Politics, Patronage and Public Works: Administration in New South Wales
Australian History Colonial History Political History Public Administration Infrastructure History Government Studies Reference Work
First-edition hardcover of Hilary Golder’s 2005 study Politics, Patronage and Public Works: Administration in New South Wales—the go-to reference on how roads, railways, schools and water-supply schemes were really built in Australia’s oldest colony. Golder trawls the archives to show that every bridge and classroom was a political battleground: ministers traded contracts for votes, engineers jostled with party hacks, and “public service” often meant jobs for the boys. The result is a lively, illustrated narrative that turns dusty departmental files into a gripping story of power, pork-barrelling and the birth of modern public administration.
Collectors value the book because it is still the only single-volume, university-press treatment of NSW infrastructure between 1856 and 1900. Golder’s forensic case-studies—Sydney’s Garden Palace, the Hunter Valley railways, the 1880s waterworks—are packed with names, costs and back-room deals that genealogists, heritage architects and policy students cite again and again. The 268-page hardback is generously illustrated with historic plans, cartoons and photographs, many reproduced for the first time, so it doubles as a visual reference for anyone restoring 19th-century properties or tracing an ancestor who worked on the railways.
This copy is clean and tight: no inscriptions, no dog-eared corners, just light shelf rub to the jacket and a couple of tiny edge dents—exactly the sort of condition that serious Australiana collectors look for. Published by UNSW Press in a small academic print-run, first editions in hardcover are already scarce; unmarked copies seldom surface online. If you need a reliable secondary source for HSC or university Australian-history essays, or you want a quality title to anchor a colonial-politics shelf, this is the edition to grab before it disappears into private collections.
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