In the autumn of 1992 I visited a friend of mine, Peter Gathercole, in Cambridge. I was bleary; a car alarm had been triggered in the middle of the night in London, where I'd been staying, so the night was sleepless, but the trip was pacific and I was pleased to catch up with Peter. We had met in 1990 in Brisbane at a conference on the work of the Australian Marxist archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe, and hit it off immediately, even though Peter was a specialist in anthropology and I was a refugee in sociology; he'd been a Marxist as well, indeed had been taught by Gordon Childe. In Cambridge we walked together and talked, took tea back at his flat. We'd spoken about Cambridge and communism, about my ongoing work on Australian intellectuals, and about his own acquaintance with Bernard Smith over the years. At 4 p.m. Peter took a nap, leaving me sitting at his desk downstairs with the various copies of Smith's books that Bernard had given him over the years. It dawned on me. I became convinced that I must write about Bernard Smith. Somehow his work spoke directly to me, across all those cleavages claimed to divide the generations. Imagining the Pacific was a strikingly contemporary way of seeing. The idea of European vision was brilliant. Bernard had left his umbrella with Peter on a previous visit.