon blood and suffering, co-existed alongside, and were incorporated into, new cultural forms of entertainment, such as theatre productions and modern crime reporting. Although scholars have explored the pastimes examined in this book in isolation, few studies, as Crone points out, have sought to delineate the connections between them, or interpret them as part of a broader “culture of violence” (p.9). In doing this, Violent Victorians offers a useful corrective to narratives that champion the “civilising process” and the extent to which the ideal of “respectability” was embraced in society. While some of the claims for innovation in terms of argument (less so approach) on these issues are a little overstated, the book nonetheless forms an important part of a growing scholarship exposing the limited hold “respectability” had over the cultural imagination and social action of Victorians.

Moreover, the pastimes, amusements and cultural texts explored in the book offer an insightful way into exploring the mentalities of those who engaged with them and an illuminating supplement to other widely used sources in this field, including criminal statistics and police records. Indeed, like any good book, Violent Victorians has an

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appeal and significance beyond the immediate confines of its subject matter. The exploration of print culture, in the form of execution broadsides and newspaper crime reporting, makes an important contribution to scholarly understanding of the relationship between the media and the criminal justice system — a topic which has in recent years become a staple of academic investigation in the field of social, cultural and legal history. Moreover, the book will be of interest to scholars studying the growing field of emotions history, given how depictions of violence in Victorian entertainments engendered emotional responses.

There were a few areas that might have been explored in greater depth. The claim made in the introduction that in some ways “things were becoming much less civilised” is probably the most controversial hypothesis Crone advances and would have been better served had the book re-visited and developed it more fully (p.6). This, though, should not detract from what is an extremely important study. Given that Violent Victorians focuses primarily on London, the historian is left wondering just how far the capital’s experience was mirrored in the provincial towns which had their own regional traditions and identities and where the police took longer to suppress thriving street culture and popular pastimes. What is more certain is that Crone’s fascinating book will provide an important framework for future investigation.

DAVID BARRIE History, School of Humanities, The University of Western Australia

India and the British Empire: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series. Edited by Douglas M. Peers and Nandini Gooptu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.ix + 366. US$65.00 (hb).

India and the British Empire is an edited compilation that takes a broad view of Indian Empire history, covering more than the usual suspects of political, economic, cultural and social history. Its inclusion of literary studies, environment and ecology, and gender studies chapters makes the compilation more interdisciplinary than truly historical, although the bulk of the fourteen chapters do address historical questions. This wider range is unified, however, by the theme of the book which relocates power to Indians acting in response to internal stimulus and traditions as well as to colonial realities and non-colonial global influences. In the process, the compilation challenges the colonial/nationalist dichotomy and attempts, mostly successfully, to move beyond the binaries of colonised/coloniser, liberalism/conservatism, and pre-modernity/modernity, as well as considering the regional dynamics and flows of capital, people and ideas above and below the state. In doing so, the book makes a conscious effort to move beyond the Subaltern and Cambridge Schools of history, while still taking into consideration the advances made by these schools, and by historical anthropologists such as Bernard Cohn, Edward Said and Michael Foucault. As a result, the compilation examines Indian history within the context of India, not of “isms” while continuing to acknowledge the presence of colonialism and nationalism.

This is a very strong unifying theme, pulling together the disparate chapters included in India and the British Empire. It works better in some chapters than in others, with the fit being least comfortable in the chapters addressing the dissemination of knowledge about science and medicine, the gendering of public and private selves, and the Desi Diaspora. These chapters follow the theme of the book, but the colonial presence remains very strong in all three, resulting in a strong element of the binaries the compilation attempts to avoid. All three chapters do, however, indicate ways in which future studies might be able to move further into an analysis of Indian actions

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within the context of India, influenced by regional and global trends. The theme works well in the other ten chapters, offering the reader an assessment of a variety of areas of history, literature and material and visual culture from a new perspective.

Overall, the theme is well developed throughout the book, allowing the compilation to achieve its aims of moving beyond the dichotomies and binaries present in many of the histories of India as a part of the British Empire. The compilation also succeeds in its role as part of the Oxford History Companion Series, in that it addresses areas not covered in sufficient detail in the Oxford History Series, often due to the specialist or interdisciplinary nature of the areas. As such, each chapter is, essentially, a summary chapter, thoroughly grounded in the secondary sources and exhibiting a good knowledge of relevant primary material. As such, this compilation provides a good introduction to the areas covered, as well as offering an interesting and challenging interpretation of the areas that should interest scholars already working in the field. The book itself is organised with the more traditional areas of history towards the front of the book, and the more interdisciplinary areas in the second half, finishing with a chapter on the politics of post-colonial India. Overall, this is an interesting and valuable contribution to the field of Empire and Indian history.

LINDSAY HENDERSON Faculty of Arts, University of Southern Queensland

The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire. By Giordano Nanni (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2012), pp. xviii + 254. Six Maps. AU$144.00 (hb), available in Australia through Footprint Books.

The marking of time led to the dominance of Europe as surely as guns and germs. The invention of the clock in the Middle Ages, as Nanni reminds us, helped shape European culture as expansionist, and the perfection of the chronometer in the late eighteenth century solved the problem of longitude and was vital in charting and claiming new lands. A study of the clock as a universalising mechanism is surely a pertinent subject for Manchester University’s Press long running series “Studies in Imperialism”.

Much of late has been written about the use of space in colonialism as an organising principle of oppression, control and change. However, among the many studies of time, few have been written about its connection with colonisation and the attempt to subdue Indigenous cultures through employing the idea of time. Nanni explores two case studies within the nineteenth century British Empire — Victoria and South Africa. His approach is to see how Indigenous peoples in these two places were rendered as being without a concept of time, or with a “worthless” one connected to nature, and thus were primitive and not modern. Such colonial abjectness, together with their various other cultural “absences”, rendered them ripe for change. Western ideas of time not only identified their “primitiveness”, argues Nanni, but were used as a key way to bring them to the modernity they were said to lack. Yet this colonising mechanism was contested in many ways, making the European view of time the dominant idea but not hegemonic. After explaining the nature of time, Nanni devotes two chapters to colonial Victoria and three to Southern Africa, in which he reveals the representations of the “timeless native” and the attempts, led by missionaries, to impose respect for Western time and time-thrift, by inculcating the Sabbath, daily rituals marked by bells, and routines to internalise time.

The book is clearly written and opens with a masterly chapter from the secondary literature on time as a cultural idea that reflects the innermost ideas of a culture and

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social identity. This explains time’s key role in the othering of newly-encountered peoples in the colonial context, and its relationship to the exploitation of Indigenous land and labour. Through this discussion he is convincing as to why we must bring together the study of time and colonialism. He is not the first to study time in a colonial situation, but he does so extensively, comparatively and as a mechanism of dominance. His research into both colonial case studies is extensive, making use of settler and missionary evidence, not only to explore the representations of Indigenous peoples, and the mechanism of time-imposition, but reading against the grain, to track their resistances. He uses Ranijit Guha, Frantz Fanon, the Comaroffs and others to guide his way.

The book is stimulating and contains few failings either of method, analysis or execution. Despite the universal nature of Western time and its triumph in the world-conquering Greenwich Mean Time, Nanni rarely overreaches in his claims about time. He sees it is part of the equation of exploitation through the use of time, space, land and labour, to eradicate or control the colonised. And he sees that Western time, despite its conquering abilities, was resisted to varying degrees by other cultural constructs — “African” and “Aboriginal” time, or appropriated in the cause of personal or societal liberation. The half of Aboriginal Victorians who did not reside on nineteenth-century missions are rarely discussed, and sometimes those Victorian missions are claimed to be more controlling than in effect they were able to be. The Xhosa are featured in the South African case study, while the Bushmen and Khoikhoi, once introduced, are then light on. But the thoroughness of the study makes it impossible to cover all things.

Readers will be rewarded by the deeper and fascinating understandings of colonialism offered by this must-read book.

RICHARD BROOME History, La Trobe University

G.K. Chesterton: A Biography. By Ian Ker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. xxi + 747, £19.99 (pb).

Corpulent, humorous and witty, perceptive and paradoxical, likeable and larger than life, G. K. Chesterton was a major public intellectual of the early twentieth century. Yet today he is largely unread and forgotten, except by a band of Catholic followers, especially in America. (There is even a Chesterton Review). Ian Ker sets out to redress this situation, claiming that Chesterton was a worthy successor to the great Victorian sages Newman, Carlyle, Arnold and Ruskin. In a sense Ker follows Shaw, who called GK “a man of colossal genius”.

This is a biography in the nineteenth century tradition. It is leisurely in pace, a massive tome, full of big chunks from Chesterton’s (and other people’s) letters and from his voluminous writings, following his life almost day-to-day in great (too often tedious) detail. The book should have been cut by at least two hundred pages. Despite the slow going, the reader is gradually caught up in the mesmerising web of GK’s varied career. Ker writes well and from a sound scholarly basis. As is to be expected from a distinguished biographer of Newman, and author of The Catholic Revival in English Literature (2003), he is totally at home in the religious and cultural milieu of Chesterton’s lifetime (1874-1936). Sources for the life are a problem. Many of his papers were destroyed or lost (including papers available to earlier biographers). Ker has ransacked archives to recover whatever is available. Although there are valuable recent studies on aspects of Chesterton’s work, especially William Oddie on his early

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religious development, Ker’s is the best single-volume life since Maisie Ward’s classic biography of 1944.

Having said that, I find Ker’s claim that Chesterton ranks with the great sages deeply problematic. He is simply not a systematic religious thinker of the class of Newman, for example. Despite GK’s elaborate defence of paradox, it ultimately blocks any achievement of a coherent and logical body of thought (not that he ever attempted such a thing). Also, it must be said, his relentless paradox, humour and optimism can be wearing. One longs at times for the doom-laden gloom of a Malcolm Muggeridge. (T. S. Eliot found Chesterton’s style “exasperating to the last point of endurance” and his cheerfulness depressing. I sympathise).

Nevertheless, Chesterton offered a host of original ideas on a range of topics, from religion and social analysis to politics and economics. They include: free will and determinism; original sin; ritual, dogma and faith; the Trinity and Incarnation; heresy; the religion of mystery and paradox; his theology of development (with interesting parallels to Newman); his philosophy of limitations, wonder, humour and the grotesque. And on the more secular side his searching critiques of capitalism, socialism, imperialism and eugenics; and his theory of distributism (the more equal distribution of property).

In his chief works Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man (and one might add his Aquinas), he gave fresh insights into the nature of faith, Christ and the Gospels. In numerous works after his conversion to Catholicism (1922), he overturned conventional views on Catholicism, Anglicanism and Protestantism. Coming from a family climate of Unitarianism/pantheism, he was less subject (he said) to the usual prejudices on these subjects. He stood up for (if romanticising) “common and simple people” and their popular culture against the onslaughts of elitism, Nietzschean pessimism and Supermanism.

He had his blindspots (women, Jews, Buddhism, Islam, Fascism) — areas where his deeply embedded values seem to blinker him from really informed understanding (he was a lazy researcher, relying on his prodigious memory). Nevertheless, Ker’s biography portrays a magnificent Renaissance man, from journalist to quasi-theologian, novelist and critic. He was a truly heroic figure, warring against the modernist currents of his age, including aestheticism, art-for-art’s sake and decadence. When many Christians were timid, he doughtily championed his faith, pugnaciously taking the fight to the secular enemy.

PAUL CROOK History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland

The Crisis of Theory. E.P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics. By Scott Hamilton (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011 hb; 2012 pb), pp.ix + 293. A$35.95 (pb), available in Australia through Footprint Books.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. This landmark in twentieth-century British historiography is being marked by international conferences and symposia. Surprisingly, perhaps, this recent book on Thompson contains little discussion of his magnum opus, which may strike some readers as a little like Hamlet without the Danish prince. The Making and some of Thompson’s other historical writings are dealt with in an almost cursory fashion. Instead, Scott Hamilton chooses to focus primarily on Thompson’s 1978 collection of essays The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. But Hamilton’s book delivers precisely what the title indicates: an analysis of Thompson’s

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relationship with post-war New Left politics in Britain, and the essays gathered in The Poverty of Theory mark significant stages in Thompson’s political and intellectual evolution.

Hamilton traces Thompson’s family background and early life, and documents the formation of a “hardcore” set of ideas and beliefs against the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s, a period marked by popular front anti-fascism, voluntarism (and an emphasis on the subjective factors that motivated popular struggles for freedom), and commitment on the part of writers and intellectuals. After breaking with the Communist Party in 1956, Thompson had an intense and often testy relationship with younger intellectuals in the New Left, breaking with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn. Thompson’s immersion in the history of the emergence of British working-class consciousness led him to emphasize English exceptionalism and empirical historical considerations, which brought him to disagree with younger left intellectuals’ espousal of Continental Marxian theories, in particular the writings of Louis Althusser, whose work would be the target of Thompson’s polemic in the title essay of The Poverty of Theory. (Younger generations of readers may now wonder at the importance attached to Althusserianism at the time.) Hamilton gives an unsparing account of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Thompson as a polemicist: Thompson’s vigorous and sometimes intemperate criticisms could wound erstwhile allies often as much or more as they did his (so-called) “Natopolitan” enemies on the right. (The conservative military historian Michael Howard entitled his rejoinder to one of Thompson’s polemical blasts, Protest and Survive, “Surviving a Protest”.) Hamilton resists the easy temptation to categorize Thompson’s 1970s polemical writings as simply a- or anti-theoretical: he interestingly credits Thompson with an astute and original reading of the writings of the later, post-Capital, Karl Marx.

For a fuller intellectual history, one might wish for more systematic and deeper engagement with Thompson’s historical writings. Students of historiography might still turn to the 1990 essay collection E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, edited by Harvey Kaye and Keith McClelland, or await the fruits of this year’s symposia. But for students of the history of the British New Left, this book will be indispensable. Hamilton not only analyses the printed debates between Thompson and his interlocutors on the left, he also makes extensive and very effective use of the papers of Thompson’s old comrade, the late John Saville, which are clearly an exceptionally rich body of material for historians of the British New Left. The book is thus likely to stimulate further research in this area, which will be a notable service both for historians and for the (formerly) New Left alike.

ANDREW G. BONNELL History, University of Queensland

The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History. Edited by Dan Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ISBN, pp. xxviii +767; £95.00 (hb).

Europe’s twentieth century is conventionally divided into two contrasting phases: a “thirty years war” (1914-1945) characterized by economic crises and political violence, followed by a new age when Europeans consciously charted an alternative historical path that featured the welfare state, consumerism, and unprecedented (and largely positive) changes in social, sexual, educational, economic and political life. To complicate matters, however, the historian must also countenance the Cold War, the residual tensions that persisted after 1945, the cycles of recession that followed 1973, and, depending on which periodization terminus one prefers, the crises that flowed

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from the decline and collapse of Communism. In other words, while unquestionably a more auspicious age, Europe’s postwar era has its own complexities and it ought to be considered on its own terms. It can no longer be read as a mere postscript to the “thirty years war”.

Dan Stone’s very stimulating Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History is designed to help historians come to terms with a period that was once the territory of political scientists and journalists. Notwithstanding such seminal works as Judt’s Postwar and the latter chapters of Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes and Mazower’s Dark Continent, Stone rightly points out that we are only beginning to make sense of postwar Europe as “a coherent historical field”. In this volume Stone provides a rich feast of topics with a view to giving readers a sense of its potential. Although readers can expect first rate interventions on conventional topics, such as the Cold War, the European Union and the Eastern Bloc, they will also be treated to conceptually focused chapters on temporality and territoriality, and on public memory and forgetting. Some chapters, however, such as Michael Shafir’s “What comes after Communism?’ and Uli Linke’s on the politics of difference, offer no historical perspective and seem somewhat misplaced in this collection.

Periodization is quite significant in a volume that seeks further to develop a field, but while Richard Overy expertly problematizes the idea (and notion) that 1945 was a ‘zero hour’, one would have liked a companion chapter that discussed the possible endpoint of the age. Geoff Eley outlines the reasons why 1945-1973 forms a coherent phase, but highlights “the centrality acquired by organized labour for the polities, social imaginaries, and public cultures of post-war European societies”(p.38). Eley sees this as an era of greater societal inclusiveness and state/society alliance, which is why the post-war 1945 settlement was successful and why that of 1918/19 was not. Indeed one will find that most of the thirty-five chapters have something insightful to say. Thus, the volume provides to my mind the best comparative analysis of Portuguese, Spanish and Greek experiences and memories of authoritarianism, a chapter by Martin Klimke’s (“1968: Europe in Technicolour”) which deftly draws the connections between the enormous variety of ruptures that occurred across Europe, and a characteristically interesting intervention by Valdimir Tismaneanu on “National Stalinism”, or the commonalities of the more reactionary Eastern Bloc regimes (Romania, Albania, Poland and Bulgaria). As with any good handbook, the volume deals with a comprehensive array of topics, which include the arts, the travel and leisure industries, economics and social groups.

This is a handbook in very best sense of the word. Stone has succeeded in producing an aide that is meant inspire scholars rather than merely inform them. I recommend that all who work in the area have a copy within arms’ reach.

NICHOLAS DOUMANIS University of New South Wales

Moscow, 1937. By Karl Schlögel, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2012), pp. xx + 652. £25.00 (hb).

By any measure, the challenge of writing a history of Moscow’s annus horribilus — 1937 — is a heady one. As the Great Purge reached its zenith, the atmosphere in Moscow during what was a pivotal year in Stalin’s rule was marked in equal parts by senses of horror, absurdity, irrationality and hope. Seeking to convey a sense of this reality, Karl Schlögel’s Moscow, 1937 employs an inspired stylistic choice: abandoning the conventional logic of a single vantage point, the designated space and

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time is depicted in a Cubist key — from multiple perspectives, and in numerous voices. Across an interwoven series of forty chapters, and drawing upon a wide spectrum of source material from personal diaries to exhibition catalogues, Schlögel constructs a complex yet strikingly vivid account of a city in crisis.

To set the tone of his study, Schlögel begins by recalling the phantasmagorical Moscow of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov’s masterpiece — which by 1937 had been largely completed — suggests a city of rumour, suspicion and black magic; a space in which “no one can say exactly where reality ceases and the imagination begins” (p.25). From the pages of his fiction, we are quickly whisked into Bulgakov’s own Muscovite reality, as we tour the private apartments, Commissariat offices, theatres and editorial agencies which the author frequented — spaces from which artists and leading officials alike were known to disappear without trace. Urban disappearance is also powerfully depicted in chapters that investigate the Moscow directory of 1936, the final edition of a publication whose pages contain the details of countless numbers of individuals who would not survive 1937. A similar sense of loss is evoked by an exploration of Stalin’s General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow — a vision of a modernised and sovietised metropolis, which called without hesitation for irreverent destruction of large swaths of the city.

Indeed, Schlögel’s main characters are the spaces of this historic moment. Readers are led through specific buildings and locations in the city, beginning with the House of the Unions, which was the centre of all three Moscow show trials, and the locus of celebration marking the Pushkin Jubilee. In just a few short steps we are then taken to Red Square, and up into the surrounding Kremlin apartments; there we witness the suicide of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, before peering into the decadent and luxurious apartments of Genrikh Yagoda in central Moscow. From inside these apartments we then gaze back upon Red Square, where Ordzhonikidze’s funeral is orchestrated so as to recast his suicide into a story of noble death. In the next moment we see the May Day parade and celebrations to mark the return of Ivan Papanin’s team from the North Pole unfold in the same space. Then — again — the stage turns, and explorers, alpinists and geologists are now regarded with suspicion, owing to their knowledge of the terrain of the country and frequent collaborations with foreign colleagues. This dark merry-go-round continues to spin, leaving the reader nauseated, disoriented, consumed and exhausted by the barrage of images, faces, and locations.

The work draws toward its conclusion by exploring a topography of terror, as the locations of major prisons, sites of mass executions, special purpose buildings, secret police stations, and Cheka unit barracks are all mapped out. The creation of such a cognitive map brings this story of visceral fear to its crescendo, in which Moscow in the year 1937 ultimately functions as a symbol of Soviet society during the Stalinist era as a whole. In both concept and execution Moscow, 1937 is remarkable feat: a work that has found a method by which to communicate an atmosphere that is beyond conventional description.

IVA GLISIC History, The University of Western Australia

It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway. Russia and the Communist Past. By David Satter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), pp.xii + 383. AU$26.95 (pb). Distributed in Australia by Inbooks.

David Satter’s book discusses the way in which post-Soviet Russia has failed to come to grips with its Soviet past, and in particular how the millions of victims of Soviet

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Communism are all but forgotten. His discussion ranges across the terror of the 1930s, the camps, the Katyn massacre and the rehabilitations of the 1950s and later. He argues that this legacy has never been fully confronted, and that this is holding back the development of Russian society. His descriptions of what happened under the Soviet regime, of the killing of “opponents” and the operation of the camps, are lively and compelling if not, for the most part, new. His description of the contemporary attitude to this is less satisfactory with significant gaps in his coverage eg. the debate about the fate of Lenin’s body, the bust of Stalin in Red Square, the Museum of the History of the Gulag in Moscow and the fate of statues of Soviet figures, to name only a few of the most important absences. Furthermore his analysis of why the Soviet legacy came about and why contemporary society has not come to grips with it is simplistic.

When Satter tries to explain what he describes so well, he relies on vague generalisations that either lack any substance or are partial in the extreme. For example, in contrast to the burgeoning literature explaining why the terror unrolled in the way it did, Satter simply asserts that it aimed to “guarantee the absolute domination of a totalitarian regime” (p.72). The terror in Leningrad made the population “unhinged mentally” (p.83), while communism enabled “Russians to compensate for personal inadequacy and lack of freedom by identifying with a powerful state” (p.105). These sorts of generalisations do not aid understanding at all. Furthermore Satter seems to start from the premise that it is obvious that the Soviet experience should be rejected root and branch; he wants Russia to make “a clean break with its past” (p.173) and posits a need for “condemning unreservedly the regime which so devalued the individual as well as the state tradition out of which it arose” [sic] (p.306).

It is clear that he sees that past solely in terms of the denial of freedom and the suppression of the individual. The problem is that this is not the sum total of the Soviet experience. A rejection of that experience in total would mean also the rejection of what many Russians today still consider its positive achievements, including victory in the Great Patriotic War, the industrialization and development of what was essentially an agricultural economy and society, and the enhanced opportunity for education and employment provided by the Soviet regime. In other words, as Putin has said, it would involve rejection of the contributions made to society by all of those Russians who lived under Soviet rule. Complicity in the Soviet regime runs deep, and not just in terms of the terror, and a failure to appreciate this means Satter does not understand the complexity and nuance of the relationship with the past. This is also reflected in the fact that he sees the Soviet regime as so bad, that he cannot conceive of anyone voluntarily supporting it. He declares that the Soviet citizen “had a higher, human obligation to oppose the Soviet state to the extent he could” (p.295), and he uses this to criticize Russian failure to consider as a hero someone who betrayed the USSR by working for the CIA. This is, to say the least, an odd position. In sum, Satter’s book is good on description of aspects of the Soviet legacy, but poor on the analysis and deficient in outlining the contemporary response.

GRAEME GILL Government and International Relations, University of Sydney

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The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, The Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. By Richard Wolin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) pp 370 AU$36.95 (pb), available in Australia through Footprint Books.

Paris, 1968: romance is in the air, but this isn’t Hollywood. It is the romance of revolution, revolt, all with the hybrid taste of Gallic and Chinese cuisine thrown together. For the nearest the French got to doing anything like 1789 again was a moment overdetermined ideologically by the Great Helmsman and the image (but not the reality) of the Cultural Revolution.

Richard Wolin brings together a fascinating series of fields, actors, movement and ideas, connecting French radicals and Chinese ideological influences to revisit and revise our understanding of this incredible moment.

The book has, in a sense, a front step and a backstep, or one step each forward and backwards.

The front step is the better known of the stories, about the fascination with China as a kind of left wing infantilism. Unable after two centuries to continue their revolutionary tradition under the guise of Jacobinism, French radicals projected their own fantasies onto the Chinese experience. This was a projection in the Freudian sense, but also, as Wolin shows, like a projection onto the screen. In a sense it was Hollywood, Godard and Jagger. China became a model for French radicals, notwithstanding the cultural distance between the two experiences. Like earlier fellow travellers, most famously the Webbs, these French thinkers and activists blinded themselves to the violence of Mao, the Revolutionary as Nice Guy.

Of course it all changed, after the renewed exposure of the Gulag, and then of Pol Pot. Intellectuals who had turned ultra left now turned against their God. Structuralism, in any case, had failed to attract support on the streets. The PCF, and indeed the French Maoists took a distance from the Events, whether as adventurist or as insufficiently proletarian. In this setting Sartre remained the local god, once he had stepped back from his own excesses. After promising everything, with a Maoist sheen, the gurus ran for the so-called New Philosophy, or else substituted the cause of Revolution with that of human rights.

The novelty of this book is that it adds in the back step. Wolin argues that notwithstanding the tragicomedy of the Maoist infatuation, there was at least one positive outcome. Radicals were drawn to Mao because they were attracted to the idea of culture — revolution should be made in everyday life, by its own subjects. In the longer tail of 1968, for Wolin, this helped shift the emphasis away from party and toward associative politics. The politics of everyday life is ultimately incremental, reformist, even perhaps in a sense invisible.

This is a good book. Is it finally, on the second step, persuasive? Is this a matter of Three Cheers for Civil Society? I am unsure. For in the meantime French mainstream politics has moved on into Euro austerity, leaving Bourdieu until his death to carry on the oppositional legacy of Sartre. We may be left facing the legacy of the invisible revolution.

PETER BEILHARZ Sociology, La Trobe University

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Wood: A History. By Joachim Radkau, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4688-6 (hb), £25.00 (hb), first published in German as Holz, oekom verlag, 2007, pp. viii + 399.

This book is a history of wood, primarily in Europe, by a self-confessed “wood worm” or “wood tragic” in the Australian slang. As Radkau points out, the rich literature on particular aspects of the history of wood — on hardwoods and softwoods, on wood as fuel and wood as building material, on the differences between different types of wood, on charcoal burners — have been written in siloes; we need to see the history of wood whole. As a committed world historian, such assertions delight me. And Radkau is the right person to write such a book because he, too, takes a broad, global approach to environmental history, and has written a wonderful global history of the environment with a German focus, Nature and Power (2008). In this book, too, the focus is German or Central European, though it reaches for global comparisons throughout, and particularly in its final chapter.

Radkau’s research is astonishingly wide-ranging and diverse. Like Braudel, he writes with quirky details that constantly remind the reader how misleading surface appearances and broad-brush generalizations can be: over and over again, he insists that it’s the local variations that really matter, particularly with a product as unpredictable as wood and the forests that grow it. Like Braudel, Radkau builds up his story in pointillesque fashion, through vivid details that eventually cohere into a rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory story. The first chapter, “Paths into the Thicket of History”, is a ramble through some of the byways of the history of woods, forests, forestry, wood connoisseurs, and wood crafts and professions, from joinery, to building, to charcoal- or potash-making, to tanning or the fattening of pigs or the simple but crucial activity of gathering firewood.

The book is built on a simple chronological frame that takes us from a world in which markets have limited power, to one in which they dominate. The second chapter describes an early modern world in which European peasants still enjoyed many customary rights to woodlands, and the woods were used and exploited in many different ways by many different groups. Lords hunted game, farmers grazed their animals, salt-makers and iron-workers used firewood in commercial quantities, while households used it in small bundles. Indeed, the main use of wood has always been as fuel for fires. Perhaps because the book really is about wood, there is surprisingly little on the many ways in which the woodlands could feed or support those who lived nearby with their mushrooms or berries, their small game, their fish and beehives.

Chapters 3 and 4 describe a world in which customary rights were gradually eroded, in complex and often contradictory battles whose outcomes varied from locality to locality, but whose final result was a clarifying of rights to commercial exploitation and a simplification of property rights. One of the commonest markers of commercialization was an increase in the planting of conifers, which grew faster, more uniformly, and straighter than most deciduous trees and offered fewer possibilities for exploitation by local populations so that they were ideal for commercial plantations. Industrialization did not automatically end the “Age of Wood”, nor was it, as is often claimed, a response to shortages of wood. On the contrary: “In most regions, industrialization first proceeded on the basis of wood resources and animal and water power. A global comparison clearly shows that, in the eighteenth century, Europe was still quite rich in timber resources and was by no means suffering from exceptional shortages” (p.325).

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Like Braudel, Radkau is rarely content with the familiar arguments: Has wood lost its importance in the modern world? Probably not. Is the idea of conserving wood a modern notion? Certainly not. It’s as least as old as the late medieval origins of modern forestry. Do forests tell us of a prolonged tragedy of the commons in the spirit of Garret Hardin, or perhaps of a surprising local capacity to preserve scarce resources, in the spirit of Elinor Ostrom? Probably both.

A rich, engaging, and important history of one of the most important of all the materials used by human societies.

DAVID CHRISTIAN Macquarie University

The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War. By James Q. Whitman (Harvard University Press: Massachusetts, 2012). ISBN 978-0-6740-67141. AU$45.00 (hb), available in Australia through Inbooks.

The author’s contention in this fine work of legal history is that the making of early modern war has been misunderstood. A few assertions form the targets of this thesis. Whitman contends that the idea of the pitched battles, those seemingly antiquated modes of ceremonially orchestrated slaughter, matter as objects of study (p.25). This is so despite being considered by most contemporary military specialists as being of limited importance. This, argues Whitman, is not a case of mere glory or grandeur, however foolish they might seem.

Whitman also challenges the idea that such pitched battles were merely “a form of gaming”, something accepted by such scholars as Johan Huizinga (p.190). “Battles were not games; their rules were rules of law.” They did follow the idea embraced by the strategist Carl von Clausewitz in light of the Napoleonic Wars: that waging war is premised on annihilating opponents (p.63). The eighteenth century battlefield could well be incorporated into a framework of laws (p.191) despite the presence of cheating, or the incentives that might be gained by what the jurist Oliver Holmes termed the “bad man”. Limits would be observed. Perfidy was frowned upon (p.200). There were laws, and they, in the main, were observed, even if such observance seemed counter-intuitive.

The eighteenth century pitched battle was “an enforceable gamble accepted by risk takers in a world in which regimes would prosper and fail without any sense that their fortunes reflected the true drive or deep meaning of History” (p.258). For Whitman, the gambling metaphor is all relevant. Prussia’s Frederick the Great and Austria’s Maria Theresa went to battle at Chotusitz in 1742 as educated gamblers, calculating instances of profit and loss (p.256).

A deal was eventually reached between the Prussians and the Austrians. Contrary to a strong narrative about the Prussian leader as an aggressor who fought war above the law, “proof of a Nietzschean willingness to take action without regard for qualms about good and evil”, he showed obedience to it (p.68). In fact, he conspicuously refused to abide by the Clausewitzian formula of annihilation, much to the consternation of his contemporaries, when he refused to destroy the retreating Austrians at Chotusitz (p.72).

What Whitman seems to be suggesting is a particular manipulation of law on the battlefield — far from being disregarded, it formed a specific form of behaviour typical to that time in history. The wars of the eighteenth century such as the War of Austrian Succession lay in disputes of legal assumption — the right of Maria Theresa to assume the Austrian throne, for instance, and Prussia’s perceived entitlements to Silesia.

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Whitman, in embracing the legalistic form of eighteenth century war, may come across as a touch romantic, despite the graphic details he goes into in describing the Battle of Solferino in 1859. The point being made is that such battles, for all their horrors, were brakes of restraint. Modern wars maintain some pretence of restraint, at least when waged by such powers as the United States. Even the use of unmanned robotic war, for all its legal dubiousness, is argued as consistent with various laws of war, though it is ultimately premised on exterminating the target. Modern procedural rules are based not on calculable gain as a total expunging of the enemy. Where Whitman’s strongest point lies is that legal procedures deemed acceptable in the wars of the eighteenth century no longer apply. The enemy in modern context is there to be annihilated, less a creature of civilization than a creature outside it.

BINOY KAMPMARK RMIT University, Melbourne

Egypt and the Origin of Civilization: The British School of Culture Diffusion, 1890s -1940s. By Joshua Smith (Vindication Press, 2011), pp.147. £5.68 (pb).

“The British School of Culture Diffusion” was neither British — the leading light Elliot Smith was Australian – nor was it really a school, rather a group of independent and tough minded scholars, who nevertheless interacted with and influenced each other enormously. Elliot Smith was a world renowned neuro-anatomist and expert on human evolution; W.H.R. Rivers was a pioneer in the fields of psychotherapy, neurology, physiology and ethnology; and W.J. Perry taught university courses in comparative religion and cultural anthropology at Manchester and London universities. Despite their credentials, their theories on cultural diffusion have been treated with cruel derision in the profession of archaeology and anthropology since the Second World War. Joshua Smith rightly seeks to redress this situation by placing their ideas in an historical context, examining non-epistemic reasons why the profession dismissed such ideas, and returning to primary sources to analyse what they in fact wrote rather than “what is claimed by their detractors”. (Modern textbooks tend simply to repeat the negative comments of critics such as Glyn Daniel). I have put similar revisionist views in my book Grafton Elliot Smith, Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture (Sussex, 2012), in press unfortunately at the time Smith’s volume appeared.

A useful account of the theoretical antecedents of Egyptocentric , and more general, concepts of diffusion covers a range of thinkers, including Kircher, Stukeley, Prichard, Lacouperie, Humboldt, Bastian, Ratzel, Tylor, Graebner, Kroeber and many others; and in the early twentieth century Flinders Petrie, Peake, Fleure, Childe, and even Boas. Diffusionism entailed a diversity of conceptual positions, but it was a contending paradigm in the formative years of anthropology (as historians such as Trigger and Kuklick have shown — historians often do better than the profession in this area). The “British school” was making wide-ranging claims about culture change at a time of interdisciplinary fluidity, gathering information “from the fields of archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, comparative mythology and [...] religion, Egyptology, ethnography, ethnology, and prehistory” (p.8). When Elliot Smith set up his anatomy department at University College in 1919, he tried to make it an interdisciplinary centre. He was a lifelong foe of narrow specialisms that encouraged tunnel vision and also territorial jealousies that rebuffed the ideas of “outsiders” such as himself. When UC lost out to Malinowski at LSE in a fight for Rockefeller funding, this presaged the eclipse of difffusionism by functionalist-structural paradigms, which were more relevant to colonialist interests. New questions were asked, older issues

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ignored. Patriotic factors also intruded, especially in America, where what Smith calls “nativist isolationism” ruled (theories of exclusive indigenous development that admitted of no transoceanic cultural contacts).

In his detailed analysis, Smith dispels many still current misconceptions. To give examples, they include the charge that Elliot Smith’s heliolithic theory was anti-Darwinian or racist; or that it had Egyptians directly carrying their culture traits across the world, when he postulated indirect mitigated contacts, “wherein the receiving culture adapted the ideas to their pre-existing beliefs and made their own modifications”. With respect to America: “He postulated multiple Asiatic and/or Indian diffusionary waves that took place in the Pre-Columbian context” (pp.65, 78). Smith makes admirable use of primary sources on his main topic, but relies heavily upon standard secondary sources for related themes, such as the transition to structural-functionalism (Stocking, Urry, Langham et al.). He makes the point that British functionalism was “ahistorical to a fault because it failed to offer any resolution to the omnipresent question of origins that always comes with the study of anthropology” (pp.89-90), an opinion shared by Evans-Pritchard. Smith nicely broadens the “diffusionist milieu” to include lesser figures such as Meek, Rattray, Fox and Armstrong; and treats the diachronic versus synchronic debate (the diffusionists being allied with the former). Despite being theoretically problematic in places, this book is an important contribution in a contested area.

PAUL CROOK History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland