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  • Savage or Civilised?: Manners in Colonial Australia by Penny Russell
  • Adele Perry (bio)
Savage or Civilised?: Manners in Colonial Australia, by Penny Russell ; pp. x + 406. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010, £26.50, $31.95.

Manners were a complicated and important business in the nineteenth century. This is perhaps especially true in colonial contexts, including Australia. In Savage or Civilised?: Manners in Colonial Australia historian penny Russell uses the rubric of manners to anchor a wide-ranging discussion of colonial Australia. Savage or Civilised? is a lively and engaging piece of scholarship that uses close readings of a wide range of written records to show the ways in which manners functioned as a critical but unstable and malleable means of distinguishing indigenous from settler, respectable from rude, and, ultimately, Australian from all imperial and national others.

Russell urges historians to move beyond the conventional archive of advice manuals and an expected focus on the formal rules and regulations of social and personal conduct. Instead, she argues that we need to see manners as given meaning by and changed through lived experience and interactions between people. Russell argues that “in the vulnerability of unrehearsed, unpredictable encounters, where rules were disputed or unknown, we find manners operating in ways in which we could never see in a guide to etiquette” (13). Savage or Civilised? finds these unpredictable encounters in a wide range of written archives, including published travel literature and memoirs, newspapers, and personal correspondence. Russell has a sharp eye for a revealing incident or narrative. By casting her net widely, she is able to map the ways in which manners were defined and used differently across social moments and by social actors ranging from Robert Dawson, an agent for British pastoralists encountering indigenous peoples and lands; to Jane Franklin, a British philanthropist and explorer who tried and failed to reform the manners of the Australian settlers she found herself among; to Polly Hardy, a wife and mother who struggled to keep up appearances and affection.

At over four hundred pages including notes, Savage or Civilised? is a substantial book. Russell’s introduction lays out the intellectual and topical parameters of her project, which is pursued in thirteen substantive chapters grouped into four sections and capped by a brief conclusion. The first section examines the role manners played in contact, whether violent or collaborative, between indigenous peoples and colonizers in pastoral Australia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The second part analyzes the uncertain social world of early settler Australia, a society profoundly shaped by the politics of penal colonization and its meanings. Russell’s third section grapples with a series of domestic spaces, examining the ways in which manners regulated interactions among families and couples and between employers, servants, and the children they were paid to care for. The fourth part treats the so-called new publics that emerged in modernizing Australian capital cities, where “ideas of civilized behavior were once again evoked to shape and regulate conduct” (270). The conclusion foregrounds a question that lies quietly behind much of the book, namely, how distinctly Australian manners were reconfigured in national discourses around the turn of the century. Russell writes that “freedom from snobbery, fluidity of social boundaries, an open, frank and natural democracy, and an impatience with meaningless rules of etiquette were all claimed as peculiarly Australian—and peculiarly rural—qualities; and all robustly contrasted with the effeminacy, particularity and reserve of ‘English’ manners” (358–59). [End Page 523]

Savage or Civilised? is organized along a familiar reading of Australian history, beginning with contact and dispossession, moving through British settlement, and concluding with federation. Russell’s caveat that the “suggestion of chronology here should be treated with reserve” cannot really challenge or substantially modify this powerful narrative arc. The extent to which the different social moments that Russell maps here were shaped by one another is also obscured by this approach. The processes of dispossession and colonization that engage the book’s first section and give Russell her title drop largely from sight thereafter. This is unfortunate given the richness of the available secondary scholarship on indigenous peoples and colonization in Australia and...

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