No other contributor to this substantial volume is as clear and uncompromising in explaining the effects of British Imperialism on displaced, colonized peoples as the Aboriginal stockman and activist, Hobbles Danaiyarri, speaking with the anthropologist and historian, Deborah Bird Rose, about that well-known, emblematic colonizer, “Captain Cook” (26), at Yarralin in the Northern Territory in 1982:

“Really beautiful country,” Captain Cook reckoned. “That's why I’m cleaning up people, take it away. … I want to clean that people right up. … I like to put my building there. I like to put my horses there. I like to put my cattle there. I going to take all my book to make a bit of an office in Sydney Harbour.” … Bring lotta horse and bring lotta rifle, bullock. … Horse been galloping all over Australia, hunting all those people. … Blackfella been fight, and another whitefella been shot the whole lot. … I know Captain Cook been little bit wrong for these people. “This no more blackfella country. No more.” … I think they take the wrong book. Steal. Kill my people no reason. … Why didn’t you look after London and Big England? Why didn’t you stop your government, Captain Cook? (29–31)

Danaiyarri's opening salvo effectively casts everything that follows, no matter how intellectually subtle or labyrinthine it may be, into the shade. Though one finds many good things and sound observations to chew over in this book, its central problem lies within a taken-for-grantedness about the prospect of Empire—an implicit paradigm that views British Imperialism in Australia as simply a given, an inevitability requiring little explanation of its raison d’être, the guiding motivations of its creators or of the historical choices that brought it into being in a particular way. Australia's Empire is not a given to Danaiyarri, nor should it be to any scholar.

The editors, Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward, refer extensively to the Empire as an established entity as well as to its fall, but not so much as to the matter of its generation. They recall a time when Imperialists were seen as those who “dreamed great things” (6) but tend to elide these people's commission or countenancing of terrible things. They typify Australian migrants as “both colonists and citizens … `Citizens of the South'” (9) but dwell less upon them as simultaneously colonizers, preferring instead to employ the architectural terminology of “Empire builders … asserting their sovereignty” (12) over Australian and Pacific territories and peoples. With one notable exception, the substantive realities of material dispossession and an accompanying repetition of interpersonal violences are not so much extruded in this text as smoothly glided over by various deft maneuvers of academic escapology.

It does require nimble mental calisthenics to conclude, as Alan Atkinson does, that the conquest of Australia was “at once both brutal and intelligent, bloodthirsty and benign” (83). Here, justice-seeking Enlightenment thought and an “on the ground” (49) actuation of aggressive forays are treated as equally vital characteristics of dispossession, existing in a condition of fascinating tension. Something here, one would think, should have to give. Danaiyarri would rather interpret all this as the stark realities of “Captain Cook’s’ behaviour contrasted telling against the humbug of ‘Captain Cook’s’ book. Similarly, Richard Waterhouse expands upon ‘Settling the Land’” (55–77) with the same story of violent seizure substantially backgrounded. There is as much said of kindly squatters (a relatively minute category) as oppressive ones and as many lines devoted to successful Aborigines becoming “entrepreneurs” and “expert shearers” (60) (an even tinier statistic) as to overly exploited and dead ones. Pastoralists display “considerable chagrin” (72) when Aborigines spear their cattle and lack “tact and understanding” (62) toward convict workers. There is a point, surely, where literary restraint begins dancing with distortion.

Ann Curthoys makes a much better fist of handling frontier and postfrontier race relations as a story of “catastrophic loss” pitched against one of “immense gain” (78). Here Imperial expansion is not an inevitability but a choice. Officials already knew of the devastations colonialism had brought to North and South America, including the Caribbean, but pressed ahead regardless. This hints at the kind of brutal calculus that positions material gain always above human suffering: “Colonisation, with its relentless, destructive logic of displacement and erasure, would continue” (82). She is the only writer to venture that Australia's Empire may have been “founded on a fundamentally genocidal impulse” (91–92).

Contributors such as Curthoys thus have more success when they emphasize material realities rather than the windy rhetoric of Imperialists, as though their repetitive speeches were representative of something truly substantive. Dealing with the environment through Art, as Anne Gray does, produces a nicely readable chapter but does not contemplate an intrusive rapacity that has done more damage to Australian land, its flora, fauna, water, and, inevitably, climate, than virtually anywhere else on the planet. This oversight allows her to conclude that Australia is “a fortunate `enchanted' place” (136): well, tell that to the latest bushfire victims. John Hirst also rarely ventures away from the conceptual realm to depict only smooth transitions in the polity and “no great struggle” (143) to create democratic forms. So there is no “liberty-threatening tyranny” (144) in the colonies, even during the long penal era: a “new humanitarianism” ensures “a responsibility for the well-being of convicts” (144). British officials are always “remarkably efficient and honest” (146). In fact, colonial governments provide “a secure world in which all subjects enjoyed protection of their property and liberty” (145). He appears to forget that Aboriginal peoples—for all the good it did them—were nominally British subjects too.

On the other hand, seasoned historians such as Geoffrey Bolton, Neville Meaney, and Eric Richards do especially well in encapsulating the complex processes of money, myth, and migration. Bolton on “Money, Trade, Investment and Economic Nationalism” (211–31)—hardly a head-turning title—is the most pleasant surprise of the book: a sparkling piece of economic history contrived with thoughtfulness and wit. Indeed, Bolton's chapter, with Danaiyarri's narrative read against its grain, probably tells us much of what is essential to know about Imperialism in Australia. Angela Woollacott, on the evasive topic of gender and Empire, also shines, though she should note that, crucially, “J. S. Griffiths” (322) was a woman, not a man.

Overall, this volume deals more encompassingly with the Empire's Australia than with Australia's Empire. The colonies’ and nation's roles in bestriding the Pacific is only tangentially broached. I looked in vain for a discussion of Queensland's long labor-recruiting activities in the Pacific or of Australia's imposition of a part Jim Crow/part Apartheid system in the townships of Eastern New Guinea, or of its later machinations in Bougainville and Timor. The colonies’ fundamental role in the Maori Wars is elided as is Australia's terrible punitive intervention in Malaita in 1927. A text with such a subtle title does raise one's expectation of such investigations.