Duggan, who will be familiar to most readers as a renowned poet, has based Ghost Nation on his doctoral thesis in art history, but his roots in poetry still remain. His impetus in this book is an admirable desire to reinvest the fluidity and ‘thickness’, as he refers to it, into our understanding of Australian visual culture from 1901 to 1939. He contends that in the creation of a plurality of imagined and imaginary spaces the interdependence and discontinuity between Australian modernists and their more aesthetically conservative opponents become evident. From the miniature worlds of May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie to Hans Heysen’s gigantic gums, Duggan considers the imaginative rendering of spaces as contested cultural zones.

Creating a framework for such a discussion is ambitious, and Duggan freely admits that the idea of ‘space’ is difficult to discuss in the abstract. His solution is to use a range of disparate, even tangential, sources with the hope that these parts will ultimately reflect a coherent whole. It is a cultural history approach that has its successes – and limitations. I do not, I should say, agree with Donald Brook’s recently published view that cultural studies is an intellectually impoverished ‘art-industrial entertainment centre’. Indeed, I think that the mining of a wide variety of sources can provide a more accurate and certainly enlivened approach to the nexus between visual culture and society. However, I do recognise that it is an approach that requires discipline: too many ingredients in the ‘stew’ of history can create a strange kind of dish.

The key to Ghost Nation came for me when I read Duggan’s description of the evocatively named ‘White Cities’ or fun fairs that had their antecedents in the Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth century. Like the unashamed mix of low and high culture present in these miniature worlds of play, this book also contains an often dizzying range of material, melding past and present into a largely nonlinear narrative. While I am not contending that Duggan’s so-called ‘ghosts’ or parallax views of modernism are as artificial as the structures in White Cities, the weblike density of this book can, at least initially, be as disorienting as a fun fair ride.

This effect, seemingly intentional, is used by Duggan to suggest the various shifts and turns that occurred as Australians rewrote narratives of space in the period of evolving nationalism after Federation and before World War II. Roughly speaking, the divide between urban and rural spaces forms one of the key dichotomies in this account. Duggan considers these spaces as gendered zones, using contemporary accounts to show how the city was often anthropomorphised by conservative commentators as a ‘female’ and corrupt modern space in opposition to an ‘innocent’ or Arcadian view of the bush. In terms of painting, these views roughly translated into, on the one hand, a modernist celebration of urban life, as seen in the work of Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, against, on the other hand, the conservative pastoral hegemony of landscape painters such as Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen. Duggan explores, in some detail, how each artist articulated his or her own ‘creative spaces’ suggesting that, while many of the arguments concerning Australian modernism revolved around imported discourses, there were moments of ‘occasionally spectacular adaptations and inventions’, especially by women artists of the period.

While the modern/conservative camps may appear today as unified movements, a close analysis of the period shows considerable overlap and ambiguity. Even that antimodernist warhorse Norman Lindsay published an ecstatic ode to New York skyscrapers in 1931. Indeed, as Duggan outlines, by the 1930s the tension between the new and the old had begun to collapse as the ‘anarchic spark of modernism was domesticated’. Commerce, in particular, took what it rightly saw to be the vibrant creative spark of the modernist style to advertise and sell products. One prime example of the interesting crossovers that occurred between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art are to be found in the work of photographer Max Dupain, who often used the same modernist and Surrealist techniques in his art work and commercial assignments. Along with a notable private art practice, Dupain also worked for that epitome of chic modern values, The Home, a magazine directed largely at women readers keen to incorporate the latest style into the social spaces of their homes.

For me, one of the most interesting parts of this book concerns the application of modernism in the reconfiguring of just such physical spaces, from the impact of garden-city philosophy on Australian urban design to the creation of modern hygienic interiors in the home. In both instances, a powerful influence on the imagining and creation of such spaces was the pseudoscience of eugenics, an area of considerable importance that Duggan briefly touches on. The creation of ‘healthy’ physical spaces was often tied to the imagined formation of a robust new race of Australians.

Castlecrag in Sydney, for instance, serves as one fascinating example of the creation of a spiritually energised space designed by Walter and Marion Griffin as a model for enlightened living.

The vision of a ‘new breed’ of Australians also lay at the heart of the 1938 Sesquicentennial celebration of the founding of Sydney, a spectacle that formed a nationalistic agenda of ‘blood and soil’. Here, in tableaux form, was a sanitised view of history that, to quote Duggan, ‘suggest[ed] space through closure, as though taxidermy had become a model for civic order’. It is with this event, which closes Ghost Nation, that we are drawn back to one of Duggan’s primary concerns, that any account of history runs the risk of compartmentalising it into inert and passive spaces.

While Duggan’s speculative and fluid account could not be accused of falling into such a trap, it still represents only one possible framework for understanding this complex period in our history. Beach culture and ‘the body’, for instance, also offer important battlegrounds of modernity and nationalism. Much can be drawn, too, from artists working outside Sydney, which is the book’s primary focus. However, it is apparent that a totalising view of history was never Duggan’s aim. Like the song-cycles he alludes to, his themes gain complexity as the reader proceeds. What one is left with is, as the book’s title suggests, a ghostly sense of space and time that may appear quantifiable but is ultimately speculative.