| Book Review | Labour History, 95 | The History Cooperative

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BOOK REVIEW

Mark Finnane, JV Barry: A Life, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007. pp. xiv + 322. $49.95 cloth.

Mark Finnane's book is a well written biography of a man who is something of an occasional presence in the histories of Australia. Reading general histories, histories of the labour movement and the Labor Party, histories of criminology, civil rights and cold war Australia, J.V. (Jack) Barry skips in and out of text and footnotes. Finnane's book establishes the importance of an Irish Catholic Albury boy in some of the major changes in notions of law, order, state power, social reform and Labor politics spanning the decades from the 1920s to the 1960s. It sets out clearly the principles which propelled Barry to become a major campaigner for civil liberties, criminology and the abolition of the death penalty, and the personal ambition that saw him become a judge of the Supreme Court and a knight of the realm. It also offers a sense of farce in the way that a lawyer, a judge, a UN delegate and a man committed to basic principles of equity and social justice could be seen as an enemy of the state and the subject of an ASIO file. But, then again, as this book implies, those of an Irish Catholic background were always somewhat suspect in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century.

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