Lusting for London (book)

LUSTING FOR LONDON: AUSTRALIAN EXPATRIATE WRITERS AT THE HUB OF THE EMPIRE, 1870-1950

New York: Palgrave, 2011

According to an old and bitter joke, the leading exports of Australia are wool and brains. This book investigates the haemorrhage of so much of its literary brainpower which the country suffered over several decades on each side of the year of Federation, 1901. It analyses the behaviour of those who expatriated themselves to the British Isles permanently, or for a long time, on a quest to discover their authorial talents, or to develop them, or to try to make a better living, or simply to escape from a birthplace that they regarded as stultifying. It expresses their hopes and fears, measures their successes and failures, and studies comparatively how their careers were shaped by shifting their country of residence. It also tries to evaluate some of the best attempts to exploit creatively the expatriate experience—in three very different novels in particular—and the degree to which, insofar as their work was done elsewhere, the loss of these expatriates supplemented or hampered the evolving literary culture of Australia. And last but not least, since in every case the destination and residence of these people was London and its environs, it is also part of the task of this book to investigate what Julian Wolfreys calls ‘the rhetoric of imagining London’—here, specifically from an antipodean perspective, and from the late nineteenth up to the mid-twentieth century.

Lusting for London tries to handle questions such as: What is an expatriate writer? What distinguishes an Australian expatriate writer from, say, the American equivalent? At what point does a long-stay visitor become an expatriate? Were those who eventually returned to Australia after many years away simply going back home, or does it make more sense to think of them as ex-expatriates? What changes in the standing of the expatriate writer are detectable over the period, and was the concept, as it had been previously understood, still intact by 1950, or had it started to disintegrate or mutate into something different? Its ‘raw material’ is the careers of about 150 Australian expatriates who moved to London semi-permanently before 1950 – these writers range from the more or less forgotten journalists like Arthur Adams, P.R. Stephensen and Louise Mack, to canonical Australian expatriate novelists such as Martin Boyd, Christina Stead and H.H. Richardson.

Some of the literary characters who left, or fled, Australia in my period and found ‘darkest London’ a suitable habitat for their further activities, were both eccentric and morally dubious. It would be hard to invent a character like the doctor-journalist-sexologist Dr Norman Haire, who was not averse to recommending sex with spaniels, or the pornographer and pseudo-moralist William Willis. Several writers left Australia to avoid, or after serving, a gaol sentence; and for people of this type London offered concealment. For the sexual escapist, exhibitionist or entrepreneur London’s anonymous, swarming multitudes supplied deep cover to all sorts of transgressive sexuality—promiscuity, homosexuality, adultery, paedophilia—providing one were discreet and superficially respectable enough to pass unchallenged by generally deferential policemen. As another immigrant, Joseph Conrad, puts it in another study of a different kind of exile, the terrorist, in The Secret Agent (1907)—and in this comment he is must be drawing a contrast specifically with Australia—London is a ‘monstrous town more populous than some continents’ with room for any story, depth for any passion, darkness enough to bury any life. Such was the dark romance of the great metropolis whose population, right through this period, exceeded the whole of Australia’s.

Throughout Lusting for London the emphasis is on what Australians of literary bent made of the expatriate experience at the personal level. It therefore draws most productively on memoirs, journals and (particularly) novels where the semi-autobiographical element is uppermost. It aims to be both a scholarly work – it draws on unpublished archival material and is thoroughly documented – but also a readable piece of social history exploring an almost totally unexplored field. Given that the loss to Britain of so many of Australia’s most creative people was a persistent theme in the history of the first half of the last century, it is extraordinary that my subject has not been tackled before.

The book was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. For sample reviews and the opening chapter, see Sidebar.