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Abstract

Australians have always been great travellers, not only internationally but between Australian states and territories. Writing about Australian lives is thus a biographical challenge when they transcend national and internal boundaries. It means that, when dealing with mobile subjects, biographers need to be nimble diachronically, because of changing locales over time, and synchronically because many Australians have not always seen themselves as bound to a particular place. Nonetheless, despite the problems of writing about mobile lives, the deft use of biography appeals as a means of examining individual life paths in their immediate contexts within the larger scales suggested by transnational historical practice. An abundance of books, edited volumes, and articles have followed individuals, families, and other collectives as they 'career' (to use the term adopted by Lambert and Lester in their influential 2006 volume, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire) around the globe.Over its 60-year history, the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), like its British equivalent the (Oxford) Dictionary of National Biography, has been characterised by many as a 'classic instance of national self-regard'. 1 Yet in a similar way to its predecessor, the ADB has been fluid in its conception of the 'national', and thus has endeavoured to recognise Australians who have been active overseas, as well as foreign nationals who have contributed, even fleetingly, to Australian life. Nonetheless, various factors have meant that such an aspiration has tended more toward the ideal than the reality, and that 'the shadow of the nation' has continued to affix itself to biography. 2 Not least of these is the nature of the personal archive, which generally reflects a cultural, social or political contribution to a particular nation state, rather than a life of movement and transnationality. Added to what will often emerge as practical and methodological problems in biographical writing, the most popular biographical subjects, and those generally favoured by publishers, are often the 'towering national figures' whose significance is defined by their contribution to the particular nation. In over 13,000 published biographies since its first volume in 1966, the ADB corpus reflects this tendency towards the national in biographical writing, at least at a prima facie level. The vast majority of subjects (87.5 per cent) are male,