As Professor Oskar Spate says in his Foreword, ‘Most Australians who have heard of Miclouho-Maclay at all have a vague idea that he was the first ethnographer to do serious work in New Guinea, a Russian with a warm human sympathy for native races’. In this sensitively written biography, Elsie Webster presents Maclay as a man of strong, complex and sometimes inconsistent character who packed a remarkable amount of work and adventure into his short life of forty-two years.

Nicolai Miclouho-Maclay was born in Russia in 1846. His father was a railway engineer who died when he was eleven years old and his mother’s grandfather had been physician to Prussian and Polish kings. He was a ‘hereditary nobleman’, a rank which did not carry a title. He was called ‘Baron’ by people outside Russia but he did not encourage its use and he can be acquitted of the charge of self-aggrandisement. In 1868 he adopted the additional surname of Maclay but, although he claimed a Scottish grand-mother, its origin is uncertain.