ANU Press

Dreaming Ecology is the posthumous third volume in a trilogy that also comprises Deborah Bird Rose’s earlier anthropological study Dingo Makes Us Human (1992) and Hidden Histories (1991), an account of the recent his-tory of Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District (VRD) region in the north-western corner of the Northern Territory. As an anthropological neophyte, I came across her briefly in 1994 during the Palm Valley Land Claim in Central Australia, in her role as anthropologist assisting the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Commissioner. Although by the time of her death in 2018 she had worked on nearly twenty Aboriginal land claims, her own anthropological research diverged from Australian anthropology’s preoccupation for nearly fifty years with Indigenous land tenure systems dictated by the land claim and native title claim process.

Persons of Interest does not fit readily into any familiar genre. It crosses the borders of biography, psychology, Cold War history, and family studies. When Pamela Burton and her sister Meredith Edwards decided to write a book about their parents, they realised that different readerships would be attracted to different parts. Who would be interested in a book about the marriage, and the post-divorce lives, of a man who had been a central figure in public controversies many decades ago and a sensitive, introspective woman who was little known to the public but for whom their daughters felt far greater sympathy? By crossing those borders with what their prologue calls ‘a unique, intimate and candid account of our parents’ complexities and interweaving relationships’, they have written a book that will be ‘of interest’ to many readers, no matter what their usual focus.

It was one of the most notorious episodes in the annals of Australian publishing. In September 1993, writing in Quadrant, Peter Ryan, the former director of Melbourne University Press (1962–87), publicly disowned Manning Clark’s six-volume A History of Australia. Clark had been dead for barely sixteen months. For scandalous copy and gossip-laden controversy, there was nothing to equal it, particularly when Ryan’s bombshell was dropped into a culture that was already polarised after more than a decade of the History Wars.

What kinds of stories are possible now about a mission community at the height of the assimilation era? How might scholars narrate the lives of religious women who ran an institution for Indigenous children?

Glen St John Barclay and Caroline Turner’s Humanities Research Centre offers the first historical overview of this prestigious Australian National University-based institution. Their book is an extremely dense yet remarkably comprehensive and well-written homage to one of the key international sites of scholarly research in the humanities.

It is impossible to think clearly about modern ideologies without perceiving their rootedness in class-related concepts of a better society. Nor can we understand this without seeing that class is a radical rearrangement in fact and in political discourse of the realities previously referred to as ‘orders’ and ‘ranks’. This vast shift into simpler and fewer forms of relation to the means of production is one way of understanding the enormous change in power and dynamism of western capitalist societies that we abbreviate for discussion into the familiar terms of the French and Industrial Revolutions.

The first thing the general reader will need to know about this book is that it is not for the general reader. It too often and too closely approaches the clipped and densely allusive style of the average scientific paper, designed for initiates only and a small band of them at that. It uses too many words from the jargon of physics, chemistry and even geology with insufficient or no explanation. Even if Scientific American and New Scientist are your cup of tea, this book could exceed your powers of digestion.