Towards the end of 1954 a bright young woman from Orange County in California found herself close to a political wildfire that had just broken out in Australia. The young Californian was Celia Louise Hamilton. Her bracing Cold War Australian encounter deserves to be better known. Born in Anaheim in 1931, Celia Hamilton graduated from Pomona College in 1953. Politics was her preferred field of study. She wrote a final-year dissertation at Pomona in which she compared the two presidential elections—1932 and 1952—that bookended the recently concluded twenty-year unbroken stint in the White House by the Democrats. After leaving Pomona,…