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26 Fed. L. Rev. 409 (1998)
To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural History of Australia's Constitution

handle is hein.journals/fedlr26 and id is 421 raw text is: BOOK REVIEW Helen Irving, To Constitute A Nation: A Cultural History of Australia's Constitution, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Deborah Z Cass* Constitutional law is not the raciest of topics. In Australia until recently, study of the Constitution and its legal development was perceived as rather arcane, the preserve of fusty academics (like myself) and lacking the relevance of disciplines such as contract or property law. But since the decisions in Wik and Mabo, the implied rights cases, and even the People's Convention, the Constitution, and constitutional law, have been thrust into the public spotlight. Helen Irving's new book To Constitute a Nation makes a colourful and scholarly contribution to both academic and popular knowledge on the subject. It brings constitution-making out of the closet and into the living room of public opinion. The book makes three main claims. The first is that the movement to federate and the making of the Constitution were not the product only of political and legal events but arose from the complex cultural conditions of the period, hence the book's secondary title, A Cultural History of Australia's Constitution. The second and related claim is that a constitution does not spring from the political and legal spheres alone; it must also be present in the (hearts and) minds of individuals involved in the process of constitution-making and the collective consciousness of the community. In the words of Benedict Andersen, whom Helen Irving follows, the Constitution, and indeed the nation itself, must be imagined before politics and law can bring it into existence. The final argument is that the Australian Constitution is a derivative instrument; a hotch potch of constitutional techniques and experiences, and this hybridisation is a product of the utopian environment in which the Constitution was made. The defining feature of Helen Irving's book is that she has written a cultural history as opposed to a political or legal history of the making of the Constitution. Conventional legal and political histories of Federation have told a somewhat dry, but functional tale, focussed largely upon a limited group of historical participants and Senior Lecturer in Law, Australian National University.

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