Introductory chapter of Lusting for London

According to an old and bitter joke, the leading exports of Australia are wool and brains. This book investigates the haemorrhage 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 gives voice to 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 the attempts of these writers 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.[1]

This topic has been virtually ignored by literary historians. It is true that there have been several excellent books published recently on literary and other Australians in London, but none from quite the perspective of this one. It is the post-Second World War period that is treated very largely in Roslyn Russell’s Literary Links (1997) and in Stephen Alomes’ When London Calls (1999), and exclusively in Ian Britain’s Once an Australian (1997). The old anthology The Australian Abroad (1967) has a wide scope and some interesting commentary by the editors Higham and Wilding, but it deals largely with travellers’ experiences in many different places, not with people who stayed for years in London. The two social histories Duty Free by Ros Pesman (1996) and Angela Woollacott’s To Try Her Fortune in London (2001) do cover the late Victorian and Early Modern eras, but restrict themselves to women expatriates of all kinds, not only writers. Finally, the articles published as Australians in Britain (2009) exclude the late nineteenth century and only two pieces deal expressly with literary matters. In short, the earlier period—the extent of a long lifetime—has never been treated systematically or even received much attention at all. This is a really striking omission when—so it will be demonstrated in the following chapters—we have here a phenomenon which has been one of the most identifiable and enduring themes in the socio-economics of Australian letters.

It is not only historians who have ignored the issue or misinterpreted it. Even some contemporary Australian writers who have long been resident in Britain themselves know nothing of their predecessors’ enterprise in moving countries. Quite recently the late poet Peter Porter, looking back at his own arrival in 1951, spoke proudly of his own post-war generation as being ‘the original garret-starvers’. If Porter was an early ‘garret-starver’, then what was the journalist and novelist Louise Mack, late of Sydney, who in 1902 grew so poor in her attic room near the British Museum that she changed her remaining pound or two into single pennies to eke it out further, and even brooded on suicide? Porter seems oblivious to those who had starved and staggered their way to success or failure over the fifty years or more before he was even born.[2]

As far as definitions are concerned, various questions arise at once. What is an expatriate writer? What distinguishes an Australian expatriate in London from, say, the American equivalent? At what point does a long-stay visitor become an expatriate? Is it useful to distinguish between those who permitted themselves to be absorbed by the host culture, and those who resisted it? Were those who eventually returned after many years away simply going back home, or are they best defined 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 at mid-century, or had it started to disintegrate, or to mutate into something different?

Then there is the issue of evidence. This book is an exercise in socio-cultural history, insofar as that is examinable through group literary biography, memoirs, autobiographies and semi-autobiographical novels and poetry. Its raw materials are necessarily selective, but the criterion is not solely, or even mainly, the quality of writing. Potentially all is grist to the mill. If it resurrects many half- or wholly-forgotten writers and their work, it does so not to rehabilitate a reputation but because they have left behind something unique, or at least striking, to add to the documentation of expatriation. There can be no pretence of inclusiveness, however, in the sense of treating or mentioning every author who moved to London, not even if he or she had a notable, or at least an extensive, writing career there. To do so is impracticable, for three reasons.

First, there is the sheer number of people involved. Only one statistical attempt, by the bibliographer and historian John Arnold, has ever been made to assess the number and productivity of early expatriate literary Australians in London.[3] Taking the narrower period between 1900 and 1940, he identified 120 authors who were active in London at some point over those years, and he enumerated some 1900 creative works published by them over that time. Ninety per cent of these were novels. (He excluded essay collections, journalism, critical works, children’s stories, and most ephemeral romances and thrillers.)

As Arnold concedes, these statistics are problematic in two respects. For one thing, the author-list is by no means comprehensive: it overlooked some names of those who reasonably qualify as expatriate authors, for example Alec Dawson and Fergus Hume, among others. For another, the source of his publications data was the bibliography Miller with McCartney, published as long ago as 1956. This work has some curious omissions, including all Philip Lindsay’s numerous books to that date (he died in 1958) and his brother Jack Lindsay’s prolific output between 1930 and 1940.[4] But in most respects these bibliographers from half a century ago took a generous view of what works should be counted as being ‘by Australian authors’ who were British residents. For example, they included some works by Morley Roberts, E.W. Hornung, and B.L. Farjeon. These were prolific writers whose output, even if only partially enumerated, skews the count of expatriates’ works published in London. Although the issue is bedevilled by the question of how exactly to define an expatriate author, it is more than questionable whether these particular three were in any possible sense ‘Australian’ authors at all. Morley Roberts spent some years in Australia and set stories there, but his North American experiences were very much more valuable to him, and an Englishman who continually roamed the world for his material but who eventually settled and died in his birth country can hardly be called an expatriate Australian. Hornung spent only two years, 1884-6, in the country, and did not return; furthermore, although seven of his many novels do have Australian content, most of this seven appeared before 1900, and should therefore, strictly speaking, be excluded from Arnold’s table. Farjeon has even less of a claim. He embarked for Australia as a teenager but moved on to New Zealand after some years. He returned to Britain when he was thirty and did not leave it again. Although he wrote more than sixty novels, none with any Australian content appeared after 1900, and he died in 1903.[5] The count of 1900 creative works is therefore rather too high, although allowing for the omission of relevant authors and the addition of another three decades or so to the period under review, perhaps not by much.

Second, there is the daunting issue of the overwhelming productivity of some of these authors, especially those who wrote formulaic romance or thriller fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. For example, the romantic novelist Maysie Greig (Jennifer Greig Smith) undoubtedly qualifies as an expatriate Australian author. She was born in Double Bay, Sydney in 1901, worked briefly on the Sun newspaper in that city as a young woman and departed for London at the age of nineteen. She moved on to America and travelled widely, but apparently was based in England for at least seventeen years, between 1934 and 1948, and again from 1966 until her death in 1971. (She lived in Sydney with her third husband between these two periods.) She churned out six titles or more a year, building up a huge readership: at least 150 novels in all, under various pseudonyms, with titles like Make the Man Notice You and Retreat from Love, but none of them—or so an admittedly minimal sampling suggests—bear on the subject of expatriation. In fact, in terms of sheer productivity Greig had already been more than matched years earlier by another of the same ilk, Effie Rowlands, who was born in Adelaide around 1866. The British Library catalogue lists exactly two hundred ephemeral penny romances under the ‘Rowlands’ pseudonym, starting in the late 1880s. Despite this output she fell on hard times late in life and twice applied to the Royal Literary Fund, a charity, for support, before dying in 1938.[6] It is uncertain, however, whether or not she was removed to England as a child or left voluntarily when she was a young adult.

These are exceptional cases, but an impressive productivity has always been one of the hallmarks of the expatriate. At a time when one of the surest ways into print was via popular and undemanding fiction, some writers survived in London by turning out a book of this kind once or twice a year, sometimes for several decades on end. It could be done: but in such a competitive marketplace the pace required to make a living in this way could be killing. In the decades before Federation, one of the earliest of these who has left a record of his labours is Hume Nisbet (1849-1923), a Scottish-born, energetic, pugnacious artist, novelist, poet and travel writer who left for England at the age of twenty-three. (He returned for a short while in 1886.) By 1904, when he had been sweating it out in the capital for three decades, Nisbet claimed he had been writing 300,000 words a year for many years and in the last two alone had written 790,000 words of fiction and journalism. Not surprisingly for a man by this time in his fifties, he described himself as being in ‘the acute stage of wearied discontent. Existence seemed to me a long bondage, and I was mutinous with my task masters’.[7] Yet Nisbet could not afford to retire or even slow his pace. Nor was returning permanently an option. In 1905, the year after this outburst, he published, or more likely paid to have published, his own Poetic and Dramatic Works, planned to be in eight volumes, of which only one ever appeared. Nevertheless, he kept up his output for many more years, issuing not only sensational romances but guides to painting in oils, polemical pamphlets, verses and even a illustrated diary with blank leaves for a voyager to fill in on his way to Australia, with a guide on what to see en route. Almost anything, in fact, which might turn a penny.

In Nisbet we have an early example of what would become a common type: the author-entrepreneur who transplanted himself with tolerable success, though at the cost of relentless lifelong labour. Nisbet, for example, was followed by similar athletes of the pen such as Charles Rodda (1891-1976), born in Port Augusta and at first a journalist in Adelaide, who moved to New York in 1919, aged twenty-eight, to become a music critic, and who later wrote, mostly in London under the pseudonym Gavin Holt, around forty thriller and crime novels. Another such was James Morgan Walsh (1897-1952), known as the ‘Australian Edgar Wallace’, who departed in 1925, aged twenty-eight, to write about fifty thrillers under his own name alone. Also highly productive, if not in quite the same league, was the novelist, journalist and children’s author Dale Collins (1897-1956), who was an expatriate for most of his career, from 1923 until 1948, finding fame in the year after he arrived in England with his second novel, Ordeal, which was later turned into a play and a film. He was a versatile writer, producing novels, children’s stories, travel books, poetry and short stories in abundance.

Third, there is a final and, in many cases, an insurmountable difficulty: the lack of adequate documentation. Some writers were very productive once they got to England, but apart from a shelf-full of mostly forgotten volumes—which may tell nothing—there are no extant memoirs, letters or other memorials to reveal anything about why they left or how the experience of expatriation affected them. By no means does this apply only to entirely forgotten authors. Fergus Hume is a case in point. His self-published clever thriller The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was a remarkable hit of 1886, selling a phenomenal 100,000 copies in the Australian market alone and more than half a million altogether. Hume sold the overseas rights to a consortium for an absurd £50, a decision which perhaps ranks as the most catastrophic lapse of financial judgement in Australian literary history. Hume, not surprisingly, never got over it. He went to London two years later to try to capitalise on his success and did not return.

Next to nothing is known of Hume’s English life. When he was interviewed five years afterwards, he had nothing to say about the move itself, but he had bitter things to say about trying to break free of his Hansom Cab reputation (the product, he said, of ‘an immature boy’) that was still pursuing him like Frankenstein’s monster. Hume worked hard. He tried fantastical romances, in the mode of Arthur Machen and, later, H.P. Lovecraft. He tried a volume of fairy stories. He published some dreadful poetry. He returned perforce to mystery stories and thrillers and eventually wrote a hundred or more of them. Yet he only ever scraped a living. The last we hear of him is a pathetic newspaper paragraph of 1925 under the heading ‘A Writer in Want’. A film adaptation was being made of the Hansom Cab in Sydney, and the producer, in a kindly but rather tactless gesture, sent over some stills to Hume, who by then was in his sixties. In reply Hume told of being in severe straits, ill, virtually destitute, and unable to work. He was still harping on that £50. Some subscription-money was promised from Sydney and possibly was sent to him, but Hume left only £200 when he died in 1932 and obituaries reported that he had been living for thirty years mostly on £10 a week from a rental property he had inherited.[8] Apart from the long shelf full of his forgotten books, his only remnants are a small handful of business letters.

Further down the scale, the novelist and poet Carlton Dawe is another case devoid of records. We know he was born in Adelaide in 1865 and published two or three books before departing at the age of thirty-three. As with so many others, Britain certainly unleashed his productivity, even if he had no special talent. Dawe produced a remarkable number of thrillers and some science fiction—about seventy, some with fantastical Australian settings—before dying in London in 1935. It is a fair guess that he travelled again in the East, for some of his work has Eastern settings, although that is not certain. Nothing else is known of his manner of life in England or of his motives for leaving.

It is particularly unfortunate that no records seem to exist of the expatriate experiences of Mary Gaunt (1861-1942), the intrepid traveller-explorer. For one thing she was unusual in being, at forty, much older than average when she left finally for England, bent on a literary career. Gaunt had previously earned enough from journalism to finance a first trip to England in 1890, when she was twenty-nine. It is known that the English Illustrated Magazine took two pieces while she was there, but she could not find anyone to take her novel manuscript and returned home the following year. She did place a novel with Edward Arnold in 1894, at which point, as she said later, she should have tried London again. She married a doctor instead, publishing two further novels and other work with London publishers while still in Australia. She finally left for good after she was widowed, in October 1900. Her first years in England were hard and miserable, although she never described them in any detail; but she became well-known eventually for her novels and especially for the records of her travels, which involved solitary and risky trips to West Africa and China and Jamaica in the tradition of other dauntless Victorian women travellers. She was reviewed well, and her comings and goings were noted respectfully in the British-Australasian newspaper. She sold well enough to be independent into old age, but other biographical details are lacking.

There are plenty of others about whom even less is known. John Gordon Brandon (1879-1941) was Australian-born and certainly shifted to London at some unknown date; the British Library lists ninety thrillers and detective stories under his name starting in 1923, and this is probably only a fraction of his output for magazines. A near-contemporary in the same mould, though not quite as productive, was Arthur Rees (1872-1942), who left at about the age of twenty-three, worked for a while as a journalist on The Times and wrote about thirty thrillers with titles like The Shrieking Pit. Nothing in this output hints at his Australian origins, though the facts that he was able to make one return visit in 1935 for health reasons and that his address at death was Offington Hall, Worthing hints at attained prosperity. Even less, if possible, is known of R. Coutts Armour (1874-1942), except that he wrote at least 140 books in England, mostly for children, under a variety of pen-names.

Sometimes what documentation does exist has survived more or less by accident. That is the case with Hume Nisbet. We would know nothing at all of his thoughts about his career had he not written in a spasm of indignation a small, privately-printed pamphlet, ‘One Chapter from the Life of a Novelist’, in connection with some dispute with his publisher, in which he sketched out his literary activities since the time of his arrival.

In other cases just enough details are recoverable to provoke the imagination. What possible motives, what questing ambition, lie behind the simultaneous decision, in 1904, by all three of the Flatau siblings—Dorota (b.1874) Hermoine (b.1879) and Theodore (b.1886)—to seek their fortune in the English literary world? The children of a Sydney surgeon, none of them had published anything much before they left. It is possible that the two girls accompanied their younger brother when he went to Oxford at the age of eighteen, but what did they expect of their new country? Did their departure have something to do with the fact that they were—most unusually for Australian authors of the time—certainly of Polish ethnicity? And what did the sisters do after they arrived? If they wrote journalism, it is all lost; but the dates of their books hint at a long and slow struggle. Theodore published the first of his three novels some years after his arrival, though he had been employed earlier as the editor of an Egyptian paper in Cairo. (He read Arabic at Oxford.) After that he was editor of the World newspaper in London. We know he was gassed during the war, and then killed in 1916 when he returned to the Front. According to his obituary, ‘he was killed on the parapet of the German front line when he was standing up cheering his men on. One can only say of him that he was very gallant gentleman’.[9] What had the two sisters been doing in the long years before their bereavement? Dorota was apparently stirred into authorship quite soon after her brother’s death and must have gained some sort of a reputation, for she wrote nine successive novels for the publisher Hutchinson, starting in 1918. One of her story-collections, Pong Ho (1924) deals with low life in the Chinese communities of Limehouse and one story, ‘Pak of Pennyfields’, about a young couple who are Polish migrants living in such a community, reads as though it might be semi-autobiographical. Her sister Hermoine wrote a couple of comic operas and a feeble romantic thriller after 1925. None of the three siblings’ work gives the slightest hint of their Australian origins. The sisters had both fallen silent by 1933, but someone paid for death notices for them in the Times, revealing that Hermoine and Dorota died in 1946 and 1947 respectively, at Slinfold in Sussex. Behind this bare bibliographic record must be a poignant story that is completely lost to history. There are many such cases. Particularly thin are surviving records, even private documents, of those who left but failed entirely to realise the ambition which took them to London.

Enough has been said now to show that the usefulness of the statistical approach is limited. However, recently it has become possible to make more sharply focussed computer searches of the comprehensive bio-bibliographical databases available for the longer period 1880-1950, specifically the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) and Austlit. As will be demonstrated later, neither of these major reference tools has an entirely lucid and consistent policy of inclusion or exclusion in the case of expatriates. Nevertheless, the new search techniques made it possible to extract details of those authors who lived for long periods in England and who seemed likely to repay closer study. Since bibliographies cannot be relied on to settle the question of who should be regarded as ‘authors’, the same liberal interpretation will be taken here that H.M. Green took in his ground-breaking A History of Australian Literature Pure and Applied. That is to say, its subjects are those people who used words as their vocation or trade, insofar as their target audience was the broad reading public rather than specialists. In principle it includes journalists of most kinds, including medical and scientific journalists, novelists, poets, historians, philosophers, dramatists, and academics in the area of the liberal arts: in other words, those people who form the literary wing of the intelligentsia in Western societies (or were so regarded, at least, during the century under examination). It does not include people in their professional roles, such as politicians, soldiers, lawyers, pure and applied scientists, and sports people; or other kinds of creative artists such as dancers, singers, musicians, cartoonists, graphic designers and illustrators, painters, film-makers or actors.

The result of these database searches, combined with this broader view of what constitutes the ‘literary’ suggests there were in the order of 150 Australian professional or semi-professional authors living in London and active at various times over this period who meet the definition of expatriation which will be used in this book. Obviously, therefore, only a representative selection of these authors and their works can be considered in detail or even mentioned at all.

While London was always the choice of the great majority, it is worth noting briefly that not all writers who left their birthplace found England to their taste. Some found other European countries, or countries beyond Europe, more appreciative of their talents or more congenial as a settling place. For example, the career of the popular novelist Tasma (1848-1897: born Jessie Huybers in London) took off only after she left Tasmania permanently and married in Belgium in 1885. Greece or Italy claimed others, especially in the first decades of the century when living was cheap in southern Europe, especially along the Mediterranean coast. Arthur Maquarie (ie Arthur Mullens, 1874-1955), poet, playwright and a London friend of Henry Lawson’s, went to Florence to teach English around 1900, allegedly, according to Lawson, because he was so poor he could not afford a fire or winter clothing in England at the time. Later he found a berth as an official of the Royal Society of Literature in London. The journalists Joice NanKivell (1887-1982) and her husband Sydney Loch (1889-1954), a veteran of Gallipoli, left in 1919 for an exciting life in war-torn Europe, eventually settling in Greece.

France had its adherents too, and as a city of choice for permanent residence Paris was next only to London. The rich music publisher Louise Hanson-Dyer chose it in 1927 when she moved there at the age of thirty-three and founded the Lyrebird Press. The artist Stella Bowen left Adelaide in 1914 as an innocent young woman of twenty-one to study painting, but when she was swept up by the unreliable novelist Ford Madox Ford, who had a long history of infidelities behind and ahead of him, she moved in quite a different sphere. For nine years, first in rural England and then in 1920s Paris (a period she herself called ‘playtime’), Bowen associated with Joyce, Hemingway, Pound, Stein and other luminaries of that legendary period. Playtime lasted right up to the dreadful moment at the end of the 1920s when, as she describes it in her autobiography Drawn from Life, ‘I opened my Herald Tribune to see in the right hand corner, “£1 sterling =frs. 103” ... I knew that I was ruined.’[10] This was an exaggeration, but it was certainly the end of the idyll, though it was England she returned to, not Australia. Alister Kershaw (1921-1995), poet, foreign correspondent and miscellaneous writer, worked for a year in London but then moved to rural France in 1948, aged twenty-seven and never left it, preferring to struggle there as a freelance supplemented with other kinds of work. Robert Close (1903-1995), who wrote the once-notorious semi-fictional Love Me, Sailor (1945), started out as a deckhand on windjammers and also found his haven in France after being fined and gaoled for three months for obscene libel. (The sentence was quashed on appeal but the fine increased.) Rather puzzlingly, he had a great reputation in Fifties Paris, where he was compared to Hemingway; and when the soft-porn Olympia Press republished his first novel under the soundly marketable title of Prends-moi, matelot! it made him enough money to buy a yacht and set himself up in Cannes. Unfortunately his vivid autobiography Of Salt and Earth ends with his trials in Australia.

Finally, the United States claimed some, but it was not a popular destination for writers until the later years because Australians were surprisingly snobbish about the States before the Second World War. Many agreed with Lionel Lindsay that the country could only interest business people as it was just another colonial society like their own, but written larger. As for American literature, that was not highly regarded. Neither the United States nor Canada was thought to offer much stimulus to serious writers and artists, compared to almost any European country.[11] Still, John Farrow, novelist, biographer and the screenwriter of some quite well-known films, moved to California c.1923, when he was barely twenty. Dorothy Cottrell (1902-57) , whose The Singing Gold (1929) was a best-seller, moved to California in 1928 aged twenty-six, where she continued to write fiction with Australian settings. The novelist Shirley Hazzard (b.1931), author of The Transit of Venus, left permanently in 1947 at the age of sixteen and later became an American citizen; the following year the scriptwriter Sumner Locke Elliott (1917-91) left at the age of thirty-one. Expatriates of a later generation would be taking a very different position on the United States as a rewarding haven for writers.

Literary people were only a part of the total Australian diaspora of creative persons over these decades. Many other kinds of talented Australians heard the siren call of migration to Europe and elsewhere, and a good proportion of those liked it too much to return for a long time, if they ever did. Milan attracted singers and Paris painters, Rome was the place for sculptors, Berlin or Leipzig for musicians, Heidelberg for the liveliest possible student experience. For the idealistic, there was Switzerland for international politics; for the active anti-fascists and anti-appeasers of the Thirties, there was Republican Spain. After 1917, for committed communists or fellow-travellers like Katharine Prichard, the archaeologist Gordon Childe and later Dymphna Cusack, the Soviet Union, China or Eastern Europe called. And, of course, during the Boer war and the two world wars, many ordinary Australians, and not a few talented ones, were sent much further afield than Europe, courtesy of the military, and thousands left their bones there.

Painters and other visual artists left in droves. Arthur Streeton, John Longstaff, Tom Roberts, Rupert Bunny, Fred Leist, George Lambert and Henry Fullwood all went to England or elsewhere in Europe for portions, in some cases large portions, of their careers. Others went and never returned at all, like George Coates and Dora Meeson, Horace Brodzky, Charles Conder, and Bessie Davidson, who went to Paris in 1910 at the age of thirty-one and died there a full half century later after a prosperous and satisfying career.

This is not to say that the likelihood of success was greater for visual artists than for writers. It was just as easy to fail with the brush or chisel as with the pen. Frank Mahony was a very popular magazine illustrator of Henry Lawson and others in the Nineties, but he left it too late to find success in England. He was already thirty-nine when he left in 1901, and found few markets for his work; still, he stuck it out, perhaps unable to return, until he died at Kensington fifteen years later.

But there were plenty of success stories as well. The architect-designer Raymond McGrath (1903-77), who left for London and Dublin at the age of twenty-three, had more luck and found plenty of commissions, as did several other illustrators, graphic artists and sculptors. The society portrait photographer Walter Barnett (1862-1934) left in 1897, aged thirty-five, having made a fortune in Sydney and helping to shoot some of the first cinema footage there. He did even better in London, where the royal family were his clients, and on the proceeds he became an art collector at Nice. Of sculptors, Margaret Thomas (1843-1929) was the most variously skilled: she left in 1867 aged twenty-four and proved so successful as an artist that she was able to devote much of her life to poetry and writing frothy travel-books with titles like A Scamper Through Spain and Tangier. Bertram Mackennal (1863-1931) left for the second time in 1891, aged twenty-eight, and after a starveling beginning secured many commissions in both countries which let him travel to and fro, and he was the first Australian artist of any kind to be knighted. A competitor of his, though much less successful in Australia than in England, was Harold Parker (1873-1962) who sculpted the allegorical groups still to be seen on Australia House. Three cartoonists who became household names in England had Australian antecedents: H.M. Bateman, Will Dyson and David Low. Dyson soon leapt to fame when his savagely witty cartoons started to appear in the left-wing Daily Herald. David Low was born in New Zealand but left for London from Sydney aged twenty-eight, and his mocking cartoons during the Second World War were superb propaganda. The Nazis were not amused and had Low earmarked for immediate liquidation when they won the war.

Then there were all those aspirant actors and performers, first of the stage, then of the radio and screen as well: the actress, producer and suffragist Inez Bensusan (b.1871) who left in about 1893, in her early twenties;[12] and the very different Florrie Forde (1875-1940), actress and singer, who left in 1897 and was an immediate hit on the music hall and pantomime circuit. Her lewd ditty ‘Hold Your Hand Out Naughty Boy’ had them rolling in the aisles. There was the actor and dancer Robert Helpmann (1909-86), who left in 1932 aged twenty-three and made his reputation in England, though he returned more or less permanently in 1965. There was the actor-playwright Hugo Hastings (1917-2004), who left some time in the ’30s, whose war-service comedy Seagulls over Sorrento was one of the first big post-war hits on the London stage and later a repertory favourite. Departing around the same time, in 1934, the actress Coral Browne made the traditional trip to the London stage and fortune, while the young Errol Flynn went the other way, to California, for a much shorter if more glamorous career in the movies.

And musicians and singers: Australia has produced people with great musical gifts, but the greater the talent the greater the likelihood of departure. An early expatriate was George Clutsam, the popular composer and song-writer who co-authored one of the biggest hit musicals of the 1920s, Lilac Time. He left in 1887, aged twenty-one. The eccentric Percy Grainger (b.1882), recognised as a childhood prodigy, was taken to study at Frankfurt as a teenager, and established his career as a composer and performer first in London and then in New York, where he died in 1961, though curiously he is buried in Adelaide. The pianist Eileen Joyce (b.1908) left in 1927 for good, returning only for tours; another musician, the pianist Noel Mewton-Wood (b.1922), left at fifteen to attend the Royal Academy, and had a short but distinguished career, especially as an interpreter of Hindemith, before poisoning himself in Notting Hill, aged only thirty-one, after the death of his partner.

The export of singers to Europe and America at the start of the twentieth century was so prodigious that the journalist Frank Fox, with a little exaggeration, called it ‘almost as important an item of trade as the export of frozen meat’.[13] There were prima donnas like Nellie Melba, who left to start her stupendous international career in 1886, aged twenty-five (though the number of her ‘farewell’ tours at home became notorious), and Ada Crossley, the contralto, who left in 1894, aged twenty-three. Three other singers who moved away early were Peter Dawson, the greatest bass-baritone of his day, who went to England at the age of twenty and remained there; Elsa Stralia, who left Adelaide for Milan and London in 1910; and the soprano Florence Austral, who moved to New York and then London just after the First World War, aged twenty-seven. It is interesting that three of the women found it advantageous to stress their Australian origins in their stage names, just as June Bronhill (‘Broken Hill’) was to do later, while in the same era some writers found it equally advantageous to suppress their origins. All these singers toured widely and repeatedly in Australia.

But all these creative, talented men and women are outside the present ambit. Our concern, from the years before Federation right through to the end of the Second World War, are those people of literary bent who, when they left Australia, headed like homing pigeons for one country, the United Kingdom, and one city, London. Why they went and what they found there, in the navel of their world, is the theme of this book.

*********************************

[1] Wolfreys, Writing London, 10. Other books on this subject are John Clement Ball’s Imagining London (2004); Alan Robinson’s Imagining London, 1770–1900 (2004) and John McLeod’s Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004). Collections of edited essays include David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones’s Metropolis London (1989); Susana Onega and John Stotesbury’s London in Literature (2002); Pamela Gilbert’s Imagined Londons (2002); and Lawrence Philips’ The Swarming Streets (2004). In 1999, the journal of post-coloniality, Kunapipi, devoted an entire issue to readings of the city. Despite the quantity, however, virtually none of this most recent work is by Australians, or touches on representations of London by Australians.

[2] Porter, ‘An Anglo-Australian Watershed’, 187. Italics added. Porter himself twice attempted suicide early in his expatriation.

[3] Arnold, ‘Australian Books’, 10.9, 10.14. See his table 10.1 and Appendix.

[4] Miller, Australian Literature: A Bibliography … Extended to 1950 … by Frederick T. Macartney. It claims to include all authors who were ‘connected with Australia … irrespective of whether or not they … continue to reside here’ (vi). Arnold was unable to use the major reference work of which he is joint editor (Arnold & Hay, eds., Bibliography of Australian Literature) because at the time of writing it was incomplete.

[5] Hornung has an entry in ADB but Roberts and Farjeon do not. Hornung, Farjeon and Roberts all have entries in ODNB, where, not surprisingly, they are treated as exclusively English authors.

[6] The pseudonym was based on her first married name. She was born Effie Maria Henderson, later Albanesi.

[7] Nisbet, Explanatory, ii.

[8] Blathwayt, ‘How to Escape’, 88-90. If Woolven’s article ‘Hume’ is correct, the £50 is not the full story, for Hume had retained the dramatic rights, which must have been quite valuable as the stage version had long runs in Australia and London.

[9] [Theodore Flatau obituary], 9.

[10] Bowen, Drawn from Life, 191. She had ‘lent’ large sums from her Australian capital to the egotistical Ford, who never repaid her. At times the two of them and their daughter lived entirely on the £20 a month Bowen had from her family’s estate in Adelaide. See Modjeska, Stravinsky’s Lunch, 54.

[11] L. Lindsay, ‘Australian Should Travel’, 11.

[12] There is an account of her career in Smith, ‘Inez Bensusan’. She apparently died in England some time after 1935.

[13] Fox, Australia, 186.