What is Who’s Who? Hardly the oldest institution in white Australian history, it nevertheless exudes a sense of its own history. Who’s Who 2001 is the thirty-seventh edition. The first edition appeared in 1906. Its preface tells us that the first edition was slim. Maybe we were short of important persons then. Or perhaps that’s what an egalitarian-aspiring culture does for you, if Jill is as good as her master. In the preliminary materials to the individual listings – in 2001 we have 13,100 personages, whose details make up the vast bulk of the tome – there are more formal details about prominent people, beginning with the Queen. The Honours system is detailed; very likely this is the easiest way to get into these pages, along with Nobel prizes, political office, the legal system, the diplomatic corps and industrial relations, and the crossover peerage: knights, dames and baronets. All of which is fascinating to contemplate, as it reconnects us to a world where it was far more readily apparent who the famous people were. These days, of course, one might turn rather to the pages of Who Weekly to see who the important people are: they live on film and die by the image.

Who Weekly lasts, by comparison, about six days, Warhol-wise. Who’s Who in Australia lasts at least a year, and presumably many of its personnel are regular entries. Some, of course, pass on, and so it is sad here to come upon an unwitting three-line epitaph for Helen Daniel. We meet Craig Lowndes and Russell Crowe, Louise Adler but not Luke Slattery, Franca Arena and Tina Arena, Ian Thorpe but not Billy, Tim Fischer, but no sign of Kate. Mark Davis gets no guernsey here, but neither does Peter Craven. There must be headaches aplenty for those who gather and choose these profiles, because they have something to do with senses of achievement, they are implicitly meritocratic, and therefore biased to middle years and the middle class. You get the impression that the brief strives to be democratic or at least populist as well as exclusive, which is logically what it should be, crème de la crème. Many of the suspects are the usual. Some manage to be witty, or at least distracting. Geoffrey Blainey lists woodchopping as his recreation. Ken Maddock includes everyday life in his list of interests. George Seddon offers tennis but also gardening, which manages somehow to be both accurate and misleading at the same time; one might rather think that gardens are his life, so the separation between public and private breaks down. Reading between the academic entries, I wondered whether it is the position of professor (institutional, not personal chairs) that hits the tripwire for inclusion. When I thought of my own university, it seemed to be the sub-professionate who were missing: John Hirst, John Carroll and Judy Brett; Robert Manne and Inga Clendinnen make it, presumably on other grounds. The point is not to bitch about exclusions, so much as it is to wonder how well this represents our significant thinkers and writers. More fundamentally, it is to wonder about how well a traditionalist enterprise can deal with talent that occurs outside or below the established parameters of achievement.

This is not to say that Who’s Who is anachronistic or outdated. Rather, it is to observe the points of stretch and to ponder the result as something that is simultaneously premodern, modern and postmodern all at once. Its premodernity is evident in the importance of lineage and of tradition itself; a more fully modern or meritocratic document would be indifferent to ‘son or daughter of’. Its immersion in modernity is evident in the standard use of achievement as the criteria for inclusion. It gestures to the postmodern, especially in the inclusion of younger, rock and roll celebrities, though it misses figures like the entrepreneurs, such as Lees and West, who facilitate all this cultural effervescence behind the scenes.

The job of monitoring Australian talent will likely become more and more difficult, as the symbolic analysts increasingly chase success around the globe. For it has to become problematical at some point deciding what an Australian is, or where Australians might be. It wasn’t that long ago that Neil Finn was declared ineligible for ARIA awards, yet what would Australian, or global, music be without him? Maybe this will result, more simply, in multiple listings, though questions of birth or roots will persist, legally and otherwise.

Who’s Who in Australia can be as usefully read as any novel or political tract to ask these same questions. What’s what in Australia? Imaginably, our worlds, in the antipodes, seemed simpler in 1906, though the crossovers in cultural traffic were already vital then. Who’s Who in Australia has become an institution in itself. Reading it for signs of seachange may be even more rewarding than browsing it for information. It is a sign of the times.