LAUSR

actively with the United Nations human rights machinery, supported the formation of the Australian Human Rights Commission in 1978 (p. 163), and began to institutionalize support for human rights in state bureaucracies. Indigenous Australians pressed most aggressively, forming the Aboriginal Treaty Council in 1979 and demanding protections for indigenous people as part of a broadened Bill of Rights. But as human rights entered mainstream discourse in Australia, Piccini argues, ‘it became a plaything of party leaders and political operatives,’ including Conservatives who opposed the increasingly broad rights claims of women, gays and lesbians, and indigenous people (p. 187). The book ends on a note of pessimism, concluding that ‘Australia’s human rights cascade’ proved ‘only to be a trickle’ (p. 195). Australia’s treatment of immigrants and refugees since the 1990s, in particular, has come under intense criticism, raising profound questions about Canberra’s commitment to upholding basic human rights norms. The vernacularization, institutionalization, and bureaucratization of human rights politics, the product of decades of struggle, may have diluted its power as an oppositional discourse and thus its political potency. Australia’s ‘official’ human rights policies, this book suggests, emerged from the domestic activism of Communist Party, women’s, indigenous, and other activists engaged in both national and transnational politics. It demonstrates that we must always think of human rights politics in both/and fashion, as being simultaneously constituted by both domestic and transnational forces, interacting in dynamic fashion. This book, which draws on a wide range of Australian newspapers, manuscript collections, archives, and publications from a wide range of civil liberties, human rights, indigenous rights, and sectarian organizations, should appeal to historians of modern Australian politics and foreign policy, indigenous transnationalism, and human rights more generally.