In recent decades, the growth in studies of Scottish migration and Scots overseas has been extraordinary. For many years it was the Irish who received most attention, but as the conviction in the importance of the disaggregation of the “four nations” of the British and Hibernian Isles has grown, the Scots have begun to receive a great deal of notice. As studies have multiplied, the historiography has become more sophisticated, with analyses of the geographical origins of migrants, their class, occupational, age, gender, and marital profiles connecting with the locations of their settlement, the continuation or transformation in those characteristics, and the survival (or otherwise) of the ethnocultural identity of the settlers together with generational changes over time. Additionally, significant themes have been developed in respect to the relationship of Scots with indigenous peoples and their responses to the environment in which they found themselves. In the course of all of this, the exposure of the myths of Scottish exceptionalism and allegedly dominant characteristics have been rightly subjected to scrutiny. As studies based on various territories across the globe have become richer, it has also become necessary to examine aspects of such migration in comparative terms. Among such works, the complex study of Scots in New Zealand, Unpacking the Kists (2013) by Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon (with the help of other researchers), has been particularly impressive. It blended micro- and macro-history and explored the widest possible set of fields associated with the Scots.

However, while New Zealand has always been known as a major destination of Scots settlers (with the Scottish component of Pakeha or white society being proportionately a good deal greater than that from other parts of the United Kingdom), the Scots in Australia have always been seen as a less significant migration than that of Canada or the neighboring islands across the Tasman Sea. In Australia, Irish and English predominated. Yet there were very important pockets of Scots, particularly in New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania. Although the Scottish courts did not use transportation sentences quite as eagerly as the English did, still there were significant numbers of Scottish convicts, some of whom became significant in convict settlements, particularly after acquiring their “tickets of leave.” Scots were also particularly prominent as pastoralists and “squatters” in the sheep-rearing lands. It was in these capacities that they most often came into conflict with Aborigines and so often contributed to the violence of frontier dispossession. As well as having been significant explorers and surveyors, both formally and informally, in the Outback, they also became an obvious ethnic component of the new mining settlements, of gold and other metals, particularly in Victoria as that colony boomed.

Here Benjamin Wilkie analyses these issues in detail and with considerable competence. He also examines the role of some Scots in commerce and in urban settlements. Ethnic cultural survival is an important theme—the significance of the Presbyterian Church (a dimension which, until recently, has too often received too little attention), the development of Scottish societies, and the erection of cultural monuments as icons of identity, such as statues of Robert Burns (eight of them in Australia) and even of William Wallace. Inevitably, we read of some success stories of a few wealthy Scots who set about using their money to influence the material and cultural development of their adopted country. There are also the usual references to military Scots and the manner in which there were attempts to create Scottish regiments distinguished by the kind of uniforms used in Scotland, Canada, and elsewhere in the British Empire. There is a good account of the ways in which Australian defense authorities attempted, around the time of the First World War, to create an overall Australian identity and avoid such apparent ethnic distinctions. Nevertheless, the Victorian Scottish Regiment was successful in clinging to its original objectives into the interwar years. All of this makes for a highly readable book, which builds a good deal of detail on to the existing works on Scots in Australia by G. L. Pearce, David S. Macmillan, and Malcolm David Prentis, as well as the important and more general migration works of Eric Richards. It also makes good use of comparative material, although the important book on New Zealand mentioned above presumably came out too late to have an effect.

However, there are significant gaps. Wilkie's book lacks the kind of statistical detail that has appeared in some other studies in recent times. An examination of some company histories would also have helped. A good example that is not mentioned is the important shipping line of Burns Philp, founded in 1883, whose former impressive headquarters still dominates Bridge Street in Sydney. Sir James Burns and Sir Robert Philp (respectively from Glasgow and Stirlingshire) founded this important company, which was crucial in the regional commercial connections of the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia, thus helping to ensure that Australia established its own regional commercial networks. Philp became the premier of Queensland. Other examples of investment and commercial companies founded and developed by Scots are also omitted. Wilkie's book, in other words, is much more satisfying in social, cultural, and perhaps environmental areas than it is in terms of the influence of Scots on the economic dimensions of Australian colonial history. An analysis of the Scottish component of other key professions, notably medical and educational, would also have been useful, as would have been a consideration of generational change and the manner in which cultural associations perhaps experienced troughs and a revival in the twentieth century. But it is a relatively short book and it certainly makes a significant contribution to the field of Scottish migration, revealing without doubt the extent to which it must be regarded as an entirely separate and distinctive diaspora.