LAUSR

personalities and debates surrounding the production of this seminal contribution to ethnic and migration studies is provided. While The Martin Presence offers an in-depth analysis of Martin’s intellectual work, more broadly it also makes a series of significant observations about Martin’s gendered experience of academia in post-Second World War Australia. Martin was a female scholar at the time when women were not frequently afforded the privilege of tertiary education, when few expected to achieve leadership roles in academia, and when the idea of equal pay was yet to gain full legal recognition. By reading this book, we are reminded of the challenges that women in Australia faced and how Martin defied the gendered expectations of her times. Through her work as first-ever chair in sociology in Australia – at La Trobe University – she was able to actively support the advancement of opportunities of many young female scholars. The impact that Jean Martin’s work has had on Australian education and feminist thought continues to come to light and is noted in the upcoming book by Craig Campbell and Debra Hayes on Jean Blackburn (1919–2002), another female educator and scholar from the same period. All in all, there is much on offer in this book. Personally, I would argue that it provides a poignant reminder of the historical, theoretical and organisational (dis)continuities which have influenced those working within the Australian sociological landscape. It may be a simple and well-worn logic of intellectual and institutional life that causes these effects, but it is still quite surprising to find yourself recognising just how much of one’s own experience is shared through the contours of intellectual exchange spanning traditions, times and generations without actually being aware of it. This book describes Jean Martin as ‘a bridge-builder’ between social science disciplines, between academia and the public sphere, and between vision and critique. In the shadow of the enduring legacy of her life, her work and her institutional footprint, this book also shows how Jean Martin herself became a bridge between our disciplinary past, present and future.