In the penultimate chapter, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadequacy of the NSW Education Department’s art teaching practices. Smith adds that Ashton also ‘told his life story (as old men will)’.

As the wry parenthesis suggests, Smith is knowingly doing something similar in this book. Autobiography becomes polemic, and vice versa. Smith is both narrator and subject. Sometimes the cultural historian Smith leaps out from the page, telling readers how much they missed when he, the subject, forsook painting for art education. He peevishly complains, too, that ‘the influence of Federation Art Society lectures has been completely ignored by historians of modernism in Australia’. But there is never any doubt that Smith, now in his late sixties and a retired but prolific art educator, enjoyed putting this elaborate self-portrait together. The book ends when he was about twenty-six, after a number of decisive experiences and events.