Australian Historical Studies ISSN: 1031-461X (Print) 1940-5049 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rahs20 Kamp Melbourne in the 1920s and ’30s: Trade, Queans and Inverts Yorick Smaal To cite this article: Yorick Smaal (2018) Kamp Melbourne in the 1920s and ’30s: Trade, Queans and Inverts, Australian Historical Studies, 49:3, 429-430, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2018.1495154 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2018.1495154 Published online: 13 Aug 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 20 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rahs20 Reviews: Books to the world how God could overcome all things and work through all people to further the divine purpose for human salvation. Pitman presents an invaluable biographical account not only of Kiek but also of the women who followed her into ordained ministry from 1927 to 1977, when the Congregationalists joined the Uniting Church in Australia. Many of these women grew up in Methodist, Presbyterian or Anglican churches and were drawn to Congregationalism in adolescence. Several came to ministry through independentlyfunded (rather than church-sponsored) theological education, and service in mission and educational agencies. Pitman argues that, collectively, Congregational women played a vital role in Australian religious life as prophetic witnesses to a new way of being Christian ministers. Nevertheless, despite the theological commitment of Congregationalism to sex equality, no women were called to the leadership of a major city or suburban congregation. As a result, female ministers remained a novelty within both the church and the wider community. The book includes several appendices, with biographies of each of the fifteen women ordained as Congregational ministers in Australia. The group biography which emerges is valuable evidence for secular and religious historians alike of the emergence of women into professional and public roles in the mid-twentieth century. Born between 1884 and 1940, most of these women came from middle-class urban families, completed tertiary education as part of the requirements for ordination, and were involved in advocacy for peace, justice and ecumenical relations. The text is beautifully illustrated with over fifty images, including photographic portraits of each of the fifteen female ministers discussed. It is unfortunate that these have not been captioned, requiring the reader to turn back to consult a separate list of illustrations. In a provocative epilogue Pitman exposes some of the internal contemporary debates within the Uniting Church in Australia, a most remarkable Australian religious experiment that is heir to the Congregationalist legacy. Although the Uniting Church has ordained women since union in 1977, the numerical dominance of Methodist and Presbyterian members and the retired status of most Congregational 429 female ministers have somewhat obscured the legacy of the events of the mid-twentieth century. Pitman challenges the Church to recapture this history of the principle of sex equality as a core value, not least as a means of encouraging other churches to embrace the ordination of women. PETER SHERLOCK University of Divinity © 2018, Peter Sherlock Kamp Melbourne in the 1920s and ’30s: Trade, Queans and Inverts By Wayne Murdoch. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. Pp. 256. £61.99 cloth. Australia has one of the best national queer historiographies. The stories are many and varied. At different times and in different formats scholars have turned their attention to the lives and loves of convicts, the emergence of colonial subcultures, practices of cross-dressing, romantic friendships, military service, and the years of gay liberation. Some topics have garnered more attention than others. People, institutions and identity politics from the late 1960s onwards, for instance, have been a pet documentary project for a generation of historians who experienced the challenges of decriminalisation and HIV/AIDS as well as younger researchers following in their footsteps. But there is much more to the queer twentieth century than its penultimate decades, as Wayne Murdoch’s new book Kamp Melbourne in the 1920s and ’30s: Trade, Queans and Inverts reveals. Taking as his concern the formation of urban subcultures, Murdoch recovers queer doing and being in interwar Melbourne; a welcome shift in time but also in place given the longstanding emphasis on Sydney and, to a lesser extent, Queensland. Kamp Melbourne is meticulously researched. The author draws on a magisterial array of court files, newspapers, oral histories, and other sexological and cultural sources, to tell the stories of homosex in the shadow of the Great War. So-called ‘soft city living’ amplified concerns about broken men 430 Australian Historical Studies, 49, 2018 and new women and attendant anxieties about gender non-conformity and sexual excess. Murdoch’s attention to a shared sense of belonging has demanded he examine self-generated meaning-making and identity. In chapter three he sets out the social roles signalled in his subtitle with due attention to class and gender. He argues that trade (ostensibly working-class heterosexual males), queans (effete workingclass males), as well as middle-class inverts (with no gender markers), were ‘identical to those described in New York and London at the time’ (33) and shows how the symbols and markers of a collective culture – clothing, make-up, mannerisms and language – made the queer man. I found the argument about the presence of the invert plausible and intriguing but wondered how familiar its meaning was to men on the ground. Part of the problem is the sources themselves, as the author astutely points out: court records tend to fall unevenly on working-class spaces rather than dwellings where inverts might gather. But in any case, Murdoch reveals how queer Melbournians of different stripes crossed paths in the cityscape to form the dynamic realities of same-sex experience. The treatment of the city itself is one of this book’s great strengths. Parks providing cover for sex bounded the CBD, low-rise buildings in inner suburbs shaped particular patterns of growth and development, and technologies like electricity and telephones wrought cultural change. I found myself immersed in the city’s hotels, theatres, flats and baths, for example, as well as its trams, cars and public toilets. Even those spaces similar in design and purpose could have key points of distinction: seaside baths seemed a safer bet for casual encounters than their municipal counterparts while the design and patronage of boarding and lodging houses inflected practices and identities. Elsewhere in Kamp Melbourne, we encounter the dominant social attitudes and state apparatus that regulated queer lives, especially those governed by the church, medical science, and law. One of the most critical interventions of this book is its analysis of the criminal justice system. Chapter five reveals that offences against boys (45 per cent) and youths between the ages of 14 and 21 (32 per cent) account for more than three-quarters of criminal cases between the wars. This has striking implications for what we think we know about the operation of the law and its limits as a source on queer (rather than criminal) lives. Murdoch convincingly argues that men were not living in ‘a state of siege’, at least as far as indictable crime was concerned. This conclusion is not to suggest that men lived their lives free from fear of prosecution, but that a law and order mandate operated in different ways. The summary justice meted out to lads dressed in sailors’ attire and arrested near Alexandra Park in 1938, or the case of a man caught by police enticing a young lad into his City Bath cubicle for a cigarette, for instance, is probably a more typical experience of state surveillance and intrusion than those revealed by full-blown criminal trials with their personal and financial costs. Murdoch has produced a very readable and richly illustrated book, although some might be uncomfortable with the use of actual names and photographs given the legal context. Kamp Melbourne is a thoughtfully structured and accessible text and a useful ready reference for teaching and research. More than the sum of its parts, it provides an evocative and sensitive account of queer life in one of Australia’s most dynamic cities and draws our attention to the fullness of kamp life at a crucial period of identity formation. YORICK SMAAL Griffith University © 2018, Yorick Smaal Behind Glass Doors: The World of Australian Advertising By Robert Crawford and Jackie Dickenson. Perth: UWA Publishing, 2016. Pp. 320. A$35.00 paper. Making excellent use of extensive interviews with industry professionals, Robert Crawford and Jackie Dickenson truly take the reader into the world of Australian advertising agencies from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. As they walk the reader through the decades, individual stories exemplify the professionalisation and globalisation of Australian advertising, connecting