Antipodean Antiquities is a major addition to a slowly growing body of responses to the classical world Down Under. Classical reception studies of the former colonies/imperial possessions have been dominated by UK-based engagements, and Australasia has received little sustained attention. As this book demonstrates, we can valorise our worlds as rich and complex sites for pluralistic engagements with the Classics as both import and export.

Johnson's introduction assesses current thinking on post-colonial classical reception studies, then draws out antipodean nuances, such as our Cultural Cringe (as Tomis complex?), the centrality of Gallipoli and the role of migrant experience. Johnson seems sometimes apologetic – is studying classical reception Down Under itself a form of imperial complicity (notable in the absence of indigenous scholars from this volume)? Johnson would like patterns to emerge – and there will be continuities and universals aplenty. More intriguing is how many authors will flag distortions, revisions, dislocations, subversions, gaps and fragmentary receptions of the Classics as essential to refiguring how the Classics are used at a distance. For the receptionists in this volume, distance is opportunity, not tyranny.

Johnson's chapter, ‘Black Out: Classicizing Indigeneity in Australia and New Zealand’, is a careful exploration of how the ‘colonial mimesis of classicism’ (p. 13) antiqued and civilised the Aboriginal or Māori body into Dying Gauls and Crouching Aphrodites, competing with and outclass(icis)ing ‘scientific’ ethnography to produce the ‘perfect colonial artefact’ (p. 23). Johnson touches on how classical modes of seeing process abhorrent colonial behaviours into acceptable, often heroic narratives, a point relevant to R. White's chapter, ‘Australia as Underworld: Convict Classics in the Nineteenth Century’. Remembrance of Australia's penal origins destabilises epic narratives of progress; early epic Down Under may more aptly, as White so well draws out, be katabatic – classicising responses to an abuse-filled toponymic purgatory (Hells Gates) – an ‘after-life’ for the legally dead figured in terms of expulsion, regression, decline and Neronian decay.

Four chapters follow on classical reception and the theatre. In ‘Agamemnon comes to the Antipodes: the Origins of Student Drama at the University of Sydney’ L. Ginters presents new archive finds about early productions of classical drama at the ‘Oxford in the antipodes’ and notes the cultural tensions playing out in contemporary newspaper debates on the value of Classics in a new world (‘Were there twenty amongst the twelve hundred who could think in the Greek?’, p. 47). Johnson and M. Ewans analyse ‘Wesley Enoch's Black Medea’ (STC 2000; Belvoir/Malthouse 2005). Enoch sees the Classics as a way to tackle big issues, and Black Medea becomes part of a ‘modern songline’ of far greater antiquity than its classical inspiration. ‘[D]istancing structures’ (Enoch; p. 86) such as classical tragedy provide a safe space for approaching and authenticating difficult indigenous issues (environmental betrayal of Country, domestic violence). In ‘Salamis and Gallipoli: the Campaigns of Phillip Mann’ J. Davidson describes the classical outputs of New Zealand's Phillip Mann, notably his Persae/Gallipoli mash-up (They Shall Not Grow Old, 1997) and a sci-fi tetralogy set in an antipodean world in which Rome never fell. Few will agree that The Hunger Games is not ‘a serious contribution to the Reception of ancient Rome’ (p. 70). J. Montgomery Griffiths is brutal and spot-on about recognising ‘the never-ending oscillations of subjective scrutiny, which is at the core of Reception’ (p. 87). In her provocative chapter ‘What Women Critics Know That Men Don't’ the subjective practitioner (playwright, actor) is simultaneously an objective classical scholar, tunnelling down in search of the ‘rhizomatic intimacies’ (p. 88) of personal reception to respond to critics of her Antigone (Malthouse 2015) on issues of gender, translation, adaptation, textual respect, source fidelity, perceptions of elitism and social media as a form of reception studies.

There are two chapters on classical reception in New Zealand poetry. In ‘James K. Baxter and the Gorgon Moon’ G. Miles raises an issue relevant to other chapters, namely that of non-academics writing classical reception. This is a stimulating topic in a region where the Classics is often seen to be in decline. Baxter (1926–1972) was a product of a long history of traditional classical education, but wrote at a time when classical responses played second fiddle to nationalist literature. The chapter is a close reading of Baxter's use of the moon, filtered through his uncomfortable, protean and syncretic personal beliefs. The practitioner as implied and/or ideal reader – ‘to serve narrative rather than scholarly purposes’ (p. 254 n. 3) – speaks in A. Jackson's ‘Clodia Through the Looking Glass’, a Martindalesque reading in which Jackson delves Alice-deep into her I, Clodia, and Other Portraits (2014). She explores frictions between the creative process (‘bringing Catullus … to my own location’, p. 119), historical data and all those other Catulluses. Like its admirable 2017 predecessor Athens to Aotearoa. Greece and Rome in New Zealand Literature and Society (D. Burton, S. Perris and J. Tatum [edd.], reviewed in CR 69 [2019], 321–4), Antipodean Antiquities does well to give active practitioners the opportunity to demonstrate that reception is always personal.

Lacunate literary, biographical and historical narratives are fertile ground for novelists, as the next four chapters on fictional responses to the Classics well demonstrate. In ‘Parilia Poscor – David Malouf Remembers the Parilia (Fasti 4.721ff.)’ N. Liney examines Malouf's An Imaginary Life, his 1978 take on Ovid in Tomis/Ovidius Australiensis, with particular regard to Malouf's post-colonial deconstruction of a Frazerian anthropological process, in which the Classics offer familiar frames of ktistic reference to unfamiliar new worlds. In ‘Imaginative Displacement: Classical Reception in the Young Adult Fiction of Margaret Mahy’ E. Hale deftly unpacks Mahy's wide-ranging use of the Classics (invasive coloniser, oppressive influence, philosophical guide). Mahy reacts to the burden of the ‘colonized imagination’ (Jackson, quoted p. 143) by a dislocating process – embedding fragments of a global Classics within a recognisable New Zealand setting, connected and relevant to lived experience. Deviant, competing, incomplete mythologies feature too in A. Rogerson's fine exploration of Sulari Gentill's Homeric and Virgilian worlds (‘Displaced Persons and Displaced Narratives in S.D. Gentill's Hero Trilogy’). In the Hero Trilogy (2011–2013) questions of powerful resonance to everyday Australian life are explored through myth-based journeys suggestive of a walkabout culture, the Stolen Generation and the migrant experience. Gentill is a magnificent manipulator of mythic perspective – ‘the subversive, child's-eye view’ (p. 168), using elements particularly associated with an Australian voice (ironic tone), ‘rewriting these canonical works as Antipodean texts’ (p. 172). Manipulation of foundation myths (‘trademarks of … colonialism’, p. 161) recurs in Bernard Beckett's sci-fi trilogy (2006–2015), set in a futuristic New Zealand-like world. B. Pütz (‘Classical Influences in Bernard Beckett's Genesis, August and Lullaby’) examines ‘classical influences as literary devices’ (p. 155).

Artistic receptions are investigated by S. Midford (‘Painting Anzacs in an Epic Landscape: Greek Myth, the Trojan War and Sidney Nolan's Gallipoli Series’) and M. Johnston and T. Köntges (‘Of Heroes and Humans: Marian Maguire's Colonization of Herakles’ Mythical World’). Both artists destabilise imperial legacies of colonisation and war. Midford seeks influences on the deserter Nolan's iconoclastic depictions of Gallipoli (1955–1975). The Australian Troy, Gallipoli is a site of near-sacred significance for Australian national definition. Nolan's topographically Australian Gallipolis subvert the dominant classical tenor of First World War commemoration (serenity, perfection, wholeness) – a rare negative antipodean vision of war? The episodic narratives of Marian Maguire's The Labours of Herakles (2006–2008) have received sophisticated critical attention, not least from the artist herself, with each re-exhibition offering new reception opportunities. Herakles is good to think with, particularly about appropriation: Maguire collides Herakles’ familiar iconography with New Zealand's familiar landscapes, collapsing mythological and historical time to disrupt inherited notions of Herakles-as-coloniser's ‘predictable success’ (p. 199).

Three chapters examine classical reception on the screen. I. Willis, in ‘Temporal Turbulence: Reception Studies(’) Now’, offers a sparkling, theoretically sophisticated reading of ‘colonial viewing practice’ (p. 217) in Xena: Warrior Princess and a fascinating unpacking of what still visible reception choices in new colonised lands might reveal about lost naturalisation processes in the historical past. The problem of anachronism and classical reception has hovered about other chapters of this book – here Willis deconstructs its potential as resource rather than failure: how can Classicists profitably engage with receptions that get the Classics so wrong? H. Parry, in ‘Classical Epic in Peter Jackson's Middle-Earth Trilogies’, explores how J.R.R. Tolkien's epics become New Zealand national epic. The New Zealand landscape is colonised over again in the imposition of ‘a Britain of a past that never actually existed’ (p. 225). L. Glass, in ‘Shifting Paradigms in Ben Ferris’ Penelope’, tackles the dark world of Australian Ferris's 2009 limited release Croatian–Australian film in which Penelope's life with the suitors has something to say about the atrocities of the Bosnian War. Again, gaps in mythic traditions reveal other stories or allow archetypes to be questioned and destabilised. For Glass multicultural identities represent a particularly antipodean quality of a film that had ‘little impact’ in Australia (p. 245).

The volume is well edited and clearly structured. It is adequately illustrated in black and white. There are few significant typographical errors (the University of New England is not in the USA, p. x). This is a timely book, given current debates about teaching ‘western civilisation’ in our universities. It represents a coming-of-age particularly in Australian classical reception studies, and it will surely be a stimulus to bring less descriptive and more theoretically innovative approaches to bear on the myriad forms of classical reception that saturate Australasia – it is, as Johnson suggests, ‘a map showing where we have come, and where we may go next’ (p. 10).