| Book Review | Labour History, 93 | The History Cooperative

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Book Review

*Graeme Davison, Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our Cities, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, 2004. pp xix + 308. $29.95 paper.*
Graeme Davison's book, Car Wars, was published a few years ago, but it is no less relevant in 2007. It focuses on Melbourne and traces the enfolding of the car into our culture and urban fabric in little less than 50 years. It was not so much a war as a great romance with a few big potholes long the way.	1
Davison places the car firmly in its post-war context with the end of austerity when only 15 per cent of journeys to work were made by car in 1951; but, by 1957, 51 per cent of Australian men drove to work (though most women still used public transport). Importantly he highlights that under Robert Menzies' Liberals, Australians were encouraged to reorient their social identity from the traditional focus of the political parties – the relations of production – to the relations of consumption – the private world of family, home and suburb.	2
The key players are comprehensively reviewed. The attraction of youth to cars, speed and their (alleged) sexual power; the battle by women to gain access to the family car, then buy one and overturn the stereotypes about 'women drivers'; the disintegration of the self-contained suburb with its variety of shops into the drive-in shopping centres, motels, petrol stations, wider streets and family trips to the bush fringes of the expanding city. The development of motorist's lobby groups are described, especially the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV), most of whose policies are still echoed today: establishing the car as the dominant form of overland transport, using road and petrol revenues for road construction, free and unfettered access to parking, and standardising and simplifying regulation.	. . .

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