What this book represents is, quite literally, a ""slice"" of (white) Australian life. By noting the patterns and parallels that emerge in a random sampling of social phenomena of widely varying types, from soap operas to political behaviour, Gaile McGregor has constructed a model that, in its challenge to uniformitarianism, is a test case in ethnographic theory. Using methods ranging from the hermeneutic through the structuralist to the psychoanalytic, McGregor deploys the self-evidence of communal life and language to establish not only that all cultural phenomena are ""patterned,"" but |