Owen Dixon presents a number of difficulties for a biographer, even in the most promiscuous age of biography. To consider Dixon's various roles thus requires an understanding of the practice of the law in Australia in the early part of the last century, of the difficult and sometimes esoteric matters that Dixon argued before the Australian High Court as counsel and deliberated on as Justice of that court and then its Chief Justice, of the intricacies of wartime diplomacy (which inevitably includes a consideration both of Australian political feuding and of larger questions of strategy), and of the ethnic, religious and political thicket of the Kashmir, India crisis.