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Out of Place (Gwalia): occasional essays on Australian regional communities and built environments in transition, edited by Philip Goldswain

and, more significantly, within ‘British world’ historiography. At the core of this work is a study of amateur athletics generally and more specifically the Amateur Athletic Union of Australasia which existed, if not always coherently, from 1897 to 1927. Nielsenmoves the analysis beyond a dominant focus on team sports and their touring networks, and on sport as nationalism or as unique in its Australian forms. He emphasises amateurism, a term applied as much to how games were played as to whether money changed hands in the process, as an example of the British inheritance and enduring pan-British influence over Australasian sport. Rather than assertive independence or separate destinies, as exemplified by Australian rules football, amateur athletics epitomised the majority of sports that determinedly maintained relationships with equivalent bodies in Britain, the white dominions and the United States—the latter a frequently neglected component in these British world connections. Australasians not only followed British sport in minute detail, they also contributed much to debates about styles, rules and governance. Certainly the relationships across the British world could be tense because strict British interpretations of amateurism were frequently stretched and redefined in Australia and New Zealand where there was a greater acceptance of ‘spectacle’, of leagues and of other overtly competitive structures. In many respects Australasian amateurs mirrored their professional rivals with their pragmatic desire to popularise sport. Indeed, they were decidedly more liberal than their British counterparts in their willingness to reinstate professionals to the amateur ranks and in accepting as amateurs thosewhowere regarded as professionals in other sports. Nielsen attributes much of this liberality to the strong influence of Richard Coombes, who rose from relatively humble, rather than elite public school, origins to become a prominent sporting journalist and administrator, and especially as President of the New South Wales Amateur Athletic Association (1893–1935) and as a member of the fledgling International Olympic Committee (1905–33). But much as Coombes dominated, there is perhaps a little more to be said here about more fundamental differences betweenBritish andAustralasianmiddle-class sporting administrators. The latter were frequentlymore commercially minded and involved in businesses enterprises that fostered a measure of common identity between employer and employee. Hence they tended to a stronger understanding of the imperatives of working-class sport and of the triggers for professional sport. Nielsen also provides a welcome reassessment of the concept of ‘Australasia’. He argues that New Zealand identity was not subsumed within these relationships, and indeed thrived as part of broader pan-imperial sporting interactions. That the Athletic Union survived until 1927 reminds us that a vibrant trans-Tasman community endured long after New Zealand had rejected Federation. Its demise was not due to assertive New Zealand nationalism following the Great War, but to complexities in its own internal organisation including state rivalries in Australia and provincial rivalries in New Zealand. I have one reservation. In places the prose is a little dense and didactic and the sectioned conclusions to chapters and the book as a whole make for some repetition. Both traits are reminiscent of the PhD requirements from which this book emerged. Nevertheless, this is a nuanced argument that has much to offer historians sporting and otherwise.