Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been the most wicked and twisted of roads. I owe thanks to a lot of people who helped me reach its end. For reading various drafts and providing encouragement I thank Bobby Anderson, Tom Bamforth, Jim Della-Giacoma, Andrew Harris, Sue Ingram, Christine Kearney, Jono Lineen, Stephanie Lusby, Kylie McKenna, Mark Notaras, Kevin Pullen, Michael Rose and Ceridwen Spark. Nadine Davidoff told me the book I should write and Felicity Tepper helped me wrangle the draft into shape to get it to a publisher. Awaneesh Bamola has been incredibly helpful to me. The two anonymous reviewers provided extremely helpful steer. Anthony Regan read a near-final draft and helped save me from myself. Stewart Firth, Siobhan McDonnell and Emily Tinker at ANU Press helped find the book a worthy home and Glenine Hamlyn has done a top-notch job copyediting the text. I thank the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau of The Australian National University, and the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, for giving me access to the archives.

John Timlin, my literary agent, has been incredibly supportive, despite his scepticism about the level of windfalls likely to come from ANU Press’s open-access publishing model. Ken Imako from DarkAsidE came up with the book’s main title. Any mistakes in the book are my own, as are all the interpretations. The latter do not reflect the views of anyone I worked for.

I wrote the book as a visitor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University. I loved my time there, and I thank Veronica Taylor and Miranda Forsyth for sponsoring my visitorship.

Daniel Flitton from the Interpreter, the blog of the Lowy Institute, gave me the space to test ideas. Earlier versions of some of the material in the book have already been published.¹

I have a wonderful family support team: Suzanne, and our sons, Charles and Patrick. Suzanne invariably has much more faith in me than I have in myself, and I love her more each day. I don’t know how she puts up with me sometimes, but I’m so glad she does.

Our two sons are our proudest achievements. ‘Never give up, Dad,’ said Charles to me one night when I was unburdening myself to Suzanne about how I feared I would never finish this project. I thought Charles and his brother had gone to bed. As it turned out, he was tuning into our conversation, and his words – delivered with all his passion, all his sincerity – stopped me from abandoning the project. Patrick would ask, ‘When’s this book you are going to write for me going to be finished, Dad?’ I’m happy not to have to fob him off with any more variations on ‘Soon’, and that instead I can say, ‘Now’.

Palisades, Washington D.C.

May 2022