A rowdy, sharp-eyed account of Australian culture in the 1970s, when politics, sex, publishing, protest, performance, and self-invention all seemed to be happening at once.

Frank Moorhouse tracks the decade through essays, reportage, documentary fragments, and cultural criticism, catching Australia mid-shift: more permissive, more argumentative, more self-conscious, and not always more sane. Penguin’s own description pitches it as a study of the changing mores and style of the decade, and that’s true, but the book is livelier than that sounds. It has the feel of social history written close to the heat, with all the vanity, idealism, noise, and genuine transformation still clinging to it. 

This is a very good copy for someone interested in Australian literary and countercultural history, especially because it catches that semi-underground world before it was cleaned up into institutional memory. Not nostalgic, not academic sludge, not neutral either.

Penguin Books Australia paperback, 1980. First Penguin Books Australia edition. Good condition, little spine wear, but a good reading copy!