I decided on the book's closing sentence in February 2011, only a week or so after my house had flooded, and wrote the whole of the final chapter towards its concluding encounter with the young Alison Conway. But other quite unrelated events eventually convinced me that this little flood was ultimately a very small matter, not only in relation to the collective life of Australia, but also to my own personal biography. As narrative, the book ends where it ends. But as autobiography there is more to add. I began work on the book in West Yorkshire in late 2007, whilst tending to my teenage sweetheart and first love, Kathryn Turnier (née Wench), who was dying from pancreatic cancer. I completed the first draft in Victoria over the Australian summer of 2011–12, during the early part of which I had tended to my sister, Joyce Morton (née Milner), who was dying from an ovarian cancer that had metastasised into her liver. There was a truly fearful symmetry to the occasion of the book's composition, if only because Kathy and Joyce had known each other well. They had attended the same girls’ grammar school, eaten at the same school dinner table, played in the same school hockey teams, and Kathy had also been Joyce's bridesmaid. And I remain haunted by vivid memories of their youthful beauty, energy and enthusiasm. I wouldn't want for a moment to claim that this parallelism is suggestive of environmental, rather than genetic, explanations for their illnesses. Probably not. But I would want to ask, as I have on a previous occasion: ‘Why is that you can never find an earth-shattering scientific invention when you really need one?’ (Milner, 2005, v). The answer surely lies in a deep structural contradiction between the emancipatory potential of scientific research, on the one hand, and the political economy of globalised late capitalism, on the other. As Clarke and Pohl's Mevrouw Vorhulst observes in The Last Theorem: ‘Oh, there's plenty of money for research – as long as what is being researched is some kind of weapon’ (Clarke and Pohl, 2008, 120).