Richard Broinowski, a retired senior diplomat who has served in seven legations, three as ambassador, has long been interested in matters nuclear, as this excellent work demonstrates. Broinowski traces Australian nuclear developments from the early days of World War II to the most recent developments under Prime Minister John Howard. In the process, he chronicles Australian nuclear ambitions, from the early flirtations with acquiring a nuclear weapon and its related strike capability, to the later development of uranium exports.

Throughout Fact or Fission? it is clear that it is not possible to study Australian nuclear history in isolation from the US. Australia ultimately renounced nuclear weapons and signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970 because of US pressure. Gorton was aware, as he flirted with the construction of a reactor that could build fissile material for bombs, that ANZUS itself might be sacrificed. Later, Washington would be indirectly responsible for undermining Australian non-proliferation credentials by stressing that ANZUS was defended by nuclear weapons. In this sense, the book reinforces what many writers have long concluded: Australia is a dependent power that seldom stands up to its ‘great and powerful’ English-speaking friends. John Howard has more in common with John Curtin then many would suspect.

Set in a seaside town whose name changes with the vagaries of its fortunes (Salvation, Ruination, Ridicule), Andrew Lindsay’s Slapping Man is a simpleton called Ernie who discovers a remarkable use for his gargantuan jaw. Determined to transform this facial liability into a money-making asset, he positions himself at the local market next to The Human Pincushion and The Man That Never Laughs and transforms himself into The Slapping Man. As the rhyme on the cover explains, Ernie’s spruiking patter relies on the desire for cathartic violence: ‘Feeling poorly, sick or weak? Just come down and crack my check! Don’t be sad, Don’t need to Frown, The Slapping Man has come to town!’ Owing to the circumstances of his conception and the size of his jaw, Ernie seems to have been destined for a career as a human punching bag, an easy and willing target for malcontents to vent their anger upon. And there are plenty of candidates, considering Salvation’s disaster-riddled history.

Late in in the thirteenth century, Alfonso X (‘The Wise’), king of Castille, declared: ‘If I had been of God’s counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better.’ He raised a storm. That wickedness, natural disaster and the inexorable corruption of things filled the world with suffering had hardly gone unnoticed, of course. Theologians had long sought to reconcile the existence of evil with God’s omnipotence and benevolence. But Alfonso reanimated a worm in the heart of reason: the suspicion that, really, God could have done better.

Leibniz wrote a theodicy, a defence of God. If only we knew all, all that had been and was to be, then we would see that this is the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire replied that, if this was the best, he wanted to know what the others were like. But Alexander Pope agreed, in indurate lines:

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, Direction, which thou canst see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And in spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear. WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.

Haunted Earth is Peter Read’s third book in his series on Australian attachments to place. This work began with Returning to Nothing (1996), which explored how Australians feel about ‘lost’ places. Belonging (2000) investigated how non-indigenous Australians claim to belong and how they negotiate issues of cultural difference. It was overtly concerned with the ramifications that the establishment of Aboriginal history has had on national identity.

Haunted Earth is both an individual journey and an account of aspects of Australian culture. This series is at once personal and more broadly orientated. Read, an historian, draws upon both the historical and the autobiographical when considering contemporary Australian experiences of place.

Haunted Earth is focused on the experience of inspirited places. He defines this as a place where there is the ‘presence of a spirit’. This does not depend on sensory perception or conscious belief; places are inspirited whether or not we know it. Yet if we are aware of it, they can offer the possibility of transcendence: ‘through the site, and often with the aid of ritual, the visitor or that site is transformed.’