MY EXPERIENCE OF trying to write a thesis taught me practically from the outset that writing twelve chapters was materially different from writing twelve unconnected essays. The maximum length permitted by the ANU for a PhD thesis was 100,000 words, and most theses ended up between 80,000 and the maximum. This meant that you must have a coherent argument that transcended the concerns of individual chapters. At the same time, I instinctively believed, and still believe, that the best research should be embedded in empirical exploration of reality. This is not to say that the generation of theory is unimportant, but that unless it is underpinned by empirical understanding of the actual world, it is likely to end up as largely irrelevant to practical concerns. A few times in my career I have read reviews of my work that took me to task for underplaying the theoretical implications of what I have written. Such criticisms were mostly fair, but I hold fast to my view that without a deep understanding of the real world, based on hard empirical investigation, any theoretical insights that emerge may well be flawed or of limited interest.

David Sissons, my supervisor during most of my serious thesis writing, was much more extreme than I was in giving priority to empirical concerns. Indeed, I have never met anybody who pursued every path that his research opened up with such dedication to detail and to covering every last inch of ground as was David. In his research, for instance, on Japanese pearl divers in Northern Australia, I believe that he felt it necessary to investigate in meticulous detail the background to information given by every headstone in the Japanese cemetery at Broome before he could venture to write anything about the subject. Somebody once said to me, ‘David does not understand the concept of a sample.’ More seriously Arthur Burns, who preceded David as my thesis supervisor, once expressed to me the opinion that ‘David is an absolute non-generaliser’. With that opinion, however, I do not entirely concur. Having helped edit a posthumous edition of David's writings (Arthur Stockwin and Keiko Tanaka, Bridging Australia and Japan: The Writings of David Sissons, Historian and Political Scientist, 2 vols., Canberra, Australian National University Press, 2016-2020).