AustLit

'International men (and occasionally women) of mystery permeate the dreaming about and discover of the country we now call Australia and its early development as a series of colonies of Britain. Indeed, since the European maritime explorations into the southern hemisphere in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to the early twenty-first century, men and women in the shadows of history have spied in the service of a variety of masters and mistresses as they sought to find the fabled South Land in order to exploit what wealth or advantage it might yield ... a recognition of some of these secrets and mysteries and the political imbroglios from which they grew are important for twenty-first century Australians who see themselves being drawn into other imperial ambitions or terrorist plots.' (p.17)