This book consists of sixteen essays based on papers delivered at the symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities held in Hobart in 2004. The title of the book was the theme of the symposium. A conference must have a theme, of course, or no one would ever fund the participants, but individual speakers do not always address it, or they do so tangentially. We have all been at conferences where the relationship of the speaker’s paper to the theme is the same as that between the ugly sisters’ feet and Cinderella’s dancing slipper – a great deal of stretching and contorting to make the text fit the theme, and vice versa. This is why conference proceedings rarely make good books.

The editor starts off well in her introduction by enlarging on the theme: ‘What can we know of the past and how can we best represent it? Must the discipline of history make good the fallibility of memory or does the imaginative work of fiction do a better job of enlivening past experience than the stern empiricism of the historian?’