After more than twenty-two years of haphazard diary keeping(1984-2006) and an equally haphazard twenty years of dream recording(1986-2006) , there looms ahead of me the shadow of a type of diary that my work may attain to: part of the shadow is prospective and the other retrospective. What, indeed, will I make of this loose, drifting material of my life, as Virginia Woolfe calls the material for her diary and which very accurately describes mine, however incomplete, however irregular are my entries, however superficial the content often is. Do I want this diary to be so elastic as to embrace anything solemn, slight, beautiful or ugly that comes to mind, sort of a capacious hold-all? Will this diary, this journal, this particular way of conveying my memoir, when all is said and done and the roll is called up yonder, resemble a place where I have flung a mass of odds and ends, some with reflective ardour and great meaning, some with fatigue and sadness, some with guilt and shame, some with a sense of their utter triviality, their tedium and life's.

The purpose of this overview of my diary, written after twenty-two years of making episodic diary entries and introducing the 5th volume of my diary is to analyse, give definition and pattern to the autobiographical memory that I have put on paper across my lifespan in the form of a diary. Autobiographical memory can be broadly defined as a type of episodic memory for information related to the self, both in the form of retrospective memories and prospective ones, expectations. If retrospective autobiographical memory relates to the retrieval of memories, experiences or past events in the present, then prospective autobiographical memory is concerned with the retrieval of expectations, anticipations or future events, which likewise are based on present memory functioning.

On the basis of what I have written here in these 22 years, it would appear that a collection of flotsam and jetsam has been put on record. This material has been born from a vaster collection of life's flotsam and jetsam, some of which is meaningful to me in the moment or at least hopefully so but, ultimately and possibly, about as useful and valuable to others as the eye of a dead ant. I hope this is not the case but, as T.S. Eliot once wrote, one has to be prepared that all of which one has written may become a dead letter. I get a sense of order in putting all this on paper. That is its own reward.

I certainly think there is potential in these folders that contain my journals or diaries that unfold aspects of my life. It is a potential I have hardly begun to realize as yet in these first five diary-volumes. But there is something unique, some unique contribution to my overall autobiographical opus: Pioneering Over Four Epochs, that has begun to reveal itself after more than two decades of making entries. A description of “a life without secrets and without privacy” wrote Boris Pasternak; describing only the life that is on display in society in its different forms like in some “show window” is simply “inconceivable,” he concluded. For me, this privacy is essentially the life of the mind and many things I have not revealed in the other forms of autobiography. Such things are those elements of human experience that seem most private, most hidden, most personal, most shameful, most embarrassing, a source of most guilt and those things that do not tend to be divulged in the normal course of interpersonal life. That is what has just begun to be revealed, at least in part, in these journals when time and the inclination combine to allow me to make some entry of this kind. I have tried to eliminate the trivial, but this is difficult for so much of life seems to amount to that particularly when one tries to put one's experience on paper.

Readers should by now realize that much of what is written here in this introduction is virtually the same as the introduction to volume 4 of this journal. I have also written many of these words some six months before officially opening this diary. It seemed useful to begin the contemplation of the 5th volume of this diary before its opening date on January 20th 2006. Volume 4 was becoming too full to continue and the size of my volumes is based on the room in each arcvh-lever file or two-ring binder. In addition, it was 34 years ago today that I arrived in Australia as an international pioneer and so, perhaps, writing these introductory words to this 5th volume of my journal today is timely and appropriate. Time permitting and the interest forthcoming I will add more after January 20th 2006, the opening date for this volume.

Ron Price
July 12th 2006