'Geoffrey Bolton was one of Australia’s greatest historians and writing books about the lives of historians can be a tricky business. I have a colleague who likes to try to rank the top historians in Australia. We have argued over where Bolton would fit in the list. I have always said that he ranks in the first five. He was productive over several decades and covered diverse topics from the British Empire to the Perth street in which he grew up. He did not have a niche and was also peripatetic, working in many places, a true historian for all seasons. How then would one design a book to commemorate his life without creating an exaggerated eulogy to a great historian? ' (Introduction)

'Traditional academic festschrifts often lack coherence and consistency, especially when the honorand’s former students and colleagues, as more or less duty-bound contributors, share little in common beyond that association. A posthumous tribute to a departed scholar can be more successful, not least because the circumstances of its compilation permit a less constrained approach to its subject’s oeuvre. The editors of this splendid collection, which had its genesis at the Perth funeral in 2015 of one Australia’s most productive and prominent historians, insist that they intend no ‘detailed examination’ of Geoffrey Bolton’s life work. Yet what they and their fellow contributors have to say about the man and his multifarious historical activities is at least as interesting as what they tell us about ‘how lines of enquiry that he pursued have been extended’.' (Introduction)