Widely known across this country, and the United Kingdom (where as founding director from 1982–85 he inaugurated the London-based Australian Studies Centre), Bolton’s profile stood tallest in his home state, where he was chosen ‘Western Australian of the Year’ in 2006. Close to the end of his life, the Western Australian government even named a newly created Perth street ‘Geoffrey Bolton Avenue’. Although eventually accepted by the intended recipient, this was not an entirely unambiguous honour. For the eponymous throughfare intersects a parcel of land reclaimed from the Swan River, which Bolton and others had sought to protect against state-backed multi-storey development. Some might even see the title of this collection as referencing not only Bolton’s remarkable span of achievements and interests, but also his aversion to conflict and his preference for compromise over confrontation, unless perhaps in the obsessive pursuit of historical research. This latter feature of her husband’s character was made clear to his widow early in their acquaintance, when, at a party, instead of asking her for a dance, he enquired after the possible existence of her family’s papers.

Complementing Stuart Macintyre’s perceptive biographical introduction, with its fascinating and, in some respects, revelatory picture of the man, his times, and his books, Carol Bolton’s affectionately thoughtful memoir draws on her experiences as an analytical psychotherapist, as well as Geoffrey’s wife for fifty-seven years. An empiricist who distrusted ‘theory’, he was primarily interested in what happened and why, rather than the emotions and perceptions surrounding ‘real-life’ events, matters on which they evidently agreed to disagree. She notes that he enjoyed writing his books, but preferred the preliminary research: ‘He seldom wanted research assistants, he had such a good time among the source material himself.’

All but one of the following chapters are by eminent denizens of the eastern seaboard, farflung Sandgropers, and some who have criss-crossed the Nullabor in both directions. (Not entirely in jest did Bolton term his lifelong preoccupation with the dominance of the Hume Highway axis ‘a personal neurosis’, and his own historical perspective ‘a view from the edge’). Mark McKenna’s spirited essay on the current craze for Australian political biography unfortunately fails to assess Bolton’s own extensive biographical output. However, Graeme Davison effortlessly integrates Bolton’s role as Western Australia’s ‘Mr History’ with the emergence of ‘public’ or ‘professional’ history during the 1980s, as an outgrowth from and alternative career path to ‘academic’ history, and its practitioners’ subsequent attempts to adapt to changing times.

Geoffrey Bolton (National Archives of Australia)Revisiting Bolton on John Wollaston, an influential Anglican clergyman in mid-nineteenth-century Western Australia, Alan Atkinson proposes a more positive understanding of the role of religion in Australia’s past, with particular reference to ‘the Tractarian world-view, transported and reshaped for antipodean use’ . The origins, reception, and influence of Bolton’s pioneering environmental history, Spoils and Spoilers (1981), are sympathetically surveyed by Andrea Gaynor and Tom Griffiths. A somewhat more critical Jenny Gregory outlines three urban conservation controversies in which Bolton participated, while Tim Rowse and Elizabeth Watt present a less than wholly eulogistic assessment of his ventures into northern Australian and Aboriginal historiography. Mary Jebb nevertheless concludes her overview of Jack Wherra’s boab nut carvings depicting life and death on the Kimberley frontier by suggesting that Bolton might well have appreciated Wherra’s vision of ‘emotions and relationships within a framework of violence’.

Both the concluding chapters are by former Murdoch University colleagues of Bolton’s. Commending the attention his Oxford History of Australia volume (1990) accords the ageing experience, Patricia Jalland narrates in grim detail the declining years of Vance and Nettie Palmer. A more cheerful final note is struck by Lenore Layman’s extended portrait of the one woman Bolton celebrated among a handful of Westralian ‘bold dreamers’: Deborah Drake- Brockman, aka Lady Hackett, Lady Moulden, and Dr Buller Murphy (1877– 1965), society hostess, philanthropist, and mining entrepreneur.

During his lifetime, Bolton witnessed and contributed to Australia’s emergence from the long shadow cast by the British empire. That only a single chapter in this collection focuses on his non-Australian historical writings is itself symptomatic of this great transformation. Yet outside Australia Bolton’s best-known work is almost certainly his 1966 OUP monograph on the Irish Act of Union, and some articles spun off from a never-completed biography of William Eden, Lord Auckland. Furthermore, it is suggested here by Carl Bridge, one of his successors in London’s Australian Studies chair, that Bolton’s unduly neglected account of Britain’s Legacy Overseas (1973) anticipated by twenty years the new ‘British World’ school of imperial and Commonwealth historians. Whether Bolton’s legacy is eventually also seen to include a more comparative and transnational Australian historiography, as he surely would have wished, time alone will tell.