Don’t let the title put you off: this book is not purveying social theory but investigates the historical process by which economics became a university discipline in Britain, focusing on how that event changed the nature of economic knowledge. It thus mixes intellectual and institutional history of the highest quality. ‘Constructing’ in the title refers to the cover image of the model built by Vladimir Tatlin and his colleagues of his planned 400-metre tower. Tatlin was a ‘constructivist’ in the sense of the Russian art movement that needed engineers not philosophers. The tower was never realised, much like the ambitions held for economics by Alfred Marshall, its champion at the University of Cambridge, c.1885–1908, who sits at the centre of this book.

Tribe is the only person who could have completed this study. It draws on a lifetime’s knowledge of British economic literature, which Tribe has been mastering since his book Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (1978). That research has been conducted in parallel with work on the history of German economics, beginning with Governing Economy: The reformation of German economic discourse 1750–1840 (1988). The combined effect is one of Tribe’s distinguishing features as a scholar – the ability to view the British through German eyes and vice versa. This, incidentally, makes him one of the few people in the world who can conduct source criticism on Karl Marx’s Capital, the results of which are devastating for Marx’s standing as an economic theorist and historian (see chapter six of Tribe’s The Economy of the Word).

The intersection of German and British economics is also at play in this volume. The German story is one of a policy discourse (Kameralwissenschaft) that was being taught at university to future administrators until it was transformed into metaphysical soup once it came into contact with post-Kantian philosophy around 1800, and then disappeared into irrelevance. Seen from this point of view, the comparatively modest penetration of British universities by German metaphysics in the nineteenth century prompts the question: what happened to British political economy? We have not been in a position to answer this question due to the sorry state of the history of economics.

i.m. Peter Porter

I should have seen

all those words crowded at the door

of Peter’s apartment

when I stayed with him –

so many jostling verbs

outstretched adjectives

and nervy adverbs all

rubbing shoulders with those little

ands and buts and ors, etc.

But I didn’t. His shepherding voice

and kind manner ushered me

past them. They were there

as usual, but for another time

when he could invite them in

– his customary friends – undistracted

by visitors, so they could roam

and explore, until with patience

and a home-made miracle

their jostle would subside

and they would converse with him

and later, on the page

with us.

Few names are so ubiquitous in Australian culture or hold such a significant position in its history as that of Matthew Flinders. More than one hundred sites across Australia have been named in his honour, commemorating his accomplishments as a navigator, hydrographer, cartographer, and scientist. Among them are several statues featuring Flinders with Trim, his ever-faithful pet cat and companion, as well as numerous geographic landmarks, electoral districts, and a university. 

Flinders’ short life was as remarkable as it was tragic. He was the first European to circumnavigate Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1798, proving it to be an island, and Australia three years later, after which he produced the first complete map of the country. Docking at Mauritius for repairs in 1803, Flinders was arrested by the French authorities and detained for more than six years, estranging him from his wife. Their eventual reunion in England was cruelly cut short by his untimely death at the age of forty.

Early biographers tended to present Flinders as a hero. In The Life of Matthew Flinders (1914), Ernest Scott hailed the captain as an ‘Englishman of exceptionally high character’. Later writers such as Sidney Baker and Geoffrey Ingleton painted a harsh portrait of an arrogant man whose stubbornness was his downfall. Miriam Estensen’s 2002 biography presents a more even appraisal. As its subtitle suggests, in Matthew Flinders: The man behind the map, librarian, literary scholar, and Flinders aficionado Gillian Dooley embarks on a journey to discover the person beneath the legend. Focusing on his personal life and characteristics, she seeks to counterbalance previous accounts that were overly concerned with his career and achievements.

Maps are central to Kim Mahood’s practice as a writer, artist, and intercultural collaborator. She began making them in the wake of her father’s death in a helicopter mustering accident thirty years ago. This tragic event compelled her to make a pilgrimage to the country where she spent her late childhood and teenage years living on Mongrel Downs cattle station in the Tanami Desert. This journey became the subject of her award-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake (2001). This journey set in motion a renewed relationship with the place that has seen her return to the Tanami annually for more than twenty years. The relationships that developed during this period resulted in Mahood’s longstanding preoccupation with maps and mapmaking developing into collaborative mapping projects with Walmajarri and Jaru peoples, the contours of which she traces in her second book Position Doubtful: Mapping landscapes and memories (2016).

Mahood’s interest in collaborating with First Nations people to co-create maps was entangled with her family’s role in dispossession; her own name is etched onto a map of the area, which was created by her father. She acknowledges in Position Doubtful that ‘exploration and colonisation are part of my heritage’. As symbolic representations of places that help us to figure out where we are and where we want to go, maps are an apt metaphor for Mahood’s body of writing that centres on the uncertain search for self and meaning in the colonised landscape of the Tanami deserts.

Mahood’s new book, Wandering with Intent, brings together a collection of essays written over a period of fifteen years that traverses terrain that has been shaped by both a lifetime of experience in the desert regions at the centre of the continent and the ‘undertow of its original custodians’. Having lived in ‘the zone between black and white’, at places such as Hooker Creek, Finke, Alice Springs, Mongrel Downs, and, later, the communities of Mulan and Balgo, Mahood’s life, as she describes it, has been ‘entangled in particular Aboriginal families in multiple ways’ and her ‘sense of the world has been constructed by that experience’. Mahood’s writing is compelled by this point of intersection and emerges from her observations of the places, both physical and psychic, where cultural systems encounter and ‘battle and subvert each other’.