The history of adult educations is a history of people wrestling with ignorance, suspicion, and lack of resources. It spans from convict Tasmania to a writers workshop today in a peaceful, country location. Between these two extremes lies an important but long-neglected aspect of Australian social history, inhabited by a strange collection of visionaries, philanthropists with a social conscience, and billiards players. In The Great Tradition: A History of Adult Education in Australia. Derek Whitelock brings the people, and their often wrong-headed struggles to spread knowledge and understanding, back to life from their largely unknown past. In the first comprehensive study on this subject, the author tells the story in all its amusing detail from early colonial times right up to the early 1970s.