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This handsome volume purports to be an ‘overview of the current state of social-science research about Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. Its editors have assembled a broad, if less than representative, group of specialists, most of whom comment on aspects of one of three fields declared, by editorial fiat, to constitute contemporary social science: economics, political science, and sociology. While acknowledging the immense diversity in the social sciences, the editors briskly assert that ‘the majority of universities in the advanced societies and the majority of the academic staff who work within them, are organised around, and identify themselves by [these] disciplinary labels’.

It is difficult for non-Aboriginal novelists to deal adequately with Aboriginal experience in their work. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is general ignorance about Aboriginal experience. But another, more insidious, reason is self-censorship. The politics of speaking in an Aboriginal voice, if you’re not Aboriginal, is at best fraught and at worst a nightmare. Thinking twice before embarking on such an ‘adventure’ is no bad thing, a counter-balance, perhaps, to the days when it was all too easy to usurp an indigenous point of view, days of racist triumphalism or paternalist do-goodism.

Adib Khan’s fourth novel mirrors many of the concerns of his second, Solitude of Illusions (1997). Like Khalid in that novel, Martin Godwin in Homecoming looks back over a life that could have been better lived and a moral trajectory that has long since been deflected by one key event. Martin reflects on what could have been different and is tortured by what he sees as his own hypocrisy and cowardice. These attitudes to the past have repercussions for the future as his relationship with his son, again like Khalid’s, is characterised by guilt and misunderstanding. More broadly – and this is a feature of all Khan’s novels – there is a crucial disconnection between the older generation’s way of doing things and the ways of the next. This structure of present guilt and past actions (and inaction) results in novels that shuttle, sometimes a little awkwardly, between flashbacks and the present.

Indonesia is a difficult place to write about, because of its inherent complexity and the contested views that surround it. And then there is the sheer time that it takes to get to know the place, or at least to begin to know it, or parts of it. No one book can definitively come to terms with Indonesia’s scattered geography and dozens of cultures, its aliran (streams of influence), religious factions, social strata, degrees of development and competing interests. For these reasons, few authors or even edited collections try their hand at Indonesia as such, usually preferring to focus on an aspect of its vast and fragmentary complexity. This has been particularly so in the post-Suharto period, not least with the plethora of edited volumes that have sought to explain rapidly changing events there.

This is a fascinating, inspiring and disquieting book. It is fascinating because it succeeds so well in its comprehensive overview of policy making and policy intentions during the Hawke government (1983–91). That success derives from the unparalleled mix of insiders (former ministers, public servants, leaders of unions and NGOs), journalists and academic analysts, though the voice that is notably absent is that of business. Inspiration comes when one can see, beyond the obsession with pragmatism and economic reform, glimpses of a genuine ‘third way’ in the development of social capital. Disquiet arises because so many of the contributors fail to see how they created the social malaise that dogged the final years of the Labor government, and how, in abandoning the ‘old’ ideologies, they prepared the ground for the profoundly ideological and destructive government that would follow.

Michael Pusey coined the term ‘economic rationalism’ in 1991 to refer to the narrow economic focus of many senior public servants in Canberra. These influential advisers were mostly classically trained economists who saw their task as being to assist in creating a more efficient and productive society by privatising publicly owned utilities and services, giving greater rein to market forces, increasing competition, deregulating the labour market, and so on. But like every major political programme, economic rationalism has had, and continues to have, great social costs. John Wright’s book is primarily a moral evaluation of this programme.