Alan Brissenden and Keith Glennon did much of the research for Australia Dances: Creating Australian Dance 1945–1965 during the same historical period that the book covers. Glennon travelled from state to state, interviewing artists and following leads he acquired in ‘the field’, and Brissenden pulled the transcript together, all in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But, as with so many performance archives, the letters, photographs, clippings and transcripts ended up in a garage. When Glennon died in 1983, his brother donated the twenty-two boxes to the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide, where Brissenden was a lecturer in English and, by then, an established dance critic. Brissenden tried to get the book published, again without success. Strangely, it is this book's historical adjournment that is its biggest asset. Between them, Glennon and Brissenden witnessed much of the work they describe in Australia Dances and it is those moments when engaging eyewitness accounts break through the stricter listing of facts and figures that the value of this book is most apparent.

Australia Dances is encyclopedic in its structure, but it is also a beautiful object, full of carefully reproduced photographs and sketches of costumes. There are a few oddities, however, some of which could be blamed on the publisher's attempt to be true to the original transcript. For example, no comment is made when we are offered a picture of a dancer ‘blacked up’ in Rex Reid's The Night of the Sorceress (1962) and the description of the Aboriginal Theatre's 1963 tour and performances is corralled under the title ‘Ethnic Dance’. There is also very little framing or analysis of the abundant dance history and diverse choreographic practices offered in this book. There is a lot of who, what, where and how, but not a lot of why, and this may be a disappointment for those who would like to see facts placed in historical context and assessed for implications and meaning. But the expressed intention of Australia Dances was, and is, to ‘share in building an awareness of a community of interests, stimulate the interchange of ideas, and provide a record of the richly exciting period when so much creativity was energising Australian dance’ (p. 5), and this it does admirably.