Cambridge University Press

This book is dedicated to Judith Brett’s grandparents, ‘none of whom ever voted Labor’, and their grandchildren, ‘most of whom do’; and concludes with the observation that ‘the relationship between … emerging social formations and nationally based political parties is not yet clear – or at least not to me’. The dedication suggests even-handedness, and the concluding words imply a commitment to evidence as the basis for argument. These qualities characterise this major study of Australian Liberalism – an impressive personal achievement and a significant event in Australian intellectual life – though Brett sometimes appears to believe that they are one and the same thing, and that, in order to understand human relations, one must first accept the equal validity of ideologically opposed views.

John Burton, Walter Crocker, Paul Hasluck, Gregory Clark, Burce Grant, James Dunn, Alan Renouf, Stuart Harris, Richard Woolcott, and Alison and Richard Broinowski are all former diplomats who have written (or are writing) about foreign policy and Australia’s regional and global engagements. Two of the authors reviewed here – Rawdon Dalrymple and Allan Gyngell – can be included in the list. Dalrymple had a distinguished career as an Australian ambassador in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Japan and the US. He spent his immediate post-retirement years as a visiting professor in the University of Sydney. Gyngell has worked at the coalface of Australian foreign affairs for many years. He was recently appointed founding Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, the most positive sign on the foreign policy analysis horizon for a long time.

The Tasmanian Tiger or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) continues to stalk the Tasmanian imagination. Miasmas resembling it figure in reports from tourists and bushwalkers, who happen upon the slinking apparition in the wilderness. Fanciful meanderings of wishful hearts and minds? Perhaps. Tantalising suspicions that the thylacine may still exist will not go away. No matter that the last thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo on 7 September 1936. With it died a species, but not the legend

Now that the generals have announced the end of the military campaign in Iraq, media organisations will conduct their own post-mortems. Pundits and politicians agree that the war was the most televised in recent history, but what does that mean in terms of quality journalism? One of the most surprising aspects of the rolling, often repetitious, coverage was the way that basic tenets of journalism were proven true: that is, good reporting is based on firsthand observation and powerfully evoked detail. No amount of studio analysis can equal a journalist – notebook or microphone in hand – speaking to people on the streets. The journalism of Osmar White, the noted Australian war correspondent, exemplifies this.

Is the great white middle class endangered in Australia? If it is, does it matter greatly? Michael Pusey answers ‘Yes’ on both counts. He argues that we are seeing a ‘hollowing out of the middle’. If he is right, this hollowing out has significant consequences. Both major political parties have spent decades courting the wannabe middle class – from Robert Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ to Gough Whitlam’s outer suburbanites, and from Mark Latham’s ‘aspirational’ voters to the recipients of John Howard’s tax welfare and handouts for private schools. A significant contraction of this constituency would create political shock waves. In addition, the decline of the middle class would throw an interesting light on our current prime minister who, more than anyone since Menzies, has represented middle-class values and aspirations while championing the radical economic restructuring that Pusey sees as leading to the decline of the middle class.

Nugget Coombs never accepted a knighthood. The reason, he told his one-time English teacher, the essayist and academic Sir Walter Murdoch, was that it would be ‘out of character’ for him to do so.

Nugget Coombs never accepted a knighthood. The reason, he told his one-time English teacher, the essayist and academic Sir Walter Murdoch, was that it would be ‘out of character’ for him to do so.

There is no shortage of calculated modesty in Australian public life. We cultivate it. Even the most self-absorbed of our sporting heroes can manage a spot of winning self-deprecation. But in Nugget Coombs – public thinker, public servant, economist, social reformer, Governor of the Reserve Bank, Aboriginal advocate, cultural initiator and great Australian – modesty was the genuine article. He was a man with enough distilled wisdom to know himself and enough shrewdness to know what fitted. And he was right: ‘Sir Herbert’, or, worse, ‘Sir Bertie’ would have been risible.

I was once berated by a lecturer in political theory for my undergraduate defence of Marxist economism. He pointed out that even Marx despised this mindless reduction of his work. I subsequently opted for less anal accounts of the human condition, and remain of the view that any half-intelligent person would do likewise. So I was more than astonished to hear non-Marxists of the ilk of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and the senior George Bush demanding that we read their lips as they mouthed: ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’

A brief moment of reflection on the quantum of grief in Australia associated with wars of the twentieth century is, to say the least, unsettling. Nearly 100,000 killed in combat, many seriously wounded, many dealing with the physical and mental consequences long after the cessation of hostilities. Lives snatched from the everyday and made into noble sacrifices. The darker dimensions of the Anzac legacy have seeped into the national imagining in recent years, and we are now more open to the poignant melancholy of remembrance, undercutting the bellicose flag-waving of former years. But our sense of the costs of sacrifice has largely been focused on those who served. Joy Damousi in this and her previous book, The Labour of Loss (1999), opens our eyes to those others who have borne the pain of grief most acutely: the wives and families of those killed and those forever transformed by the experience of battle. These illuminating books are a long overdue acknowledgment of the burden of mourning that many Australian families have had to bear.

Peter Pierce’s concern in this critical study is with two periods – from the second half of the nineteenth century, when most of the myths of the lost child began to appear, and the second half of this century, when a quite different kind of narrative emerges. The period in between he regards as largely a consolidation of the late nineteenth-century examples. Ranging widely over not only literature but pictorial art and contemporary factual accounts, he shows the striking changes that take place in the forms in which the legend appears.