Constitutional Conventions and the Headship of State: Australian Experience, by Donald Markwell, (Redland Bay, Queensland: Connor Court Publishing, 2016), 226pp., hardback, £30, ISBN: 978-1-925501-15-5

In the early afternoon of Remembrance Day 1975, the Governor General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, informed then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam that he had exercised his reserve power to remove the Labor Government from office. Whitlam’s administration had been unable to pass a supply Bill through theFederal Parliament’s upper house. This remains the only occasion on which this power has been exercised. The crisis which Kerr’s actions precipitated—or “the Dismissal”, asit isstyled more locally—remainsthe defining constitutional moment in the AustralianFederation’s 116-year history. The disquiet surrounding the event is rooted in divergent, and too often partisan, readings of the smudgy doctrine of constitutional conventions. It is this field of public power in Australia—where we find the Governor General cast as lead actor—that is the primary and recurrent focus of Dr Donald Markwell’s collection of writings. Markwell has spent several decades of his career thinking and writing about these constitutional questions. The book is a lucid account of an essential component of Australian constitutionalism and is primarily comprised of a reproduction of a diverse selection of Markwell’s scholarship spanning over three decades. This takes the form of extensive extracts from previously published book chapters, academic journal articles, newspaper and literary review contributions (in Australia and the UK), as well as Markwell’s public oratory.