Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Ian Tyrrell, an outstanding international social historian with a special interest in addictive substances and control measures, provides a comprehensive history of the use of tobacco in Australia and the campaigns against the weed. Based on extraordinarily broad coverage of primary sources, his work parallels, and is informed by, other national histories of the struggle over tobacco use. What is particularly distinctive about this book is the attention that Tyrrell pays to the viewpoints of smokers as well as the usual coverage of viewpoints of those who marketed and promoted tobacco use and those who opposed the substance and the industry. His book thus complements Robin Walker's more traditional but very incisive history of smoking and the tobacco business, Under Fire: A History of Tobacco Smoking in Australia (1984).

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Tyrrell recognizes the ritual nature of tobacco use as well as the addictive qualities of nicotine absorption. By the time that Australia was being settled in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the settlers largely smoked tobacco, and in pipes. The gold rush transformed the habit and the business, and Australians began to grow their own tobacco as well as import it. By the late nineteenth century, lively antitobacco movements were in place, based on evangelical beliefs and strong opposition to young people's smoking. Legislators attempted by law to keep tobacco from juveniles—and simultaneously began to make governments dependent on tobacco taxes.

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