Australia's engagement with its neighbours to the north, often expressed in terms of the tension between its history and its geography, is a perennial topic of interest among politicians, strategic specialists and educators. In To the islands, Paul Battersby covers Australian engagement from the perspectives of economic and territorial interests, the growth of intra-regional transport, personal travel experiences, regional investment and security concerns. By charting the extent of official as well as popular engagement with Southeast Asia from British colonisation to the present, Battersby challenges a state-centred reading of Australia's past.

In the nineteenth century, the colonies of Queensland and New South Wales were particularly aggressive in competing with the British Empire in the Eastern Archipelago. Economic and territorial interests are revealed through bold initiatives including plans for the establishment of a new Singapore in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the annexation and commercial development of New Guinea. The grand attempt to replicate the Straits of Malacca in the Torres Strait reveals an early confident assertion of Australian colonial prerogative in the region.

The importation of Chinese miners, Javanese and Pacific Island plantation workers and Malay and Filipino pearl divers created economic benefit but also social conflict. While the establishment of Malay kampong on Thursday and Mulgrave Islands reflected the mutual respect between indigenous Australian and Malay peoples, Asian presences provoked public fears of invasion and biological contagion in the racially homogenous settler world of White Australia. Asian racial stereotypes prevailed in newspapers but Battersby maintains that ordinary Australians at the local level were accepting of Asians in Australia as long as they did not disturb power relations.

Thanks to steamships, imperialism and Thomas Cook, travel for leisure became a socially acceptable activity and Australians travelled to Asia, seduced by imperial images of the mysterious yet debased Orient. Almanacs and handbooks carried maps of Australasia and brochures advertised the romance of the tropical idyll and the smooth sailing across the Torres Strait. The nouveau riches of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane acquired social status by travelling on luxurious steamers to New Guinea, Java, Singapore and Manila, all the while being waited on by servants imported from British India. Australia had become timetabled into the region.

Commercial travellers, prospectors, scientific explorers, photographers, theatrical troupes and holidaymakers noted their impressions of Asia and their personal encounters with strange cultures were promulgated through the Australian press. Some used metaphors of animal or insect movement to depict mass humanity, presenting chaotic images of cacophonous urban living, humidity and cultural diversity. Yet, Australians were also critical of the moral decay exhibited by the European colonisers in Asia, with the penchant for servants being cited as a symptom of climate-induced idleness. Travel served to concretise national identity, with Australians in Asia investing their home with a symbolic meaning, reinforcing ideas of cultural superiority.

Although cultural ties influenced Australian trade and investment patterns, British and Australian interests were never truly aligned. With the slow drift away from its former reliance on Britain, Australian export trade with Asia steadily increased and, in the 1900s, markets for Australian frozen beef, live cattle and coal opened up in the Archipelago. Australian prospectors and gold and tin miners forged commercial interests from New Guinea to the Malay States, as the successful Raub Australian gold mine in Pahang exemplified. Australians sought to define and assert a separate commercial identity in the Archipelagic marketplace.

The Pacific War confronted the threat of an Asian power, and the collapse of the old imperial order heralded Australia's search for regional security. Yet, while endeavouring to come to terms with the demise of white superiority, many Australians also perceived the injustices of colonialism. After the surrender, Australian interests in the Archipelago were sacrificed on the altar of Anglo-American cooperation. Decolonisation wars raised the spectre of Asian communism. Visions of an archipelagic regional association concerned with collective security contrasted with emphases on exporting Australian values to Asian nation-states to combat communism. Successive governments highlighted the market opportunities for Australian goods and services in the industrialised tiger economies of Asia, reflecting the increasing regionalisation of Australian engagement with Asia. According to Battersby, even though Australian foreign policy is more interventionist today than ever before, Asian engagement has more to do with globalisation than regional integration.

Ranging across economic history, international relations, history, politics and cultural studies, Battersby reveals the persistence of the regional idea at the heart of two centuries of Australasian colonisation. The book provides the historical context for contemporary Australian debates about increasing numbers of asylum seekers arriving in boats, racist attacks on Indian students, terrorist threats and trade imperatives, demonstrating that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Battersby claims that in the absence of a clear regional policy, Australia still has much to do to gain acceptance in the neighbourhood.

A multifaceted book, it is structured chronologically around the thematic organisation and analysis of a vast array of mostly Australian primary sources. Particularly useful for the personal accounts, as well as for the mass of trade data, charts and statistics it contains, the book is a very valuable addition to the history of Australia's engagement with Asia. While the chapters are often discursive and at times repetitive, overall the book successfully manages the vast array of data. It is a very useful resource for academics and policymakers alike and contributes new evidence about the extent of ordinary Australians' connections to Asia. Some years ago, I convened an Engaging Asia course at the Australian National University — I wish this book had been available then.