Sir Zelman Cowen and Sir Ninian Stephen: each a lawyer by training, with a highly distinguished career in (respectively) academe and the judiciary, thereafter consecutive governors-general of Australia, and other things after that, both appointed to the governor-generalship by Malcolm Fraser—yet men with entirely different backgrounds, personalities and styles, and now with dissimilar books to record their lives. One is an autobiography, the other a tribute in the form of a collection of essays on the subject’s achievements. The books are so different in genre, purpose and structure that it is impossible to compare them, so I shall discuss each…