This chapter is about the 'I' of the text. It concerns the theory, structural logic and methodology that has informed my writing of this book. Since the advent of the 'new history' in recent years and, more generally, self-reflexive scholarship, it now seems unnecessary to make any pretence at authorial invisibility. The influences upon both this self-reflexivity and what I have termed my 'structural' logic have been various: firstly, the 'Melbourne School' of ethnographic history,1 whose synchronic style and critique of (,diachronic') linear narrative history was surely partly informed by structuralist critiques, for example Claude Levi-Strauss' classic essay, 'History and Dialectic' in The Savage Mind. That essay brings to mind Hayden White's arguably equally 'classic' commentary on it in Tropics of Discourse.2 I have also found inspirational various structuralist and poststructuralist, feminist and postfeminist works too numerous to cite at this point.