Although this is a serious thesis, it is a trifle difficult to accept it as such, given the format. Rigby picture books, impeccably glossy, do not normally press heavily on the. intellect, however well they sell.

Julia Featherstone, a lady of many talents, has provided ninety-five pictures to break up the text and provide for the modern reader who is apparently unwilling to cope with complete pages of words only.

There can be no quarrel, or very little, about the pictures. They concentrate very much on faces, which is as it should be. A superb spread on pages 82-3 is of a Greek Orthodox service in Melbourne. Don Dunstan is shown once in colour in his garden and once in black and white leaving Parliament. His wife Adele is there giving a cooking lesson.

The test is very much the man himself, or as much as he is willing to make public. Some new material is provided for Dunstan-watchers like Max Harris, who has grown not to like what he sees, or Peter Ward, the Premier’s former executive assistant, who tries to be fair and is believed to have a biography in mind.

Pointers are there to contemporary or fairly recent South Australian politics: treatment of Aborigines, freeways, educational reform, and urban renewal in the inner Adelaide suburb of Hackney.

And the concluding section on worker participation and industrial democracy is very much what is currently being heavily debated in South Australia. It is more polemical than the rest of the book. Still, as part of Australia that concerns Dunstan, it belongs.

One would imagine that people will buy this book for the author’s personality more than his politics.

Sales will probably be better in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane than in Adelaide: something to do with that Biblical saw about prophets not being without honour save in their own bailiwick …