Book Review

Helen Irving's historical investigations of Australia's constitution have appeared at a moment of some public reflection upon the meanings and future directions for change of the constitution in Australia. The Constitutional Convention of 1997 signaled that a wider range of people, both public figures and also less visible members of the nation, were keen participants in the debate over constitutional change. Irving's framework of "cultural history" broadens the scope of a history of the constitution's origins. As editor of A Woman's Constitution? Gender and History in the Australian Commonwealth (1996), Irving signposted her important contribution to the field of constitutional history. In this collection contributors show how different women participated in the Federal movement and played a variety of roles in shaping the new Commonwealth. It ends with Irving's glance at the importance of imagination in the work of constitutional reform. In this essay Irving and coauthor David Headon imagine a future Australian society that has the benefit of hindsight and experience, appreciating the central issues of a past era. This kind of imagining must surely be part of constitutional reform in the present. Or so Irving and Headon wistfully speculate.	1
Imagination and speculation are key concepts in Irving's new book, where reflection on the cultural conditions of federation, and the public figures who participated in the culture of making a nation at least in constitutional terms, prompts more thought about Australia in the present. Irving finds it at times "deeply poignant" to read late nineteenth-century predictions of the future nation (45). The constitution is considered as a text, like others (national myths, nationalist and utopian literature) circulating around it, that articulates future hopes for society. With chapter titles like "The Imaginary Nation" and "Imagined Constitutions," Irving interprets this text to challenge the body of histories about the constitution that—as her conclusion states—tend to construct Federation within an economic model. This challenge, which conceives of the moment of Federation, the Federal movement and the Federalists themselves as part of a wider utopian turn, is perhaps long overdue. J. A. La Nauze's 1972 history, The Making of the Australian Constitution, gestured to by Irving, claimed that the Federal movement in the Australian colonies in the latter part of the nineteenth century "died in childbirth" with the inauguration of the constitution in January 1901, and that a history of this movement was much needed.	2
Over twenty years later, like La Nauze, but influenced by recent Australian feminist scholarship of nationhood, Irving uses the metaphors of family and life cycle to describe Federation. "Colonial Nuptials" deploys the metaphor of marriage to some effect, describing (just as contemporaries, including Alfred Deakin did) the moment of Federation as the colonies entering into matrimonial agreement. The chapter runs the risk of trying to make everything fit into this symbolic framework; Aborigines, for instance, were, as Irving recalls, absent from "nation-making processes" (15), for the most part represented rather than active participants in the celebrations. But the scene for this history is artfully set and woven from a wide range of sources, especially newspaper reports. Irving's reliance on these is part of her attempt to write a cultural history. I especially enjoyed the careful detailing of all the regional and urban celebrations around the Inauguration. Temporary "arches and pavillions" were constructed in cities, in the case of Melbourne, erected "in something of a panic" (20), and these were structures in which (white) citizens asked "what it meant to be Australian" (24).	3
Later chapters take up the place of Aborigines in the "community" described by the constitution. Significantly, it was the definition of "whiteness" that became important to those imagining this community. Thus Aborigines were barely mentioned in debates, and the Chinese were constructed as a threat to a community that "embraced other whites" in its self-definition. The discussions around race, immigration, and the meaning of "native Australian" lend Irving's book a sense of real relevance to the current debates over the nation in Australia. Together with her attention to the concerns and voices of women, and thus the problematic of gender, this analysis of race is not made marginal by Irving but threads its way through her text. In "Things Properly Federal," marriage and divorce laws are discussed as aspects of the constitution that set it apart from the American model but make it similar to the Canadian constitution. Irving makes the connection between the contributions of women to the blurring of the lines between "public" life and politics and the "private" or domestic scene, and the growing emphasis on welfare legislation by the state.	4
Reading the constitution as a textual production provides Irving with the possibility of grappling with its linguistic slippages and definitions in a historical context. This is something that is nicely realized in her chapter "Citizens," which details the debates around the meaning of the term "citizen." Australians became "subjects" of the empire, but were to have certain "rights" (though not all Australians) in their own country. The explanation offered by Irving for the conflict over these terms solves the perceived problem of the lack of "explicit statements of ideals and guarantees of rights in Australia (162). But more than this, the chapter explores the very "slippery" concepts at play in these debates: "citizenship" itself, "freedom," and "participation" in the making of the nation.	5
Within the field of "law and history," To Constitute a Nation stands out as a book that places the Australian constitution as a document in its shifting and complex legal and social context. The useful appendix, "Key Sections of the Constitution," provides the reader with reference points to Irving's discussion. This is not a weighty, impenetrable history. It is an entertaining and perceptive study that interrogates the relationship between "people" and "nation" through themes of great significance to the contemporary reader, some of which were perhaps surprisingly urgent to those "framers" of the constitution in the late nineteenth century. Irving also places her subject within an international framework, which may be useful for non-Australian readers.	6
Cathy Coleborne University of Waikato, New Zealand

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