'In his introduction to this edited book, Paul Longley Arthur notes that the public image of Australian egalitarianism is at odds with the nation's internal experience and policies, historically, and in the present. It would be unproductive, he writes, to attempt to present a case for ‘what we are’ or for the past ‘as it really was’ (2). Instead, stories of previously obscured or hidden lives shine a new light on the complexities of Australian (and other) identities, cultural experiences, society and history, working the ‘gap between image and experience’ (2). In a country obsessed with national navel-gazing, this is the type of national self-examination worth engaging in, he argues.' (Introduction)
