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Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s by Stuart Macintyre
Stuart Macintyre’s book reconstructs the way politicians and public servants reorganised the Australian state to put it on a war footing after 1939; how they prepared for postwar reconstruction, like some other countries, long before victory was certain; and how those plans changed as they were executed. The book shows how judgements about the nature of Australian society and political choices about the future meshed with, and came into tension with, technical, scientific, economic and administrative expertise. It traces debates about Australia and its future as they played out in practical settings under acute pressure.
Australia’s Boldest Experiment makes a powerful case for rethinking popular narratives of twentieth-century Australia and the privileged place of war — and especially combat — in those narratives. To shift our attention from Gallipoli, Fromelles and Kokoda to reconstruction is to put the economic lives of Australians, education and immigration at the heart of the Australian story.
This is a truly magnificent contribution to political history. Macintyre wears his learning lightly but draws on an immense knowledge of Australian history, navigating adroitly between the detail of political negotiation and the larger social, cultural, and economic contexts of a transformative period in Australian and world history. The book shows an acute and humane judgement of personalities and a powerful interpretative command of structures and processes. This work is highly commendable for its precise and fetching style, and for its extraordinary success in relating so many complex developments with clarity and balance.