Ravi de Costa. A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006. [Book Review]

The Howard decade in Australia has been characterised, among other things, by a strong emphasis on patriotism, national unity and national identity. The contemporary debates on “Australian values,” “un-australianess,” and the war waged on the term “multiculturalism” in favour of “integration,” reflect a politics which aims at consolidating the cultural borders of the nation-state and its internal cohesiveness. The effect has been the progressive marginalisation of cultural politics of difference: ethnic, social and cultural minorities have acquired a divisive “unviability” which must be surrendered to the unity of the social body. This unity is also set against the “in-appropriate” interference of supra-national bodies that meddle in internal affairs and limit the authority of the nation-state.

Against this background, Ravi de Costa tells the story of indigenous struggle in Australia emphasising its necessary transnational traits.