For many readers, critics and writers, Australian literary biography and autobiography are rich and complex domains. In this chapter the texts themselves will be used as points of departure, and anchors of a series of cross-sections which will stress the importance and energy of this writing from the very beginnings of European settlement, although the focus will remain on contemporary examples. One of the pleasures of these books is their ongoing interrogation of ways of writing about the self and subjectivity; some of the best critiques of biographical and autobiographical writing occur in the primary texts themselves. Another pleasure, and further reason to modify a chronological approach, is that nineteenth-century Australian life-writing remains very much alive, and continues to emerge anew in the present. The past is not settled. Extensive bibliographical and critical work continues to challenge Australian literary history by revealing hitherto “invisible lives” in nineteenth-century materials, so bringing a much larger volume of autobiographical writing into bibliographical records. Furthermore, the recent work of critics who draw on the methods of feminist criticism, deconstruction and/or new historicism has produced rereadings of many nineteenth-century texts. So, for example, in the wake of Paul Carter's The Road to Botany Bay (1987), the writings of explorers like Sturt and Mitchell, or Watkin Tench's journals, previously categorised as “descriptive writing”, may now be read as autobiographical acts, allowing insight into the historical, cultural and social contexts which shape the autobiographic subject. Lucy Frost's A face in the glass. The journal and life of Annie Baxter Dawbin (1992) also uses a nineteenth-century journal as the basis of a biographical study of Annie Baxter, weaving together the autobiographical journal and a contemporary biographical account.