This book is a selection of essays published over half a century. They appeared in a variety of journals, and are grouped under the headings: The Public Realm, Folkways, Russia and East Europe, Australian Literature and Australian society. They argue that all cultures have an underground dimension which acts as a balance to its overt one. Heterodox political and religious notions can survive in subliminal form in literature to avoid detection by dominant cultures. In times of drastic change survivals from the past can have a brief last flowering in literature: 'Things reveal themselves passing away', as Yeats understood. Our personalities and our nations are not monochrome entities but layered amalgams of all that has gone before. These deposits form the substratum on which our civil society is grounded. Civil society itself can be corroded when the public realm tries to suborn rather than protect the intermediate and private sectors in society. Literature and history are the domains where these relentless processes of coagulation and dissolution are best understood.

Patrick Morgan has had parallel careers as academic and author. This is his thirteenth book. He was appointed a council member of the Federal Government National Archives and the Australia Council of the Arts. His regional history won the Victorian Government's Local and Community History Prize in 1998, and he was awarded a Centenary Medal in 2001. Patrick and Ann Morgan live in the south Gippsland hills; they have seven children and twelve grandchildren.