AustLit

'Inevitably the personal past that John Mulvaney tells us about in his autobiography will be closely inspected for its relationship to the professional past that has been dominant in his life. And there is much of relevance there: his boyhood in rural Victoria in a family in which it was thought that he might become a teacher like his father; his wartime service in the RAAF for which, on his demobilisation, the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme provided him with the opportunity of tertiary education; the 50 years of his companiable marriage and collaborative relationship with Jean; and his thoughts in his eighty-fourth year on life, death and religious belief, particularly in the light of his years of archaeological and anthropological study. In what follows, however, I shall be looking at major themes in his professional past.'  (Introduction)