'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)
