Irwin Herrman

Finding the answers is often not half as important as asking the right questions. Desmond Ball has written an important book even though he raises more fundamental questions than he answers.

The central question in A Suitable Piece of Real Estate is simply ‘What are the rights and responsibilities of a host country which allows installations of a foreign, albeit, friendly state, to be sited on its territory?’ The author has dedicated the book For a Sovereign Australia. Australia is the host country in question, with American defence, scientific, and intelligence installations on its territory; but the situation he describes in great detail could, and probably does, apply elsewhere.

This book of a dozen essays, with a foreword by Sir Kenneth Weare (his last substantial piece of writing before he died), concentrates on various aspects of the changing Anglo-Australian relationship.

It is an enlightening collection, for most of the essays test and in some cases challenge the ‘conventional wisdom’ which pervades recent analyses of Australian life. This is especially useful to this reviewer who, as an immigrant of two years’ standing, discovered on arrival a veritable industry of writers in various disciplines all concerned with the search for an Australian identity. Two essays, for a start, provide the leaven in reassessment of George Johnston’s literary quest for ‘the way home’, as well as Donald Horne’s ‘Lucky Country’ theme and Alan Renouf’s ‘Frightened Country’ analysis. The first is interestingly dealt with by Alan Lawson in his ‘Acknowledging Colonialism: Revisions of the Australian Tradition’, which challenges several half-truths which have become maxims. Horne and Renouf immediately spring to mind in J.D.B. Miller’s ‘An Empire That Don’t Care What You Do’. This essay is a ‘must’ for those people who view most past (and some present) Australian leaders as supine in their dealings with British counterparts.