Bus crossing King William Street, c.1950 (photograph for W. Menz & Co, State Library of South Australia BRG 94/124/29)

In the writing of history, the facts are there to be found, interpreted, wrangled, mused on, and set against each other in proportion. For this task, two heads can often be better than one, filling gaps, illuminating blind spots, and toning down individual preoccupations. The successful teamwork of Sendziuk and Foster leads the reader down a smooth and easily navigable path, showing the development of South Australia from its earliest days and locating its changing fortunes in national and international contexts. They also trace the patterns of cause and effect among history’s cornerstones: government, society, economics, and the law are intertwined in the making of history, and this book illuminates their interdependence.

As the first single-volume history of South Australia in more than fifty years, it questions some well-worn misconceptions, honours some neglected figures, and shows some shifts in emphasis regarding what is considered important. For example, the authors point out that the much-vaunted ‘no convicts’ claim, while true in the sense that South Australia was never a convict settlement as such, leaves out the fact that many ex-convicts – and some escaped convicts – arrived in South Australia from elsewhere by various routes.

The book also examines newly available or previously little-known information. Chapter 3, ‘Settling and Unsettling’, quotes an 1846 letter to his father from settler Samuel Davenport suggesting the extent to which violence and murder were visited on Aboriginal people in South Australia, especially when they ‘resisted encroachments on their land’ and met white settlement with hostility:

[Davenport] complained about the character of the men who worked for him, and their treatment of Aboriginal people, remarking, these ‘poor beings are much shot, and no one sees how to avoid it’. Whatever anguish he may have felt, Davenport openly acknowledges the violence employed in the dispossession of Aboriginal people. In the more remote regions … settlers would take the law into their own hands and retaliatory raids on Aboriginal camps were frequently designed to have a punitive effect.

This corrective view of the more usual belief that the history of South Australian settlement involved relatively little violence against Aboriginal people is one of the major features of this book, and their treatment – physical, social, and legal – is a recurrent topic. The effects of developments and changes in law and in social attitudes are consistently reported and represented as a significant part of the state’s history: the ‘civilise and Christianise’ views of the earliest days gave way to the notion that white Australians should ‘smooth the dying pillow’ of a race ‘doomed to extinction’, followed in its turn by policies of assimilation. Finally, the book outlines the changes driven by Premier Don Dunstan, who introduced the first anti-discrimination legislation in Australia and rejected the goal of assimilation outright:

Dunstan, by contrast, sought the integration of Aboriginal people into white society on their own terms, and recognised that Indigenous people needed the protection of the law, access to their own land, and to be conferred the right of self-determination if they were to prosper.

The charismatic, flamboyant, intellectually dazzling Dunstan is the best-known of South Australia’s premiers, but he was not the only extraordinary man to lead the state, and neither was ‘Honest Tom’ Playford, to whom Sendziuk and Foster feel that history has, thus far, been too kind. As they point out, a great deal is owed, not only by South Australia, but by the entire country to Charles Cameron Kingston, one of two relatively little-known characters – the other being Robert Gouger – who were leading lights in the State’s history and who are given proper credit for it here.

Academically and athletically gifted, choleric, theatrical, sexually over-enthusiastic, and, if the sumptuously braided and embroidered frock-coat on the statue of him in Adelaide’s Victoria Square is anything to go by, as sartorially self-expressive as Dunstan himself, Kingston was premier for six years in the 1890s. He was not a Labor man but called himself ‘a State Socialist … a man who recognises it is right for the State to interfere for the good of society’. He introduced a number of major and far-sighted reforms, including the matter of women’s rights, while also playing a crucial role in the achievement of Australian Federation. Sendziuk and Foster quote yet another South Australian premier, the late John Bannon, on Kingston’s enthusiasm for the Federation cause: he was, says Bannon, ‘always pushing for progress and action, chiding and appealing to his colleagues, demanding deadlines, seizing initiatives, and generally refusing to let go of the concept of a united nation’.

Two of the most intriguing chapters in this book cover the half-century before Federation, when South Australia went through a number of changes in self-image after initially styling itself a ‘province’. After the establishment of a bicameral parliament in 1856, it was referred to as a ‘nation’ – with the South Australian ‘national character’ described by the South Australian Register in 1887 as ‘brave, earnest, patient, and selfreliant’, which, it must be said, accurately describes the third-generation South Australian who was my own grandfather, born six years later – before the push for Federation changed the focus of the growing nationalistic sentiment.

The most significant thing about this book is the quiet way it adjusts or corrects a number of long-held but oversimplified views, especially the rosy notions that South Australian history features neither convicts nor Aboriginal massacres. And then there is the story of the legislation that decriminalised homosexuality in South Australia, a change for which Don Dunstan almost always gets the credit. But in its original form, this legislation was first officially proposed by Murray Hill, an Upper House member of the conservative Opposition. South Australia is another country; we do things differently here.