In each of these autobiographies, an Aboriginal man is enabled to see himself in new ways partly by his experience of being a public servant. There is a way to think about the impersonality of bureaucracy that assumes that impersonality is the nemesis of ‘personality’, as if the ‘machine’ necessarily tends to obliterate the person. Charles Perkins’ account comes closest to saying something like this. Becoming a ‘paper warrior’ confines him; and he is impatient, and even dismissive, of the established procedures of financial administration and recruitment. Yet his attitude to ‘impersonality’ is on the whole more complex and ambivalent. When he reproaches the diplomats who failed to help him, he invokes an ethic of selfless pubic service, and he is in no doubt that Aborigines must learn to use the machinery of government, whether it be a Department of Aboriginal Affairs reconstituted as a statutory authority or their own publicly subsidised organisations. He joined the public service to learn its techniques, and as readers we know that he had thirteen years as a senior public servant after publishing his account of his initiation.

Gordon Matthews narrates his personal quest for the truth of his heritage partly according to the trope that impersonality is the nemesis of personality; I am thinking of his reluctance to reveal to his boss his discovery that he is in fact Sri Lankan-Australian, not Aboriginal-Australian, as if the machine would judge him as dishonouring its investment in him as an Aborigine. But his public service boss is not troubled by having quietly to change a line in Gordon’s personal file. Not only did impersonal administration allow him to be ‘Aboriginal’ and even to reward him for being so; it was no less forgiving of his ceasing to be ‘Aboriginal’. Bureaucratic impersonality turns out to be accommodating of ‘difference’; it can choose to inscribe and re-inscribe ethnicity as merely the private characteristic of a functional person.

Finally, Wayne King allows us to see one of the limits of this accommodating impersonality. There is something enabling and something disabling about an ethos that does not care who you are. In the world of the floating UN bureaucrat, especially in that version of its socialities that gay men are able to perform, to be deracinated is both emancipating and deeply unsatisfying, at least for someone such as Wayne King who is in a condition of existentially insecure flight from the roots of his social being.

These three books give us a glimpse of the potential of administrative memoirs to be essays in the psychology of contemporary Australian liberalism.