Ray, Arthur J.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 239Yet, for all its insights into the frontier myth and the Boy Scouts movement, Sonsof the Empire is at times frustrating to read. MacDonald never defines the frontier:to argue his thesis he freely draws on evidence from the imperial frontier (in all itsdiversity) and the American frontier (with its multiplicity of meanings and multitudeof contradictions). The reader is thus advised to Be Prepared for an often confus-ing journey through several frontier myths. MacDonald himself appears confusedwhen he ignores his own insistence on the importance of the American frontier andoddly concludes that the myth of the imperial frontier [emphasis added] providedboth the context and the material for the construction of Scouting (p. 204).In part a study of masculinist ideology, Sons of the Empire contributes to theexpanding literature on the history of masculinities. Beyond citing Michael Kim-mels crisis of masculinity and the introduction to Elaine Showalters SexualAnarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de siècle (Viking, 1990), however, Mac-Donald fails to provide an account of how he intends to use gender as a categoryof analysis. Given all that has been written on the history and theory of gender inthe past two decades, this remains a glaring omission. Moreover, Kimmel points outthat at least three masculinities emerged in response to Americas turn-of-the-century New Woman who resisted existing definitions of femininity and challengedestablished structures of power. The pro-feminist man (albeit a minority) embracedthe possibility of a future free from a dangerous, compulsive masculinity. The anti-feminist man sought refuge in an aggressive misogyny and ideas about the naturalinferiority and subordination of women. The pro-male man, meanwhile, placed arenewed emphasis on traditional masculinity, one that rejected sentimentality forvirility and the martial spirit. Was Baden-Powells notion of masculinity one ofthese? Or was it a different masculinity altogether?These shortcomings notwithstanding, Sons of the Empire will be of interest tohistorians interested in the study of myths, masculinities, and youth movements.Donald A. WrightUniversity of OttawaEviatar Zerubavel  Terra Cognita. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UniversityPress, 1992. Pp. xiv, 164.Peggy Brock  Outback Ghettos: A History of Aboriginal Institutionalisation andSurvival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. v, 180.The 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbuss first voyage to the Americassparked a heated debate about his place in history. Eviatar Zerubavels TerraCognita is one of the countless books to address this controversy. Unlike most otherscholars, however, Zerubavel is not interested in using the commemoration as anopportunity to reassess the impact of European expansion on aboriginal peoples.Rather, he took the occasion to rethink what is meant by the concept of dis-covery. Zerubavels purpose is to challenge the popular notion that Columbus was240 Histoire sociale / Social Historythe European discoverer of North America. The author contends that to assignanyone that honour is to misunderstand the process.Zerubavel argues that the discovery of new worlds is a complex intellectualprocess for any cultural group. Certainly it is not an instantaneously epic event,which, according to Zerubavel, is the way our action-oriented civilization mistak-enly prefers to see it. In the case of Europe, the intellectual discovery of theAmericas as a world other than Africa or Asia was a lengthy process involvingmany adventurers and scholars who preceded and followed Columbus. Indeed, theauthor contends that Columbus contributed little to this recognition by doggedlyasserting he had reached the Orient despite mounting evidence to the contrary.Zerubavel shows that Portuguese explorers and cartographers  and those whoexpanded on their ideas  played crucial roles in Europes mental discovery of thenew world. Among them, the explorer-cosmographer Amerigo Vespucci stands out.He accompanied an expedition in 1501 and 1502 that sailed southward along thecoast of South America as far as Uruguay, or perhaps Argentina. Vespucci notedthat the continent extended too far south to offer the sailing route that Marco Polohad used 200 years previously on a voyage from the South China Sea into theIndian Ocean. It followed, therefore, that the vast landmass was an entity entirelydifferent from Asia. Vespuccis ideas soon circulated widely in print beginning in1504, albeit in a pirated Latin translation entitled Mundus Novus. A year later afellow Portuguese cosmographer, Duarte Pacheco Pereira, expanded on these ideasin a book (Esmeraldo de situ orbus) in which he envisioned the Americas as afourth part of the world, separate from Europe, Africa, or Asia.Although the Portuguese were among the first Europeans to begin to reconceptu-alize the world into four parts, according to Zerubavel it was the armchair ex-plorer Martin Waldseemüller who played the critical role in altering the Europeanworld view. Waldseemüller had this opportunity because the Portuguese courtcensored heavily maps and documents relating to its discoveries to protect its vestedinterests. Thus Waldseemüllers Cosmographiae Introductio, published in 1507,proved to be the seminal work in the popularization of the notion that America wasabsolutely separate from Asia. Included in this widely disseminated work was thefirst European map of the world that displayed North and South America as anunbroken landmass separate from Asia. Zerubavel notes that Waldseemüller madea bold speculation in this regard: no European would actually see South Americaswest coast for another six years, and Captain James Cook would not firmly estab-lish the separateness of North America from northeastern Asia for another 271years. In Cosmographiae Introductio Waldseemüller also named this fourth worldAmerica to honour Amerigo Vespucci, whom he credited as its discoverer.So, although Zerubavel admits Columbuss role in the physical discovery ofAmerica by Europe, he honours the intellectual pioneers, particularly Vespucci,Pereira, and Waldseemüller, for having had the intellectual guts to re-examine theavailable information and use it to speculate and create a modern cosmographythat recognized the New World as separate from the old. In doing so he explainswhy scholars, who often had none of the first-hand knowledge of new worlds whichexplorers like Columbus possessed, actually played a bigger role in the process ofComptes rendus / Book Reviews 241mental discovery. Too often explorers clung to outdated cosmographies that prevent-ed them from truly understanding what they had accomplished. Columbus is aclassic example.In Outback Ghettos, Australian historian Peggy Brock shifts the focus fromEurope to the lands affected by European expansion. She looks at the ways Europe-an colonists mentally reconstructed the reality of Australia to suit their own endsand explores the ways Aborigines responded. One of the most remarkable of theseconstructs was the legal doctrine of terra nullius. Put simply, this notion held thatAborigines wandered over the land before European contact, but did not occupyit because they erected no permanent structures. This legal and political fictionmaintained that the country was developed by settlers, not invaders. State policiestoward Aborigines helped perpetuate this notion by removing them from the sightand awareness of the general white population by largely confining them to depen-dent communities. These settlements served as pools of labour in times of labourscarcity. Brock notes that, until recently, the dominant historiographic tradition ofthe country justified these policies by perpetuating the myth that the act of settle-ment was swift and not resisted by Aborigines and that superior technology right-fully predominated over people with outmoded, primitive crafts.In the new tradition of scholarship concerning aboriginal people throughout theformer domains of European colonial empires, Brock challenges this old mentality.She looks at the agency of Aborigines through histories of three outback ghettos Poonindie, Koonibba, and Nepabunna  located in the state of South Australia.Brock carefully chose these settlements because their histories bracketed crucialperiods and they represented different Aboriginal responses. Missionaries createdthe first two settlements; in contrast, the Aborigines of the Flinders Ranges initiatedthe latter community before these newcomers arrived.Brock sets the stage for her case studies by providing the reader with an excellenthistorical overview of government legislation and policy concerning Aborigines. Shenotes that the purpose of the states policies shifted over time. Initially the govern-ment segregated Aborigines in order to Christianize, educate, and train them; in thelater nineteenth century its purpose was to isolate Aborigines from the destructiveinfluences of the superior white society; and in the early twentieth century itsought to remove Aborigines so that they would not contaminate white communi-ties. Two aspects of the discussion will be particularly striking for Canadian readers.There are many parallels between the states treatment of Aborigines in Australiaand of First Nations in Canada. For instance, the various Aboriginal Protection Acts(and amendments to them) controlled all aspects of Aborigines lives in much thesame way that the sundry amended versions of the Indian Act regulated the livesof Canadas First Nations people. On the other hand, the Protector of Aborigineshad more arbitrary authority than Canadas Minister (and deputy minister) of IndianAffairs.Through her case studies Brock delineates a three-stage pattern of developmentthat apparently was common to most Aboriginal communities. During the firststage, resident Aborigines knew life away from the institution and could withdrawfrom it at any time. During this phase the missionaries had to work hard, create242 Histoire sociale / Social Historyeconomic opportunities, and be accommodating to earn the Aborigines loyalty. Bythe second stage Aborigines had lost their connection with the old order and wereno longer comfortable with the idea of a life completely separate from the mission-ary settlement. Missionary staff responded to this development by shifting theirattention away from winning converts and toward treating the Aborigines undertheir care as inmates who had to be closely disciplined. During these first twostages Aborigines used the missions as refuges and bases of operations. Individualsand whole groups moved in and out of these communities depending on internaland external social and economic conditions. The third stage began in the 1950swhen state policy for Aborigines shifted from a segregationist to an assimilationistmode. This change made alternative lifestyles possible and many Aborigines re-sponded by abandoning the mission communities. While outlining these broadtrends, Brock also notes that environmental circumstances and geographic locationstrongly influenced the particular course of events in each community. Settlementssituated in harsh climates or terrain neutralized the power of European technology.At such locations (Nepabunna was an example) and those remote from urbandevelopment, Aborigines resisted white domination much longer. Although Brockdelineates general patterns in this way, she is also sensitive to the varied responsesof individual Aborigines to their changing circumstances. She personalizes her storyby including family and individual life histories at the end of each community casestudy.At the close of her study, Brock returns to the question of Aboriginal agency. Sheconcludes that at the local level Aborigines chose from a variety of options thatwere available to them in their struggle to survive as a people in the new worldtheir colonial masters had created. They had little control at the macro level,however. Ultimately the dominant white society set the parameters within which theAborigines were forced to operate. In the end, Brock decides that the lasting legacyof the mission settlements was that they created the circumstances for Aboriginesto establish large, close-knit communities based on shared experiences, intermar-riage and association with land with which they identified. In this respect, theseinstitutions played a role similar to that of ghettos in any society in which minoritygroups have to endure unceasing discrimination.Arthur J. RayUniversity of British ColumbiaPat Sandiford Grygier  A Long Way from Home: The Tuberculosis Epidemicamong the Inuit. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994.Pp. xix, 233.One of the images which remains with me from my childhood in Hamilton is thered neon cross that shone nightly from atop The Mountain. The cross was thesymbol of the Tuberculosis Society of Canada and marked the location of theMountain Sanitorium. Sanitoria were common sights on the periphery of many of

Peggy Brock — Outback Ghettos: A History of Aboriginal Institutionalisation and Survival

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Peggy Brock — Outback Ghettos: A History of Aboriginal Institutionalisation and Survival

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)