Cirrus@Austlit

'Mistaken obsessions of the Australian intelligentsia. With his latest book, When London Calls – subtitled The expatriation of Australian creative artists to Britain – Stephen Alomes has made a timely intervention in the perennially simmering local dis- cussion about why the Australian expatriates went away and what should be thought about them by the cognoscenti who stayed put. As its provenance (Alomes is Senior Lecturer in Australian Studies at Deakin University) and panoply suggest, this is most definitely an academic work, but the reader need not fear being dehydrated by the postmodern jargon that threatened, until recently, to turn humanist studies in Australia into a cemetery on the moon.'  (Introduction)

'In the introductory chapter of Second Take, Raffaele Caputo and Geoff Burton affirm the phrase “reculer pour mieux sauter” as the impulse of their collection. This eclectic and self-reflective collection of essays, interviews and diary entries reviews fifty years of Australian film-making in order to establish its health, current standing and future. The contributors, who are both practitioners and critics rather than film academics, discuss the post-colonial legacy which has shaped Australian cinema and, crucially, the logistics of getting films made in a Hollywood-dominated yet global financial economy. Their themes call into question rigid academic notions of national cinema and reveal the pragmatic relationship between film-making, artistic vision, location and the material conditions of production.'  (Introduction)