Lusting for London: Australian Expatriate Writers at the Hub of Empire, 1870-1950 by Peter Morton (review)

Peter Morton titles his introduction "Issues of Definition and Evidence," and these are issues to which he frequently returns. What, precisely, does it take to make a writer "Australian"? And what is an "expatriate," especially during an era when most Australians identified themselves as subjects of the British Empire? Should we discriminate between immigrants, those who chose to melt seamlessly into their new surroundings, and metics, those who "in some way retained a relationship with their home country" (45)? After parsing and reparsing his terms, Morton settles upon a group of some 150 individuals "with strong Australian associations" who voluntarily chose to live in London for an extended period of time, who "used words as their vocation or trade," and whose reputations became linked primarily to Britain, rather than to Australia (42, 8).

Morton draws his volume's title from one such expatriate, Philip Lindsay, who wrote of Australians' "almost . . . insane lust to get to England" (vi). This lust, Morton notes, was founded in part on a simple desire to make a living through authorship—something extremely difficult to do in Australia prior to the mid-twentieth century—but was also fed by a conviction that to remain in Australia would be akin to slow suffocation: "They went off to allay that unsettling, dreary, and sometimes corrosive belief that reality was over there, and that their doom, unless drastic action were taken, was to be stuck forever on the margin" (22). This belief, as Lusting for London makes clear, was not restricted to writers alone but was common among creative Australians of all stripes. The drive towards London was in fact so unremarkable that little empirical data exists to quantify the ways that this early brain drain might have shaped Australian literary culture. Morton himself is cautious not to draw any grand conclusions, choosing instead simply to observe that "expatriation in early life . . . has been a striking cultural phenomenon in Australian history" and to describe, drawing from their own autobiographical or semi-biographical works, the experiences of many such literary expatriates (234).

While a fair portion of this volume falls outside the chronological scope of VPR, and several chapters focus exclusively on non-serialized novels, most of the writers Morton surveys saw their work printed in some of the many magazines and newspapers in circulation in England—the sheer number of which, compared to those in Australia, offered expatriates at least the possibility of success. So-called "dingo dells," or literary expat communities, also formed around the offices of certain periodicals: the British-Australian weekly paper and later the Pall Mall Gazette. Through the details of individual writers' careers, Morton does an excellent job conveying the workaday process of patching together a living from multiple short-form publications, both fictional and non-fictional. "Whatever their primary ambitions as authors," he observes, "few expatriates who needed to pay their way could avoid contact with journalism at one level or another" (114).

Although throughout his book Morton identifies a number of characteristics shared by the expatriates he has identified, ranging from their extraordinarily prodigious output to their disgust at the filth and social inequalities of London, after more than 200 pages of discussion he concludes, somewhat jarringly, that these writers "were so different in their personalities, backgrounds, and talents and their experiences were so extraordinarily varied that it is impossible to find anything binding them together" (241). The reader is left, then, with perhaps more questions than answers.