The vibrant Australian alternative theatre scene of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Victoria, has been well served in recent years by both scholarly research and works of reminiscence. Meredith Rogers, whose PhD formed the basis of this book, is both a scholar/researcher and a reminiscing participant. In 1979 and 1980 she was an actor and company manager of the Mill Community Theatre, based in Geelong, but emerging from the ethos of the Melbourne new theatre scene which coalesced around the legendary Australian Performing Group. As a participant, she is able to draw on what archival material survives in formal settings, but also on her own memories and archives, and those of her co-workers, in reconstructing a company history and its practices from fragmentary remains.

The Mill was a not entirely comfortable pioneer in the emergent Australian community theatre movement of the 1970s and 1980s and, Rogers claims, is consequently inadequately represented in subsequent historical accounts. Community theatre in Australia did not mean merely ‘amateur theatre’, as it did elsewhere, and increasingly does now in Australia as well, but was a practice which placed a core of professional artists within specific communities, variously defined, to engage them in dialogue through the construction of performances with and for them with the ultimate intention of community development. The Mill's take on this dialogic approach was distinctive, resulting from the interests of the company's ‘charismatic leader’, James McCaughey, whom Rogers describes as the ‘subject’ (p. x) of her book.

McCaughey was a classics scholar whose pioneering work in developing a practice-based interdisciplinary drama course at Melbourne University in the 1970s led to an academic appointment at Deakin University in Geelong, with a brief to establish similar courses. The Mill Community Theatre was established in a disused flour mill, with a small ensemble of actors, a connection to the courses at Deakin and a community outreach brief – a situation almost unimaginable now in either theatre or academia. Rogers contextualizes her account of the company's work over its seven-year life via three chapters: the first indicating why the Mill has been unfairly neglected in the historical accounts – a chapter perhaps a little parochial for an international readership; a second chapter, bursting at the seams, focused on the interests McCaughey brought to the venture, including his experiments in staging classical Greek theatre, his explorations of contemporary dance and music, group-devised and postmodern performance, and actor–audience relationships in non-theatre spaces; and a third significantly shorter chapter on Geelong and the company's performance space as social and physical contexts. While other Australian community theatre ventures tended to draw on popular performance techniques like those of the San Francisco Mime Troupe or British agitprop of the time, the Mill took more from the likes of Grotowski, Schechner's Performance Group, the Open Theatre, Théâtre du Soleil and Pina Bausch. This third chapter indicates that the company ‘set out to renovate theatre through its engagement with its communities rather than the other way around’ (p. 92), although Rogers describes strands of the work, particularly incorporating Deakin students, which were more in tune with the social engagement strategies of other companies in the community theatre movement.

The best of the book comes in the subsequent three chapters devoted to accounts of the main strands of the Mill's work: public performance, the centrepiece of which was a series of promenade-staged, local-history-based plays with elements of audience participation; outreach work with specific communities, including women's groups, youth groups, primary schools, prisoners and people with disabilities; and what Rogers describes as ‘the Company's signature event and most successful continuous experiment in participatory performance-making’ (pp. 9–10), called Mill Nights, during which participants invited via newspaper advertisements or direct contact with community organizations were taken through theatre games and exercises to devise performances on the spot.

Rogers's reconstructions of these projects and the accompanying photographs present a vivid picture of a set of exciting experiments and performances and, as she closes by demonstrating, a group of alumni influential on various alternative and community theatre ventures since. These include Geelong's Back to Back Theatre, a disability group which has been touring performances and workshops internationally since the 1990s. Rogers has ensured the Mill's spot on what is becoming a slightly less underpopulated map of Australian theatre activity in the 1980s.