Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2023.2230667
Maria Nugent
lives into penury and want; how at their side were the local charitable and religious institutions that supported communities in their time of need. In this way, the resilience of the human spirit is championed inBeaumont’s book. Beaumont’s chapter twenty-six, titled ‘Women at Risk’, further steps outside of existing Depression Era historiography, addressing a highly overlooked sector inmosthistorical examinations of the period. Political figures that manoeuvred their way through the Depression Era are intelligently treated. She adds the ‘personal’ to the policies, describing the motivations and actions of agents such as Scullin, Lyons and Lang, with perspicacity. Politicians do not come into their role out of a vacuum and Beaumont makes this point with real understanding. Joan Beaumont’s book is generally, and correctly, described as ‘wide-ranging’. Australia’s Great Depression comprehensively covers just what is printed on the cover – Australia, in its entirety and its experience of the Great Depression. All states and territories are examined and included and yet this history is not weighed down by the volume of its statistical evidence. Beaumont’s writing is narrative in style and makes very easy reading. In her introduction, by bringing the book into the present and not allowing the modern welfare state off the hook, Beaumont prepares us to make sense of the Great Depression from a perspective based in the here and now. Beaumont is a prolific, gifted and lauded author and historian. This book should add more plaudits to her already distinguished body of work.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2023.2228012
J. Godden
tional corporate history. Readers and historians may need to look elsewhere for a setting of MUP in the wider worlds of book publishing, the book market and university presses. Throughout Kells’ history he interweaves the relationship of academic and general trade books, and the audiences addressed by university-based authors, but in the background the market and commercial differences between textbooks, academic monographs and trade books for the general reader were developing into today’s deep chasms. To understand MUP’s dilemmas involves comparisons with international university presses, who have the advantage of access to large library, academic and student markets. There is brief mention but little formal discussion relating to Australia’s other university presses: UQP, UWA Publishing, UNSW Press (the largest, with publishing, bookselling and a sales/distribution division which once handled MUP books in the trade), while digital publishing initiatives such as those at ANU and Monash and a revised SUP brought forward new models to challenge MUP. But no history can cover every theme; Kells’ centenary history can be welcomed as a very valuable contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of the nation.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2023.2233131
James Curran
on the conviction that politics matters. His conceptualisation of ‘the political’ is relatively broad, encompassing Australians’ expectations of their political system, the relative effectiveness of that system, and actions undertaken to shape and remake that system. It is a history of ideas as well as institutions, followers as well as leaders. From the breadth of his vision follow several notable features, unthinkable to the ‘political historian’ of an earlier period. While readers will find in this book a reliable and often penetrating discussion of major figures and decisions taken by national leaders of colonies, states and Commonwealth, Bongiorno commences his narrative with a discussion of First Nations’ self-government. Across the volume, he often looks beyond the dominant national political leaders and scrupulously considers local and regional variation. He discusses Chinese democrats alongside white Britons. He gives attention to women’s collective campaigns; labour-movement action, institutions and ideas; First Nations’ struggles as well as exclusion; anti-socialist mobilisations; migrant politics; environmental campaigning; and contemporary challenges from the right. Reflecting the insights of cultural history, Bongiorno is concerned to understand politics as a performance, and he offers sensitive readings of the stump, the emporium, and the hotel as spaces of democratic assertion and exchange. He scrutinises the changing form of ‘the politician’ as a type, considers leaders as gendered and embodied actors, and interrogates the language and meanings of political claims. The book is a narrative history, and Bongiorno is a buoyant and energetic stylist, his craft honed not only in earlier works of history, but also in repeated contributions to public debate. Dreamers and Schemers is enlivened by often subtle penportraits of keyfigures, a capacity to work outwards from a dramatic episode to a larger pattern, an eye for an arresting or evocative detail, and an often amused and amusing spirit. The book unfolds in nine chapters, which span a period from ‘the earliest times’ to the ‘age of COVID-19’. The pace is unhurried, the scope formidably wide, and yet the volume less than 500 pages. Bongiorno aims to reach a readership beyond expert scholars. He deserves to engage the interest of very many Australians. Bongiorno’s authorial choices necessarily bring with them limits as well as possibilities. The narrative approach means that the book is not organised as an argument about the form or significance or transformation of Australian politics. Bongiorno concludes that the most recent election disclosed the ‘resilience and adaptability’ of Australia’s ‘distinctive democracy’, but the preceding pages have only hinted at what was or remains ‘distinctive’, and there is no systematic explanation for such distinctiveness (or its relative decline). The book’s title, ‘Dreamers and Schemers’, suggests a sustained interaction of idealistic visionaries
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2023.2228014
Michelle McKeough
made her the standout exception. How the Red Cross Societies were forced to engage with a wider section of the community is a recurring motif in this book. Margaret Tennant’s wideranging chapter on the New Zealand Red Cross particularly engages with this issue in a postcolonial context. The impact of modern marketing is yet another common thread. The key example is the American Red Cross (ARC). Branden Little argues that the American public initially rejected the ARC because it was perceived – presumably with good reason – as incompetent and corrupt. He concludes that the later success of the ARC was due to the new art of professional marketing in time for the USA’s entry into World War I in 1917. Little’s statistics, even with a healthy margin for exaggeration, are amazing. During 1917–18, the ARC’s membership increased from 22,000 to 32 million, while at the same time it distributed $US400 million in relief. An explicit challenge to orthodoxy comes from Davide Rodogno’s highly philosophical argument that humanitarianism involves cultural arrogance. Eldrid Mageli offers an empirical example. Her chapter is a confronting analysis of the Norwegian Red Cross’s role in the Biafran famine. Mageli’s conclusion is that ‘short-term alleviation...may have longerterm, harmful consequences’ (175) – and in Biafra’s case, almost certainly did. Mageli shows how leaders can ruthlessly exploit goodwill. Similarly, Rebecca Gill’s study of the ICRC conference in 1938 reveals how expertly the Nazis exploited the Red Cross’s internationalist ideals to promote British proappeasement policies. Caroline Reeves argues that efforts in the late nineteenth century to establish a Red Cross Society in China were because the Red Cross was recognised as a marker of civilisation. Despite the Chinese regime’s lack of interest in humanitarianism, it tried to establish a Red Cross Society to help assert national sovereignty. In this case, government efforts to exploit Red Cross idealism failed, largely due to the Boxer rebellion. This volume offers a scholarly smorgasbord on the impact of the Red Cross. While its small font and almost complete lack of photographs is not reader-friendly, all should find something to add to or challenge their understanding of not just the Red Cross, but the broader history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
使她成为一个突出的例外。红十字会是如何被迫与更广泛的社会群体接触的，这是本书反复出现的主题。玛格丽特·坦南特(Margaret Tennant)关于新西兰红十字会(New Zealand Red Cross)的广泛章节尤其在后殖民背景下探讨了这一问题。现代市场营销的影响是另一个共同的线索。最典型的例子是美国红十字会(ARC)。布兰登·利特尔认为，美国公众最初拒绝ARC，是因为他们认为(可能有充分的理由)ARC无能且腐败。他总结说，ARC后来的成功要归功于1917年美国加入第一次世界大战时专业营销的新艺术。利特尔的统计数据，即使有适当的夸张，也是惊人的。1917年至1918年期间，ARC的成员从2.2万人增加到3200万人，同时分发了4亿美元的救灾物资。对正统的明确挑战来自于大卫·罗多诺(Davide Rodogno)高度哲学化的论点，即人道主义涉及文化傲慢。Eldrid Mageli提供了一个实证例子。她的章节是对挪威红十字会在比夫拉饥荒中所扮演角色的正面分析。马格里的结论是，“短期缓解……可能会有长期的、有害的后果”(175)——而在比夫拉的案例中，几乎肯定是这样的。马格里展示了领导者如何无情地利用善意。同样，丽贝卡·吉尔(Rebecca Gill)对1938年红十字国际委员会会议的研究揭示了纳粹如何巧妙地利用红十字会的国际主义理想来推动英国的绥靖政策。卡洛琳·里夫斯(Caroline Reeves)认为，19世纪后期在中国建立红十字会的努力，是因为红十字被认为是文明的标志。尽管中国政府对人道主义缺乏兴趣，但它试图建立一个红十字会，以帮助维护国家主权。在这种情况下，政府利用红十字会理想主义的努力失败了，这主要是由于义和团运动。这本书提供了一个学术大杂烩对红十字会的影响。虽然它的字体很小，几乎完全没有照片，对读者来说并不友好，但所有人都应该找到一些东西来增加或挑战他们对红十字会的理解，不仅是对红十字会的理解，还有对19世纪末和20世纪更广泛历史的理解。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2023.2236283
Darragh Gannon
landers, generating anxieties and even conspiracy theories. Insularity enables not only a better understanding of Wadjemup’s position in relation to the mainland, but in relation to the rest of the world, connected to islands in the Indian Ocean and beyond. The book will appeal to Australian and global audiences, including historians of empire, punishment, gender, migration, and the world wars, as well as to scholars of Indigenous and island studies. It is exceptionally well written, and coheres remarkably well as a single narrative, though each chapter can stand alone. It is worth noting that although the book briefly covers the ‘deep history’ of the island, its chapters are (post)colonial in focus, and the majority cover the nineteenth century when the island operated as a prison. This focus is justified by the importance of the island where 3,700 Aboriginal men and boys were confined between 1838 and 1931 and where one in ten lost their lives, making it the state’s largest site of deaths in custody. This has powerful resonance today when 540 Indigenous prisoners have died in custody in three decades since the 1991 Royal Commission promised change. This book therefore plays a crucial role in raising awareness of Wadjemup/Rottnest’s importance to histories of imperialism and invasion, to a wider, global audience.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2023.2230665
Sean Scalmer
ticularly on this question about how to plumb people’s choices and reconstruct the contexts within which those choices were created and circumscribed. Poignantly, Gibson evokes the sense of crisis thatmanyof theAboriginalmenwemeet in the book were experiencing – a deeply-felt concern about how the knowledge they possessed would be passed on and carried forward into a future that seemed far from certain. Strehlow’s archive, like many publicly held historical collections, encapsulates the situation that its ‘co-creators’ were grappling with: the gamble that their knowledge would be preserved even as it was distanced from the places where it was recorded and dissociated from those who so generously shared it. What makes Gibson’s book so valuable is that it commences the vital work of reconnecting collections and ‘communities’ at a time when he can still draw upon living local and family memories about the people, places, and practices it ‘documents’. This brings me to the second innovation that Gibson makes in approaching Strehlow’s archive: his decision to focus on the work that Strehlow did with the Anmatyerr. More usually, the Strehlow archive is mined for the Arrernte knowledge it holds. This was not an abstract or purely intellectual decision on Gibson’s part: it grew out of the relationships that he already had with Anmatyerr, his awareness of their own deep interest in the collection, and the opportunity that those relationships provided to enter the archive through a different door that did not demand quite so much homage to Strehlow himself. Because of his own grounding in place, Gibson can read the material alongside the people whose questions, curiosity, commitment and knowledge revivify its meaning and open up its possibilities. Through this process of slow, relational research, Gibson creates a thoroughly striking ethnography of an earlier ethnography and its products. On that score, his book has something in common with notable recent histories that take a similar approach, such as Shannyn Palmer’s Unmaking Angus Downs and Tiffany Shellam’s Meeting the Waylo. Through this grounded, localised, collaborative and relational encounter with a valuable, if opaque, collection, Gibson contributes another seminal case study to a growing body of scholarship that insists upon working collaboratively, relationally and respectfully on historical collections and archives, paying careful attention to the agency and contexts of the many people who made them, including those whose contribution has hitherto been hidden, and the contemporary challenges and opportunities they represent for the people and communities whose inheritances they are.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2023.2230671
John Blaxland
Having authored the second volume (The Protest Years) and co-authored the third volume with Rhys Crawley (The Secret Cold War) of the official history of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), I felt I had a good grasp on ASIO and its first four decades from 1949 to 1989. I was pleasantly surprised at what Phillip Deery managed to uncover and the engaging way the story is told, revolving around the recurring concern over trust: between allies, colleagues, handlers, agents and targets. The book explains the Australian context to the Cold War onset and the significance of decrypted Soviet diplomatic messages (codenamed ‘Venona’) which prompted startling revelations about a ‘nest of spies’ in Australia. Their presence, with high-level access to sensitive documents, brought into question the reliability of Australia as a trusted US and UK security partner. In 1949, with the Cold War looking likely to turn into yet another hot war, these appeared to be genuine concerns. These events would lead to the creation of ASIO, following the mould of its British counterpart, MI5. Deery revisits the problem that others have highlighted: once created to catch these spies and rehabilitate Australia’s international standing, ‘ASIO made little meaningful distinction between the small handful of “non-legal” or covert communists... and the thousands of CPA members and “fellow travellers” who immersed themselves in daily struggles for social justice’ (7). That problemwas exacerbated as the once mighty Communist Party of Australia (CPA) progressively lost its way following the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968, leaving the CPA moribund. Die-hard revolutionaries moved to smaller breakaway groups like the Trotskyist Socialist Workers League (SWL) and Socialist Youth Alliance (SYA). Deery provides a fascinating and important look at ASIO, not through the prism of the organisation itself, but through that of those who were employed as spies and sparrows (that is, undercover ASIO agents hired and handled by ASIO officers) as well as those affected by their handiwork. To shed light on the task from a variety of angles, Deery selected eight candidates, all with strikingly different backgrounds, skills, motives and experiences. First is the radar and radio-physics scientist, Tom Kaiser, seen as a ‘fellow traveller’ who had to be dismissed as ‘part of the price paid for the Australian access into the highly coveted secret world of American and British high technology weapons systems and atomic development’. Next is William Dobson, a member of the anticommunist Australian Labor Party (ALP) Industrial Group, known as the Groupers. Neither recruited by ASIO as a sparrow nor regarded as a threat to national security, his actions ‘starkly silhouette the twin issues of trust and betrayal’. Third is the story of Paul Reuben James, ‘a minor casualty of Australia’s Cold War’, who was dismissed without recourse for having condem
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/1031461x.2023.2230679
R. Connell
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