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because of limits of space, she does not comment on the implication of her argumentfor the debate between James Tully and Jeremy Waldron concerning the degree towhich property was private in Locke’s thought; that is, whether it conferred a sense ofabsolute control over what was owned, or whether Locke’s ‘individual’ was still boundby God’s imperatives to charity and neighbourliness. This is an important point, becausein her discussion of tithes, Brace sees the Christian conscience becoming privatized, oras she puts it “bounded”, and this was linked to territorial privatization, she argues.There is certainly an important idea here, but this link is never really proven. Locke’smodel of the mind was much more bounded than previous conceptions, but was stilla part of a spiritual universe ordered by God. Also Locke’s ideas were very radical,and what we might term the ‘unbounded self’ was still affected for most by, in additionto God’s will, magic, the position of the planets, and anatomical humorous theory.Also, in terms of real territorial property, customs of inheritance and land use continuedto be legally important into the eighteenth century, even if they were increasinglychallenged. But these points do not take away from a very important thesis whichcorrectly tries to link political theory with debates about actual economic and socialchange, and does so successfully.

University of Cambridge C M

doi:10.1006/jhge.2000.0287, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

R D. H, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art andFilm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi+347. £45.00 hardback)

After two brief introductory chapters, the first of which outlines traditional Aboriginalrelationships with the arid and semi-arid regions, and the second which sketches outattitudes to the desert by western cultures, there follows the substance of the book.The next four chapters discuss in detail the early explorers of the nineteenth century—their reasons for exploration, their published accounts, their visual records, theirjournals’ impact both on late nineteenth century poetry and the formation of nationalidentity. Finally, a chapter discusses the ripping yarns of the fin de siecle, which whiledrawing on the legacy of the early explorers effectively brings their era to an end. Notonly does a new fantasy emerge in the form of the twentieth century’s confidentexpectation of conquering and improving the desert through the use of technology, butalso, in the early part of the century, the desert looses its pivotal place in the iconographyof Australian identity. This ends Part One of the book. Her discussion of the impactof the explorers’ legacy on late nineteenth century poetry was particularly insightful.The material is guided along a path that would be recognizable to those familiar with,for example, Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism, Mary Louise Pratt’s influentialwork on women travellers and the gendering of landscape, and Paul Carter’s acclaimedwork in spatial history, on the exploration and naming of Australia. But there is noreal engagement with this body of work, apart from noticing that Said never mentionedAustralia. In that sense I was left wanting something new to be said about a groundthat has been well trodden before. As with much of the book, Haynes’s contributionreally lies with the wealth of material she has assembled rather than any perspectivedeveloped, whether theoretical, cultural, social, or historical.

Unlike Part One, the chapters that make up Part Two are not arranged in chronologicalorder, nor do they focus exclusively on any one form of representation. Each chapteris based around a different theme and more or less covers most of the twentieth century,

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ranging across several media. The opening chapter gives some attention to travelaccounts but the span of time is really too great and the treatment superficial. Thereis the obligatory swipe at contemporary tourism and travel. The texts are a strangemix, from popularised travellers’ tales to accounts of scientific exploration, fromgeneralised tours of inspection, such as Ernestine Hill’s, to documentary film. The nextchapter does focus on painting and is more satisfying than the previous one. But thespan of time covered is just too long—from the post-World War I period, throughHans Heysen’s “rediscovery” of the desert for non-indigenous painting in the 1920s,through the subsequent work of Nolan, Boyd, Williams, Drysdale and so on. In thenext chapter, around the theme of the “Gothic Desert”, film is combined with fictionand poetry, exposing the weakness of this book when it comes to a consideration ofcinematic representations. “Film” scarcely deserves its place in the book’s sub-title.This is the pattern for the remainder of the book. Small chapters, with a diversity ofmaterial, spanning large time frames, organised around various themes. The result ispatchy. At times the insights and coherence work well; for example, with the way theexplorer legacy was revisioned by painters such as Nolan, Boyd, and Tucker, or infiction and poetry, such as in the novel Voss, by Patrick White. Haynes has alsoperceptively drawn out the crucial shifts in modern painting and literature towardsecological, environmental and spiritual perspectives.

With very few exceptions, Aboriginal culture is presented as static and unchanging.The historical interaction between Aboriginal cultures and modernity, whether theirsuccess with stock raising on Outback stations, or the incorporation of motor trans-portation into traditional practices, or the extraordinary engagement with high-techcommunication systems, for example in the case of satellite broadcasting in centralAustralia, or the creative dialogues between traditional land-care practices and thoseappropriate for National Parks, or the complex relationship between urban-basedAboriginals and the desert, are basically ignored. Traditional Aboriginal relationshipto the desert is presented as exemplary, without critical or evaluative comment, andthus is used as a springboard by which to continually critique and measure westernattitudes, values and representations. The final, very brief chapter returns to a quickcoverage of the contemporary upsurge of interest in Aboriginal painting, particularlyfocusing on the Papunya painting movement with its characteristic dot and circledesigns. The question it raises is crucial: is the contemporary upsurge of enthusiasmfor Aboriginal art part of a genuine reconciliation or is it a form of cultural exploitationand appropriation? Indeed, is it “guilt-driven” (p. 286)? The author’s tacit identificationof herself, and presumably the reader, as a “card-carrying liberal internationalist” (p.286), along with the unease and discomfort that results, is a clue to the book’sunevenness. By using schematic, idealized, ahistorical accounts of selective aspects ofAboriginal culture, virtually as book-ends, justice is done neither to western struggleswith representation, experience and meaning, nor, importantly, to Aboriginal culture(s).It becomes yet again just another kind of tokenism, or just another stick for self-flagellation. Haynes continually disparages western attitudes in comparison with aprofundity of Aboriginal relationship to the land, both spiritual and mundane: e.g. InChapter 5 she writes, “Europeans engaged with the land almost exclusively throughvisual observation.” (p. 85) This, of course, ignores the relationship between most ruralEuropeans and the land upon which they live, work and die. This was anything butsuperficial, or purely visual. It is quite misleading to concentrate, as she does in thischapter, on the visual art of nineteenth century exploration, or, more generally through-out the book, on the perceptions of an educated or literary elite, as if these typify ageneral European attitude, or even provide dominant insights into that fascinatingtransference of meaning and values, achieved by migrants between their ancestral landsand the new ones upon which their life depends. Her important reference to the way

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technology opened up new perspectives on the desert around the beginning of thetwentieth century (p.140) is scarcely followed up, except for a discussion about the wayin which air travel affected landscape painting after World War II. Nineteenth centurytechnologies such as transcontinental railway projects and most importantly, the mid-century construction of the overland telegraph, are just ignored. I’d also have likedmore on the distinction between the bush, the semi-arid and the arid regions in thenineteenth century.

The choice of texts is strangely ill balanced for a study that makes such sweepingclaims about Australian culture. There is very little on photography, and diaries,television, magazines and newspaper accounts are also absent. Music, whether folk,country, rock or classical just doesn’t figure. Tourism receives short shrift, being quicklydismissed as crass and inauthentic, as does the representations through all forms ofadvertising. The result is a valorization of “high-art” and a dismissal of popular culture,at least in the twentieth century. The desert becomes a strangely technology-free zonewith virtually no accounts by non-Aboriginals who have lived and worked there. Thestudy continually generalizes about the values and experiences of non-AboriginalAustralian culture as a whole, with very little consideration given to gender, age, classor, critical since World War II, to ethnicity. There is a lack of cohesive historicalbackground to provide context. The result is a study that is primarily driven by achronology of texts, rather than relating texts to the circumstances of their production.Without this it becomes difficult to evaluate the reception of these representations, bothat the time of production and subsequently, or their influence on the culture as a whole.It would, of course, be difficult to include all of these other texts and complex rangeof issues. But, I believe they could at least have been signalled to draw attention to thelimitations of the study and hence induce more circumspection about its assertions andconclusions. This was always going to be an ambitious project. Its failures are, to acertain extent, compensated by its success in synthesizing an immense body of material.The real strength of the work lies in the handling of the explorer accounts, plus thepoetry and novels of the past two hundred years. Into this core, Haynes has alsosuccessfully integrated numerous insights derived from a consideration of painting.This is a beautifully produced book, with numerous images, all clearly reproduced andmany in colour. Roslynn Haynes has assembled a wealth of examples in a study thatwill be of interest and value to scholars and students from a range of disciplines. Clearlywritten, it will no doubt also appeal to many other readers outside the academic arena.

University of South Australia P B

doi:10.1006/jhge.2000.0288, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

S M, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London:Reaktion Books, 1998. Pp.237. £14.95 paperback)

Since Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991 a plethora of empty plinthspreviously occupied by statues of Lenin, Marx and local representatives of the socialistrevolution have dotted the landscape. In the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius a civil servant,Saulius Paukstys, commissioned a local sculptor to design a statue of Frank Zappa forthe city centre because “We were desperate to find a symbol that would mark an endto communism, but at the same time express that it wasn’t all doom and gloom”(Guardian, 29 January 2000, p. 2). The subject of the German art historian SergiuszMichalski’s book is precisely to analyse the symbolic role of statuary in the articulation

2001 Academic Press