The facing island in Jan Bassett’s memoir is Phillip Island, where her maternal grandparents had a dairy farm and where it seems she was most emotionally at home. Summer holidays there as a child in the 1960s, in the midst of her grandmother’s extended family and surrounded by familiar tokens of past decades reaching as far back as the early 1900s, undoubtedly sparked her lifelong commitment to Australian history. The title, taken from Peter Rose’s poem ‘Balnarring Beach’ (‘The facing island, a mortal blue, / beckons, intensifies, vanishes’), could hardly be more appropriate, compressing in a few words much of the emotional intensity of Bassett’s autobiographical last journey.

Written as cancer ravaged her body, the book faces both the personal history and that of others in the spirit of L.P. Hartley’s assertion that ‘the past is a foreign country’. If the enigmas of history, of self and of others perpetually intrigue Bassett, contributing to the attractively candid, open tone of her narrative, one of the greatest enigmas is her beloved, deceased grandmother, Edith Coels. ‘Edie’ is shown to be as reticent and ‘serious-minded’ as her granddaughter, silent about her possible disappointments and especially about a personal crisis in 1919, which was a near shipwreck. So it is peculiarly fitting that she should grant her historian granddaughter a gift that would become a means of opening (or at least setting ajar) some of the doors to the past.