It is unusual for a book on Australia to be written by an outsider and published by an American press. This is to be welcomed. Outsiders are often free of local myths and attitudes, which are well entrenched in Australia, despite its character as a relatively new nation. Allaine Cerwonka did intensive fieldwork in two inner-city suburbs of Melbourne, Australia's second city. As a resident for 10 years in neighboring Carlton, I found her sensitivity to the nuances of the complex areas of East Melbourne and Fitzroy quite unusual.

However, she was also sold the particular minority ideology of the importance of “native” plants to defining Australian identity. This view is strongly held by one group of her respondents, the middle-class “gentrifiers” of the East Melbourne Garden Club. Though she does not say so, I suspect that her other reference group, the Fitzroy police, would have responded with skepticism to most of the attitudes of those from East Melbourne, just across the road.

This interesting and innovative book can be read on several levels. It is essentially a postmodernist text, with frequent references to Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault and the local Ghassan Hage. Australia is described as a “postcolonial society”—which is historically correct but not necessarily very helpful. Three quarters of its people descend from British and Irish immigrants who brought older cultures with them, which is not the case in “postcolonial” India or Africa. Indeed, that is why they planted “English cottage gardens,” as the author puts it.

Like many radical and, indeed, moderate Australians, the author is concerned with the severely disadvantaged state of the Aboriginal people who lived throughout the continent until 1788. But modern Aborigines make up less than 0.4% of the East Melbourne and Fitzroy population. Concern for them is a very abstract issue. It is possible to live in the Melbourne suburbs for many years and never encounter an Aborigine.

The extreme view that Australians can only find themselves by identifying with Aboriginal culture—as developed recently by Australian-born feminist Germaine Greer—is dangerously close to nonsense. The author seems at least sympathetic to this idea, if not completely convinced. The Fitzroy police, on the other hand, saw the small local Aboriginal community as a social and criminal problem.

The author's attempt to explain this tension in terms of Aboriginal alienation from their traditional land is stretching reality. Fitzroy has for a long time attracted Aborigines because it contains the central offices of several Aboriginal and general welfare agencies—not because it is in any way a “sacred site.” In fact, Fitzroy does not “belong” to anyone. Its population has been recycled several times since it was built up between 1850 and 1890. It now includes many teachers and public servants, who have replaced its previous manual-laboring tenants, and many Vietnamese and Hispanics, who have replaced its British and Irish descendants. These transformations are less true for East Melbourne, which retained a middle-class core even when its neighboring suburbs encroached on it.

But this is not essentially a study of urban ecology or even of community relations. The Fitzroy police live in other suburbs, while the East Melbourne gardeners are rather contemptuous of their more proletarian (and less British) neighbors. The central theme concerns national identity and the attempts to assert it by the majority British-derived population. This is an old obsession in Australia, but the (outsider) author brings new understanding to it. Her focus is on the movement to replace “exotic” plants and gardens with “indigenous” trees and shrubs, and the prejudices of the Fitzroy police against Aborigines and Vietnamese. Samuel Huntington caused some amusement in Australia by describing it as a society “torn” between Asia and the Atlantic world. The analysis here is more sensitive and closer to reality.

The author naturally has her own interpretation of what she observes, but this is tempered by the strongly held views of her informants. She accepts much of the anti-English blame attached to everything from exotic gardens to the rectangular layout of most Australian towns, including Melbourne. But rectangular towns are quite “unEnglish” and largely confined to military centers like Aldershot or Catterick. This military planning was the cause of rectangular layouts, rather than anything especially “English.”

The notion of the English love for gardens is much more plausible. That this is somehow a denial of the Australian environment is much more controversial. Towns, cities, and even fixed housing are all alien to Australia before 1788. The gum tree—a noble sight in eastern Australia—is unsuitable for densely populated urban areas. It dehydrates the soil, its leaves and bark fall year-round, and its limbs drop off without warning—a threat not only to passersby but to a tram and rail system dependent on overhead wiring.

Because Native to the Nation is polemical, it is also annoying. Because it overtheorizes, it can sometimes ignore simple explanations. It can be historically wrong, for example, in seeing Asians as uniquely singled out as “dirty and criminal.” The Irish, Jews, Greeks, and Italians had all previously been through this denigration. It gives too much credence to the convict influence, which was very weak in Victoria and South Australia. But it is very thorough and accurately represents the views of those with whom it came into contact. It is a refreshing and thought-provoking work that brightens up the rather tired debate on Australian national identity.