A biography is often confined by the limited range of sources for the life. For Cullen’s life, Juers needed to interview her family, friends, fellow performers, and lovers, many of whom had only vague memories of the 1970s. She had access to family letters and Cullen’s notebooks and diaries. She had her own memories of meeting Cullen in Sydney, and visits from her in London. There were some photographs and film of Cullen dancing, but relatively little documentation of her experimental choreography.

Faced with this relative sparsity of material, Juers made the risky decision to take an encyclopedic view of Cullen’s life, placing her short lifespan within a vast network of contacts to build a picture of an individual life whose particular place and time connect to a larger universe. The task stands in contrast with Bernadette Brennan’s recent biography of the novelist Gillian Mears, Leaping into Waterfalls, where Brennan faced a massive archive collected by her subject and the comments of many living people with clear memories. Juers needed to work from partial memories, scanty documentation, misunderstandings, and an artist who never returned from India. Her book is a biography for Philippa Cullen, rather than of her.

The risk is that the individual life may be lost in the panoramic vision. The first section traces Cullen’s ancestry back to generations of immigrants from the British Isles with the Throsby family, descended from the surgeon on a convict ship who arrived in 1802, the most notable among them. Juers wants to acknowledge the violence of British settlement and the deprivation it brought to the Indigenous people, but she would also like this history to indicate some of the special qualities of Cullen. She brings this connection with the Throsbys into her story from time to time – Cullen loved the Kangaroo Valley area probably without knowing that the Throsbys once had claims on it, but Juers’s description of her dancing down the aisle in Sydney University’s Great Hall to receive her degree ‘on the black-and-white mottled marble from Marulan – discovered in the early 1820s by her forebears Charles Throsby Smith and Dr Charles Throsby’ strains the connection.

Readers interested in Australian dance history may want to start at Part Two, which gives a more direct account of Cullen’s life. She was born to the postwar generation of middle-class Australians with increased access to education and travel, who thought they could revolutionise not only the arts but the way people lived. As an eight-year-old, she began dance lessons with Gertrud Bodenwieser, a refugee from Vienna who pioneered the ‘New Dance’ in Australia. By fourteen, she was performing in contemporary dance pieces choreographed by Bodenwieser disciples. Her talent and intelligence were obvious.

At the University of Sydney, she conducted free dance workshops in the Quad on Sunday mornings and became part of a collective of artists who worked at the Tin Sheds Gallery on City Road, exploring the creation of music through dance movement near a theremin. She performed with Australian musical experimenters such as David Ahern and Roger Frampton. Then she met the German experimental musician Karlheinz Stockhausen on his 1970 visit to Australia. They became lovers and, after her graduation, Cullen travelled to Europe, where she studied music theory and computer systems in her quest for ways to make musical sounds from dance. She created several dance pieces there and collaborated with Stockhausen on the work Inori, though she eventually became frustrated by his controlling manner and assumption of prominence. After returning home through Asia, she made the fateful decision to live in a commune called Auroville in Pondicherry, India. A few months later she died there.

My summary offers only the bare narrative skeleton for this long book, which follows every digression that occurs to the author, quotes almost every letter and diary entry available, and provides a day-by-day account of Cullen’s declining health and wayward decision making as her body breaks down. At times, the digressions can be exasperating, as when Juers interrupts her gripping account of Cullen’s last, desperate attempt to save her own life with a paragraph on Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, on the tenuous ground that he might have had ‘similar thoughts to Philippa’s in her escape to the mountains’. On the same page, Cullen’s arrival at Roseneath Cottage in a hill station leads to a potted account of a colonial administrator who had stayed there a century before and was the model for a character in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit.

This book is best at recalling the enthusiasms and sense of possibility that galvanised young artists around Sydney in the 1970s. Numerous musicians, painters, poets, and dancers interact with Cullen, but there is no index to help follow them. Her 1972 work UTTER used dancers’ voices and body noises as an accompaniment, with a script by Cullen’s friend George Alexander. Her Lightless involved dancers performing in darkness among an audience that could only sense the dancers’ movements. At the Yellow House, she performed Frampton’s Bath Piece sitting naked in a bath while Alexander rubbed her body with a piece of soap. There were trips to art festivals in Mildura and Canberra, where the young performers lived uncomfortably in tents and produced works like A Rain Poem, which went awry in front of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. In Europe, Cullen was able to meet and collaborate with computer experts as well as other dancers to develop machines to convert dance into music – though more than one friend cautioned her against surrendering the body to the machine. She was interested in African and Asian dance styles, and open about the potential of communal living, though her idealism about the Indian commune found her doing domestic chores rather than pursuing art. There can be no moral or clear meaning from her early death, despite the surprise that a strong athletic body like Cullen’s could be so fragile. Her pain was not simply ‘body information’ for her to interpret, but a symptom of danger.

The Dancer might be placed alongside a memoir such as Paula Keogh’s The Green Bell (2017), about her relationship with the poet Michael Dransfield, as another document of the lost artists of an idealistic and hopeful time.