Here is Kalgoorlie-born airman Wallace Kyle, dropping bombs on enemy occupied Holland from a height of fifty feet. Here are little-known discoverers of mining fields and little-known leaders of Aboriginal causes, alongside politicians such as Henry Bolte who were household names. Here is V.V. Hickman, a Tasmanian scientist after whom a spider is named, walking regularly to work with his lunch in his gladstone bag, a man of routines but still suffering nightmares after World War I. Here, standing on the cricket pitch, is George Hele who began his cricket career by keeping wickets for the Brompton Methodists in Adelaide and then became an umpire in the bodyline series of 1932–33: he thought Harold Larwood’s fast bowling was vicious though permitted by the prevailing rules of cricket.

Many of the biographies tell of the tensions facing people who lived in a century of swift changes. Here is Gordon Greenwood, who edited a jubilee history of Australia which was widely read in schools and universities in the late 1950s and 1960s. A decade later, while ‘operating in the tradition of the god-professor’, he was swept downstream, a cigarette still in his hand, by the ‘radical and democratising pressures’ sweeping through the University of Queensland. His family had suffered an earlier set of pressures; it is fascinating to learn that the likeable but strong-willed Gordon was born in small-town South Australia with a German surname, which was altered from Nadebaum to Greenwood during World War I.

We read about Bob Dyer, whose radio and television show PickaBox elevated Barry Jones to his first taste of fame; and here is Jones himself writing – with his customary vigour and flair – the brief biography of the Victorian lawyer and politician John Galbally, an opponent of capital punishment. Galbally was buried, Jones tells us, with his worn copy of Shakespeare by his side. From the pen of the volume’s editor, Diane Langmore, comes an engaging article on Lady Casey and another on Sir Percy Chatterton, who was prominent in Papua New Guinea when it was more or less part of national life. Chatterton, who had ‘a remarkably booming voice for his size’, migrated from Lancashire to Papua in 1924 to conduct a school near Port Moresby, and later sat in the independent parliament, where he gave much of his eloquence to ‘lost causes’.

Anyone with a strong interest in Australian history will gain from reading a cross section of biographies. The volume will surprise readers even in fields where they are already well informed. Here is Harold E. Corbould, the son of a Queensland mining promoter, about whom I wrote at length in 1960. I had barely heard of the son but now learn that, with the aid of his father’s mining money, he became a successful pastoralist, and a huge donor both to the Salvation Army and to the conservation movement in Queensland. Incidentally, some of the most readable or incisive articles come from contributors who are not historians.

This volume, while impressive, is not the most captivating in the series. It could be that some of the earlier volumes stand out partly because they contained long, outstanding essays on major national figures, especially politicians. This volume, purely by chance, contains few such people. Two of the longer and most revealing essays are on the historian Sir Keith Hancock, by Jim Davidson, and on the Nobel laureate Sir Macfarlane Burnet, by Sir Gustav Nossal. But there are many excellent middle-size articles which outline a career, capture a personality and sum up the life. One is Peter Ryan’s essay on the versatile ‘Mac’ Ball, one of those ‘who combined high learning and genuine cultivation with a relaxed and authentic attachment to the ordinary citizens of their country’.

Some readers will notice that matters of importance are skirted over or omitted. For example, the evocative biography of A.R. Chisholm, a Bathurst boy of humble origins who became, in his heyday, perhaps the nation’s foremost banner-carrier of French language and literature, omits to record that for long he was a very influential member of the board of Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF), at a time when it was vital to cultural life. And yet the omission is understandable. A glance at Chisholm’s own shortish entry in successive editions of Who’s Who in Australia reveals no mention of the CLF. Likewise, the biography of Robert Blackwood (1906–82), the first chancellor of Monash University, offers only a couple of guarded sentences about his long business career as an executive and director of Dunlop, at a time when it was a huge manufacturing company with products in every Australian household. Some would argue that Blackwood did as much for Australian manufacturing as he did for Australian universities and other learned bodies. Indeed, his business career, more than anything else, was to prepare him for his honorary post as an effective leader of a new university.

Similarly, the biography of Arthur W. Coles, a founder of the big chain of stores, is fascinating on his business career – and the career of several of his brothers – but does not say enough about his decisive role as an Independent ‘Liberal’ MP during one of the crucial events in Australian political history, the accession in 1941 of perhaps the most important of all federal ministries, the unelected Curtin government. The prime minister whom Coles deposed was Arthur Fadden, and in his autobiography, They Called Me Artie (1969), he gave an account which should ideally be set alongside Coles’s own loaded version of this nation-hanging episode. I sympathise with Stella M. Barber, the author of the article on Coles. I assume that it was impossible to describe adequately Coles’s business and political roles within the number of words allotted to his whole life. These three essays on Chisholm, Blackwood and Coles are excellent contributions in their own right.

This is the dilemma of a national dictionary of biography: the allocation of space. After the Australian Dictionary of Biography was founded, the decision was made to include a very wide range of lives. Every volume deliberately includes certain lives because they were typical rather than influential. Thereby Australia’s dictionary is more comprehensive than almost any other comparable national dictionary. This is one of its virtues and a source of pride to its succession of dedicated editors. But if the project was not to become too voluminous, space had to be sacrificed from another quarter. In my view, insufficient words are available to encapsulate some of those lives of higher public interest. The recent volumes of the English Dictionary of National Biography, on average, allow more words to each life which the editors deem worthy of record.

It is too late to challenge the wide span of our ADB. It has happened. Moreover, it enhances the book for those – they can’t be many – who read a volume right through rather than look up particular entries. The Australian version is equalitarian and encompasses lives of intense interest that, without this policy, could not possibly be selected for inclusion. But the policy carries a disadvantage. Sometimes there is not enough space to do justice to some of the more influential lives – the ones that will be looked up most frequently.

And yet this volume, the seventeenth so far, is a rich treasury, both in little-known lives and well-known ones.