The collection as a whole marks not just stylistic shifts but paradigm leaps, implicitly noted, as you would expect in an Oxford book that pays its dues to inclusiveness and history. Some of the early pieces now seem almost comic in their anglo or eurocentricity, their maleness, their pre-Freudian confidence. Some are Australian but in unrecoverable ways. Seamless commendation of heroic, even stoic, devotion to duty doesn't recommend itself to our contemporary scepticism. But nonetheless you can't resist the timeless poignancy of Scott's Matthew Flinders, the man sailors called 'Flinders the Indefatigable', writing his punctilious letters to the Commissioners for victualling His Majesty's Navy, explaining that he had been obliged to expend considerably more than the allowed sum on candles because His Majesty's sloop Investigator carried six men of science who worked in their cabins at night.
Revision is endemic in the essay as in culture.
Morag Fraser is the editor of Eureka Street .