In 2006-8, the ARC Discovery grant ‘Restraint: Recovering the Virtue of Self-Control or Temperance to Strengthen the Australian Social Fabric’ supported philosophical and historical work on the “Restraint Project” on temperance and self-control in Australia (http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/restraintproj.html).

One focus of the work was on the causes of the high levels of violence in remote indigenous communities. The project supported the initial work of Dr Stephanie Jarrett on that topic. Her work has resulted in a just-published book, Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence (Connor Court). The book argues that high levels of violence were endemic in indigenous communities in pre-contact times and that traditions of violence have persisted to the present, exacerbated but not fundamentally caused by added factors such as alcohol. Suggested policy responses include strategies for integration of remote indigenous people into the wider society.