As Professor Nolan rightly points out, the ‘ADB … is not itself a narrative’. How could it be, traversing, as it does, a decade’s worth of diverse Australian lives, thoughts, achievements, fortunes, and aspirations? But discrete narratives emerge if you are in the happy position of being able to read the Dictionary not exclusively for specific reference – which would be the usual and characteristic approach for most readers – but simply for its rich cornucopia of sheer existence: the intersecting trajectories, shared directions, quirks, good and bad luck, triumphs, mistakes, and fascinating penumbras of lives.

Some of this discontinuous narrative will be structured from the reader’s own interests and experience, sparked by the points at which he or she touches down while navigating from Lachberg, Maurice Derek on page one to Zischke, Mervyn Desmond on page 654. No matter what your actual task or intention is when you pick up this handsome volume, with its striking Charles Blackman jacket painting, and its weighty, welcoming substantialness, it’s impossible not to begin with a bit of random prospecting – open here, open there, this one and that one – to get a glimpse of the riches in store.

This sampling ‘method’ first of all took me to Sir George Whitecross Paton, ‘legal scholar and Vice Chancellor’. He was in fact the vice-chancellor during my undergraduate years at Melbourne University. (I remember meeting him when he personally ruled on some transgression I had committed and have now conveniently forgotten.) This excellent biographical essay by J.R. Poynter evokes the atmosphere and temper of those times in the university’s growth distinguished by ‘new buildings [replacing] wartime huts, new disciplines … [burgeoning] research strengths … and [growing] student enrolments’. Poynter captures with knowing irony the jostling that accompanies such activity, picturing Paton as ‘surrounded by powerful professors extending their own fiefdoms’ and, during his absence, ‘the medical faculty adroitly [arranging] to double its size’.

Another turn of the pages led me to Francis Joseph Sheed, of whom Edmund Campion writes, ‘Frank was sent to the Balmain Methodist Church … but remained a surreptitious practising Catholic … a natural orator … wherever he was, he would aim to speak in the street [each Sunday] about Catholicism until, in his seventies, his doctor told him to stop. It has been estimated that he gave about seven thousand speeches from a soapbox.’ Reading Campion’s expertly crafted piece, however, I realised that, somehow, my choice may not have been entirely random. I remembered having to read excerpts from Frank Sheed’s Theology and Sanity – in Campion’s view, ‘his masterpiece’ – at school, and I recalled the reverence with which Sheed & Ward, publishers, were regarded in Catholic circles. So I gave up the pretence of randomness and went straight and unerringly to Harold Edward Porter, better known as Hal.

I met him when he was the librarian at the Shepparton City Library and I was about four months into my first appointment as a teacher. He was helpful, considerate, and full of advice. His novel A Handful of Pennies (1958), the result of Porter’s stint as a member of the Army Education Unit in Japan, was heavily represented on the shelves but, despite his urging, I didn’t borrow it. Peter Pierce tracks Porter’s restless and varied career through ‘the improbable task of running the George Hotel at St Kilda’, marriage to Olivia Clarissa Parnham after ‘a week’s hectic acquaintance’, and teaching appointments at Queen’s College and Prince Alfred College in Adelaide and the Hutchins School in Hobart, from which he was dismissed within a year. His historical novel, The Tilted Cross (1961), in which he describes Van Diemen’s Land as ‘an ugly trinket suspended at the world’s discredited rump’, may have reflected, as Pierce dryly speculates, his disenchantment with all things Tasmanian.

Not all that far from the ‘discredited rump’, and a very long way from Paris and California where she had done much of her growing up, Hephzibah Menuhin settled ‘with enthusiasm’ into life with her new husband, Lindsay Nicholas, on his sheep station in Victoria’s Western District in the late 1930s.Jacqueline Kent, Menuhin’s biographer, describes her vigorous participation in the expatriate life and her antipodean concert career, though she does not mention Menuhin’s intriguing connection with Wangaratta, where she had a close friendship with musician and radical, Martha Arms.

A visit to Theresienstadt concentration camp intensified Menuhin’s growing dissatisfaction with her life in Australia and her ‘increasingly troubled’ marriage finally ended when she met Richard Hauser, left Nicholas and her sons, and settled in London.

Margaret Harris’s essay on writer Christina Stead portrays another kind of disjunction from Australia. Like Martin Boyd’s characters in The Cardboard Crown( 1952), Stead and her lover, later husband, William James Blake, travelled restlessly in Europe before living in the United States where, among other ventures, they became screenwriters in Hollywood. Harris demonstrates the continuing, if sometimes tenuous, connection of Stead’s literary imagination with Australia and the profundity and persistence in her work of certain ‘recurrent preoccupations: passion of different kinds, family dynamics, writers and literary culture, and political commitment’.

For the browser – and the researcher willing to be distracted – there are innumerable resonant moments: Gertrude Langer’s posthumously published poems for her husband, ‘my beloved Karl’; Phillip Lynch’s deathbed summation of his best achievement – ‘Keeping my friends’; Alan Marshall’s prescient concern for the sexual needs of the disabled; Cecelia Shelley’s unionism – ‘the Tigress of Trades Hall’; Ventura Tenario’s rambunctious Australian wrestling career as ‘Chief Little Wolf’; Kylie Tennant’s friendship with Patrick White; and much else.

As you read through these biographical essays, you get a sense of what the ground rules are. Although there is no overtly constraining formula, each writer covers when the subject was born and to what parents; when married, where and to whom, and according to what rites; when died; whether cremated or buried, and according to what rites. Beyond this framework, writers make their own pace andproceed according to their own take on biography. Professor Nolan’s concern is that the ADB be ‘a source of record’, factual and accurate – ‘interpretation is a matter of authors’ judgments; their reading of a life’. This is why the ADB is not a history, despite its embodying a network of discontinuous narratives discernible to, and discoverable by, individual readers. Brief biographies, even very detailed and substantial ones like the outstanding essays on Thomas Playford or Patrick White in this volume, are more concerned with the notable, not the quotidian, and not the undercurrents, the broad background panoply of individual lives, the unfolding patterns and complexities of the times.

Of the 1.16 million Australians who died between 1981 and 1990, 1300 have found their way into volumes 17 and 18 of the ADB. They have two things in common, these 1300. One is distinction of one kind or another, ‘place and achievement’, as Nolan puts it, or perhaps, quixoticism; even, in a few cases, notoriety. The other is death. True to ADB protocol, every essay ends with a burial or a cremation. The lengthening shadow of death becomes a presence, its dramatic finality and dismissive certainty unmitigated by no matter what preceding record of triumph, achievement, sensation, humanity, or generosity. This is the essential narrative of the ADB, as surely as it is, for example, in Edgar Lee Masters’s revolutionary Spoon River Anthology (1915), where each poem is the inscription on a villager’s grave, or in Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614), which ends with a salute to Death as the conqueror at last:

O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of men, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic Iacet!

More than a dictionary, the ADB, with scholarship, literary craft, and the dedication of many people, stands splendidly against erosions by time and failing memories, resisting the surrender of ‘Farewell’ and ‘Vale’ and the terrors of ‘Hic Iacet’, to confront, in the editor’s words, ‘the difficulty of capturing a life and a person’s character … [even if] heads are turned, hands obscure the biographer’s vision and what is shadowed is greater than what is lit … That … is the nature of biography.’