Lessons from History: Leading Historians Tackle Australia's Greatest Challenges

guished historians, sadly died from cancer, aged 74. This wide-ranging, rich and insightful collection, edited by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski, records the gratitude and debts felt by so many to Macintyre for what the editors aptly term his "footprints in the sand" and "the Macintyre Effect" (viii). Beilharz and Supski do not offer the reader a Festschrift, "conventionally defined," whereby the contributors are "licensed to give the subject a nod before bolting off elsewhere on their own." Rather, they invited scholars to "explain or appraise a book or theme" from Macintyre's work, to appeal to a general and new as well as a specialised and established readership and both to "engage with Stuart's work and to add something new" to Australian historiography, or "of themselves" (viii, 2). The collection admirably succeeds in meeting its objectives. The collection comprises six parts, a conclusion, an epilogue and an appendix. It includes eight pages of well-chosen colour photographs, mainly of a serious, studious and jovial Stuart and his family. The conclusion includes a typically wry, self-effacing, succinct and generous response by Stuart to the contributions in the book. The appendix lists the higher degrees completed under his supervision and the bibliography usefully consists of "an almost full list" (2) of Stuart's extensive publications. Along with the essay in the conclusion by labour historian Liam Byrne (on Stuart's studies of the ALP), the six parts constitute the main body of the text. They cover Stuart's research interests, writing and other activities as an academic and public intellectual: Communism; Australia: Foundations; In Part 1, Stuart's initial and enduring interest in communism, including Bobbie Oliver, Ann Curthoys and Peter Love. All these contributions contain much of interest, although I found most rewarding the longer essays by Morgan on "Stuart Macintyre and British communism," Irving on Macintyre and Australian communism, and Oliver on Stuart's study of the