Alan Mayne

Review Essay: Tall Tales but True?: New York’s “Five Points” Slum

TYLER ANBINDER, Five Points: The 19th-Century Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001, pp. 532, notes, bibliography, index, maps, illustrations,

On the Edge of History

30 paper. REBECCA YAMIN, ed., Tales of Five Points: Working-Class Life in Nineteenth-Century New York. 7 vols. Washington, DC: General Services Administration, 2002, notes, bibliography, appendices, index, maps, illustrations, paper.

City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia

TREVOR FISHER,Prostitution and the Victorians . Phoenix Mill,[AUSTRALIA? ]: Sutton, 1997, xxviii, 164 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index, £18.99 cloth. PAMELA HORN, The Victorian Town Child . Phoenix Mill, [AUSTRALIA? ]: Sutton, 1997, 248 pp., illustrations, notes, appendices, bibliography, index, £18.99 cloth. BERTRAND TAITHE,The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor. London: Rivers Oram, 1996, 256 pp., notes, index, £35.00 cloth. JACINTA PRUNTY,Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography . Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998, xiv, 366 pp., illustrations, tables, maps, bibliography, index, £39.50 cloth.

“Our Corner of the World” Australian Urban History and the Poetics of Space

of thought is a strength, allowing a much wider range than we would find in, say, a book on Australian theology or even Australian spirituality. The attention to process and vitalist philosophers, feminist and ecological thinkers, and the beginnings of appreciation of traditions other than Christianity, alongside impressive coverage of theological currents from a remarkably wide selection of Christian writing, makes for an erudite and stimulating account. Yet the breadth is also frustrating, seemingat times, at least to this reader, to risk obscuring the topic. I wondered how some subjects would have reacted to their inclusion. Did Sydney University philosopher John Anderson regard himself as a contributor to Australian religious thought? Presumably the category ‘religious’ is used in what anthropologists might call an etic rather than emic sense – but do Anderson’s reported similarities to a ‘Calvinist clergyman’ and ‘cult figure for his disciples’, or his intellectual debt to ‘the metaphysics developed by the Australian Jewish philosopher Samuel Alexander’ (25), override the fact that he ‘was certain that religious claims were false, and gave reasons for his views’ (24)? Later, utopianism seems to qualify, so Hudson finds the belief in ‘a perfect future society’ among ‘many Australian Communists’ to be ‘profoundly religious’ – Katherine Prichard ‘spent decades extolling the virtues of the Soviet Union and achieved the status of a Communist saint’ (58). But, if Anderson and Communists count as religious, why stop there? What about the no less sacralised utopia of the free market, for example? As to formal theology, Pentecostals are a surprising omission: only recently writing much academically, but from stirrings on the Victorian goldfields theyare nowamajorAustralian force inone of the most significant global religious movements. The book concludes with a list of five further areas in which ‘better acknowledging the nature, extent and quality of Australian religious thought’ might contribute to ‘refiguring the national imaginary’ (237). They include identifying religious contributions to public policy, economic and legal thought. I will add another. Hudson notes the sensitivities, with attendant risks of Eurocentrism, in engaging with the Indigenous sacred. He observes, for example, that the non-Indigenous thinkers he cites who have engaged with the Indigenous sacred ‘rarely spoke Aboriginal languages, at least notwell’ (230) – the only exception I noted is Deborah Bird Rose. Nevertheless, numbers of non-Indigenous scholars, fluent in Indigenous languages and conversantwith particular Indigenous cultures (thus avoiding the appropriating panAboriginal amalgam sometimes found in general statements about ‘the land’) would surely fit Hudson’s criteria for Australian religious thought – Phyllis Kaberry, Diane Bell and Bill Edwards, to beginwith.And, Indigenous thinkers: Hudsondiscusses Djiniyini Gondarra; a future study could engage with such theologians as Graham Paulson, Anne Pattel-Gray and Lee Miena Skye, and with Indigenous thinkers who do not identify with Christian tradition.

Guardians at the gate: quarantine and racialism in two Pacific Rim port cities, 1870–1914

This essay reviews urban history research in Australia, arguing that as the field has developed since the 1970s it has become increasingly interdisciplinary and outward looking. The essay draws attention to analysis that has focused on the vernacular forms of past social life, and argues that by adding complexity to this approach a useful research pathway can be developed through which to study the reference points used by people to frame and preserve their local habitats. In doing so the essay also introduces three other articles in this issue that discuss important overlapping areas of current research by urban historians in Australia.

On the Edges of History: Reflections on Historical Archaeology

This article examines the ambivalent relationship that San Francisco and Darwin developed with Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand they presented themselves as gateways that facilitated trade with Asia. On the other hand they acted as sentinels that protected Europeans from Asian immigration. This quirky behaviour is encapsulated in the quarantine regulations that were applied in both ports to Asian commodities and people. The two case studies suggest a broader paradox in the history of port cities. Their prosperity and vitality rested upon the free flow of goods and people, but those flows generated enormous frictions.