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It is an odd experience, in some ways, to read a book on history that you have lived through and written about, for it takes some time to set aside your somewhat proprietorial super-vigilance and truly enter the spirit of the book you are reading and reviewing. In the first few chapters, for this reader at least, The Seventies reads as a general history, covering a lot of ground and synthesising existing scholarship for a wide audience. It traces the advent of women’s liberation in Australia, the rise of civil liberties organisations, women’s increasing role in the workforce, campaigns to allow abortion, campaigns for homosexual law reform, and the rise of student radicalism and gay liberation movements. There is a chapter,‘It’s Time’, on the election of the Whitlam Labor government, and the emergence of a new relationship between the women’s movement and the Commonwealth government, epitomised in the appointment in …