In the last two decades literary critics have become noticeably interested in autobiography. Given the context, this is not surprising: the rise of theories in opposition to New Criticism has undermined simplistic ideas of textual integrity and the hierarchical pattern which saw poetry as the supreme (perhaps the defining) mode of literary discourse. This interest has been coincident with, and often originated from, post-structuralist reconfigurations of concepts such as text and author. To ask questions of autobiography now is to ask questions such as: ‘To what extent does the autobiographical text refer to the world?’ “To what extent is subjectivity an “effect of discourse”?’ ‘Is it possible to make any distinction between fiction and autobiography?’

The puzzles of autobiography have, in the main, been confined to the Anglo-American ‘tradition’. But Australian literature is also a rich field of autobiography. Of primary importance is Hal Porter's The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, described by John and Dorothy Colmer as the ‘greatest single landmark in the history of Australian autobiography’. Since the publication of The Watcher in 1963 by the ‘famous and fastidious house of Faber and Faber’, Australian autobiography has steadily gained acceptance as a mode worthy of critical study. Porter's critical success has also meant that earlier autobiographies have received attention. John and Dorothy Colmer's anthology of Australian autobiography includes a number of extracts from autobiographical or semi-autobiographical works published before 1963.