Ian Walter Boothroyd Thornton, Emeritus Professor of Zoology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, died in Bangkok on 1 October 2002, on his way home from Laos, where he had been advising the Laos National University on science course development. Among his papers he left an incomplete initial draft of a book he had long planned to write on the development of island communities – an interest he had pursued vigorously for much of his academic life. Ian had discussed aspects of his book with me, and other colleagues, and had expressed the wish to his wife, Ann, that should anything happen to prevent him from finishing it himself, I might be able to complete the work and see it through to publication. As anyone who has attempted any similar task will know, such an exercise is daunting in both scope and responsibility! Although we had debated a number of the themes included, and I had participated in extensive field expeditions (including four trips to Krakatau) with Ian over some 30 years, our perspectives sometimes differed considerably.

The dilemmas of editing a close colleague and friend's posthumous work have been summarized admirably (and, coincidentally, in the autobiography of another distinguished Pacific region entomologist, Robert Usinger), and I have tried to follow the spirit of the perspective given there by Gorton Linsley and Lin Gressitt (1972).