The telling of stories is key to communicating an understanding of health and illness. Public health practice in Australia, an introductory text to public health principles and practice, is at its best when telling stories. The chatty style will easily engage the reader with tales tall and true of the origins and evolution of public health as a professional discipline. Written by a group led by Professor Vivian Lin, currently Chair of Public Health at Latrobe University and with superior credentials across a number of public health disciplines, the text attemps to set out what public health practice, in its many diverse forms, encompasses today.

Reflecting their own genealogy of knowledge, the authors include numerous references to Lin’s other work (quite legitimately given her involvement in public-health action in Australia for more than two decades), and to the work of Australian public-health champions Fran Baum and Tony McMichael. However, reference is not made to work by other key public health agenda-setters such as Stephen Leeder, Fiona Stanley, Bob Douglas, David Hill, Bruce Armstrong and Ian Anderson.

The book begins with a section introducing basic ideas about the health system in Australia and is concluded by a section looking ahead to potential challenges. There are plentiful tables and figures, and boxes presenting examples or sets of principles or conclusions of various reports were particularly interesting (although unfortunately not included in the table of contents, so hard to find on a second reading).

Given the emphasis on practitioners’ values, determinants of health beyond an individual’s control, social justice principles and recognition that the inequitable distribution of health gains leaves some groups disadvantaged, I was somewhat perplexed by the utilitarian-type statement on page 20:

I’m sure that the authors are not intending to suggest that public health resources should not be expended on members of at-risk groups, although relatively few in number, such as refugees, or that rural Australia should miss out on public health resources because numerically, rural citizens number far fewer than urban dwellers (indeed Chapter 16 discusses the public health care of vulnerable populations). The authors emphasise throughout the text that choices and decisions made in public health are inherently political. So statements such as that quoted above can be confusing, especially to newcomers in public health, the intended target audience of the text.

Other concerns include tables citing information no later than 1996 and mistakes in or omissions of authors’ names in some references I know well (making me wonder whether there are errors elsewhere in the reference list).

While not all who work in public health will necessarily agree with the way in which the authors set out public health as a professional practice, the book provides a useful (although not definitive) introduction to key principles, and addresses somewhat a gap in texts of this nature.