These are sad little cautionary tales of the brevity, not only of human life but of fame itself. The only one whose name I recognise is Les Darcy, the boxer. Archie Jackson was as promising a batsman as Bradman at twenty-two, before succumbing to tuberculosis. Who knows his name now?

Given the period the book covers, Walsh had to include at least one soldier. Dying young was not an unusual event for men of the early twentieth century, however fit, healthy and hard-working. Eric Edgerton was killed in France in 1918, just a few weeks before the Armistice. On his death, Walsh tells us: ‘All spoke of his happy, generous and unassuming nature and no one ever heard an unbecoming or harsh word from him.’ The medical scientist John Hunter, who died of typhoid fever in 1924, is similarly eulogised for ‘his great human qualities. Australia’s heritage is all the richer for the remembrance of one “in whom genius flourished in a character of singular charm and simplicity”.’

This is such an old-fashioned book. It could have been written 100 years ago. It is heartening that a modern publisher will still allow the occasional untranslated Latin tag (despite the insistence on translating weight and measures into metric and, more misleadingly, shillings and pence into cents). However, I did begin to long for a small breath of irony amid the sentimentality. Do the good really die young, or is it the other way around?