Here I can mention only a couple among a multitude of remarkable effects. The second long chapter of the book, ‘History Made’, is largely concerned with the making of young William Gooch, son of a wigmaker from Brookdish. into that very odd creature. a Cambridge man. Some earlier readers had found this chapter heavy going. The University. where the power of the mind over matter has perhaps always been exaggerated, was at the end of the eighteenth century a riotous jungle of rituals and symbols, quite a few of them of recent and all too human invention. Turn an anthropologist loose in all that, and he will play. Now the play is made both more gleeful and more accessible by an array of crisp, apposite images (surprisingly many of them drawn from Melbourne University’s own Baillieu Library) which flank and spur the written text. Some are comic; some are beautiful: all are arresting.

A few photographs are used in the chapter ‘History in the Making’, (which was and remains my favourite: if there is a more insightful account of the vicissitudes practical, emotional and cognitive of ‘research’, the formidable name historians give to our hopeful topographical and intellectual wanderings, I have not seen it). Dening must have taken them years ago, before he could have guessed at their use. They make a small cluster in the upper half of a single page. There are four: two of the village church, one spanning the front, including the cemetery, the other a detail of the steeple; three gravestones; a manor house seen at a distance between trees. The church is solid, well-maintained, as unevocative as well-maintained antiques tend to be. The gravestones stand rigid as soldiers and apparently as blank-faced, hard against the church wall: our eyes skid over them. The manor house is one we might glimpse from any English country lane, unnamed, across fields, just as it is represented here. And there we have The Past, present, but opaque, and featureless to the undisciplined eye. Dening’s eye is supremely disciplined. So are ours, when he has taught us how to look. I wept, looking at those gravestones, because there were not four.

The written text begins with the account of a killing: of William Gooch, aged twenty-one, astronomer to the Daedalus and on his first voyage, by native warriors, at Waimea beach on Oahu in 1792. He dies on the first page of the Prologue. He was killed, along with his commander and friend Richard Hergest, when the two men were careless: they walked too far from a (dangerously small) watering party. The rest of the book comprises an enquiry into the many meanings of that killing, and into the making of history. It is also a lament and a memorial for young William Gooch.

In this new edition even the Prologue has pictures. We have a Hawaiian god, ‘the poison god’, rough-carved out of wood, with staring eyes and grossly swollen tongue. We have a map, austere, schematic; the black tracking line of the Daedalus runs sleekly through the islands and away. No blood-clots, no jagged stutter to mark the confusion of violent death. We have ‘a young Hawaiian woman dancing’, her body rising like a flower out of the rich swirls of her skirt. We have a drawing of a ‘cut-in-two’, warriors so ferocious as to tolerate the complete tattooing of one half of the body (it was ‘cut-in-twos’ who killed Gooch). We have a classically elegant Hawaiian chief, poised, cloaked, helmeted like a Greek. And we have a representation of a most ceremonious presentation of gifts (by a priest?) to a formal Captain Cook before a temple and the mitred image of a god. Thus the visual texts accompany and counterpoint the movement of the written text from encounter, apparent savagery (on both sides), to the flawed, halting, but necessary process of the recognition of the civility, and therefore the humanity, of the Other.

The most powerful image is placed first, before the words begin. It is a dark, brooding photograph. It is captioned ‘Entrance to Waimea’. There is a river there, and strange, blunt-topped hills. The beach curves away to the left, behind the bluff, where the river is. The caption tells us that the Daedalus’s boat beached a little to the left, just out of the picture. The written text installs in our mind’s eye two figures, moving away from us, ‘talking, strolling, tri-cornered hats together’: Hergest and Gooch. They are intent on each other, mending a small rent in their friendship: ‘with the strangeness of the place about to descend on them, they were in no strange place at all.’ Then the strangeness, and the warriors, descend.

The book ends with a réprise: Gooch and Hergest walk up that beach again, to the dark cleft where the river turns. (Now that we know so much more, we know we will never fully understand what is about to happen.) I had long held an image in my head of the two figures, walking away, getting smaller. But the image was flickering, unstable as a moment retrieved from archival film. Now that Dening’s art has been extended, I have and hold an image close to cinema vérité in its painful, human clarity.