How do individual life histories illuminate historical processes? What are the problems and pitfalls in using them? How are autobiographies, biographies and diaries constructed? What insights can psychohistory offer the biographer? To what extent is the historian justified in moving in the 'imaginative territory usually reserved for novelists'? We use key texts - biography, autobiography and the diary - to explore important themes in Australian history: Aboriginal experience, migration and displacement; late 19th century feminism; ordinary lives; war; male and female intellectuals; communism; romance, family and sexuality.