The Rural Entrepreneurs: A History of the Stock and Station Agent Industry in Australia and New Zealand. BySimon Ville. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 274 pp. Diagrams, tables, photographs. Cloth, $64.95. ISBN 0-521-64265-5.

Making peoples: a history of the New Zealanders from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. By James Belich. London: Penguin, 2001. Pp. 497. ISBN 0-14-100639-0. £9.99.Paradise reforged: a history of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000. By James Belich. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Pp. 606. ISBN 0-7139-9172-0. £25.00.The Enlightenment and the origins of European Australia. By John Gascoigne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii+233. ISBN 0-521-80343-80. £45.00.Australian ways of death: a social and cultural history, 1840–1918. By Pat Jalland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. Pp. vi+378. ISBN 0-19-550754-1. £15.99.White flour, white power: from rations to citizenship in central Australia. By Tim Rowse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii+255. ISBN 0-521-62457-6. £40.00.The five books covered here might seem a random sample: antipodean oddments from the edge of a review editor's desk. Their subject matter – from ‘ways of death’ in Australia to rationing policies for indigenous Australians – is diverse, as are their approaches: a scholarly assessment of the influence of Enlightenment ideas in the Australian colonies through to a massive two-volume general history of New Zealand to 2000. Yet even in this eclectic mix there are common themes, reflecting current interests and models in the writing of history in both countries. For some time, Australia and New Zealand have been productively positioned in relation to European social change as ‘born modern’ experiments, or at least as colonies which forced or anticipated aspects of the modernity shaping metropolitan centres. There have been several phases of historiography advancing this thesis, each reflecting a desire on the part of historians ‘down under’ to relate their account to wider dynamics, or to incorporate models that redress or refute the ‘isolation’ of their history by exploring categories extending beyond the national chronicle. More recently, historians of post-colonialism have returned the interest. They have traced in the extension of colonialism many of the crucial factors shaping core elements of nineteenth-century European nationalism, even the concept of Europe itself. In complex patterns of interdependence within ‘empire’, these historians have also identified several themes of ‘modernity’: reflexive approaches to ‘self’ and identity; discursive matrices of liberal government; the application and testing of the Enlightenment project of ‘reason’ and the ‘disenchantment’ of scientific knowledge and classification.

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Reviews

Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology ◽

10.1375/acri.40.2.236 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 40 (2) ◽

pp. 236-247

Author(s):

David Weisburd ◽

David Biles ◽

Tim Prenzler ◽

Shane Darke ◽

Maria Markantonatou

Keyword(s):

New Zealand ◽

Criminal Justice ◽

Information Age ◽

Free Association ◽

Third Party ◽

Doing Gender ◽

Drug Dealer ◽

Cambridge University ◽

History Of ◽

Third Party Policing

Third Party Policing; Lorraine Mazerolle and Janet Ransley (2005) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 261pp, ISBN 13-978-0-521-82783-6 (hb), 978-0-521-53507-6 (ppb) The History of Australian Corrections; S. O'Toole. (2006) UNSW Press, Sydney, pp 236, ISBN 0 86840 915 4 Doing Justice, Doing Gender: Women in Legal and Criminal Justice Occupations; Susan Ehrlich Martin and Nancy C. Jurik (2007) Sage Publications,Thousand Oaks, California, USA. 281pp, ISBN 1-4129-2720-X or 978-1-4129-2720-8 (cloth) Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology Pusher Myths: Re-situating the Drug Dealer; Ross Coomber (2006) Free Association Books, United Kingdom, 207pp, ISBN 1853439487 The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in the Information Age; Ball, Kirstie and Webster, Frank (eds.) (2003) Pluto Press, London, 176pp. ISBN 0 7453 1995 5 (hb) ISBN 0 7453 1994 7 (ppb)

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