The mythic and rite-of-passage aspects of travel and their representation still maintain their hold on the young, but the conditions of expatriation have changed dramatically over the last two decades. Working in a global market as members of international labour forces, perhaps as many as one million Australians are currently living overseas on a long-term or permanent basis. Unlike the past, only a third of them reside in the United Kingdom, and there are fewer writers. The attenuation of distance – cheap air fares, the Internet, Skype, smartphones, and tablets – means that those Australians living somewhere else can be as much in touch with – and find it as difficult to escape from – home as those domiciled in Australia. They can be part of transnational communities and conversations at the press of a button. Expatriation no longer carries the slur of ‘un-Australian’ or ‘anti-Australian’. The differences between the colonial and national world and its present post-national and global successor were summed up in the early 1980s by Peter Porter, who said that if he were making the decision of where to live then rather than in 1951, he would not have moved to Britain.

In recent years, a number of studies on the overseas lives of Australians, and of writers in particular, have appeared. The authors of this latest one, the late Bruce Bennett and Anne Pender, have previously written biographies of famous expatriate writers, respectively Peter Porter (Spirit in Exile, 1991) and Barry Humphries (One Man Show, 2010). From a Distant Shore, which was completed in the difficult circumstances of Bruce Bennett’s illness and death, differs from its predecessors in the longer time span it covers, beginning with William Charles Wentworth in the 1820s and ending with M.J. Hyland in 2012; in going beyond London to include the non-metropolitan lives in Britain of its subjects; in its inclusion of a wide span of genres; in its focus on the contemporary writers of the global age; and in offering new perspectives on expatriation that arise from our time.

Bennett and Pender have much to say in the context of their discussions of individual writers on relationships with and attitudes to Australia and Britain, but the study also moves beyond the parameters of the traditional expatriate debates, generalisations, and stereotypes. The authors have chosen a collective biographical approach with a primary emphasis on the lives of their subjects in Britain. Their exploration uncovers the complex and wide range of motives that led writers to leave Australia: W.N. Willis, founder of the scandal-mongering Australian newspaper Truth, decamped to London in 1910 to escape prosecution for false pretences, leaving behind a wife and seven children. In London, he found his métier writing about ‘sin and sorrow’ in the metropolis, and his novel, The Life of Lena: A Girl of London Town (1914), carried an endorsement from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Bennett and Pender’s investigation reveals equal variety in the relations of the writers with their old and new homes and in the role – or absence of role – of Australia in both their work and self-identification. Contemporary writer M.J. Hyland is contemptuous of the idea of home and nationality, believing her place of residence is provisional, temporary, contingent, and ultimately irrelevant. Her attitude might well be related to her migratory upbringing, as well as to her own times.

Bennett and Pender maintain that expatriation should be seen not in terms of loss to Australia but as the export of talent and literary creativity to Britain and further afield. They argue that many of their expatriate subjects are significant contributors to world literature in English, internationalising ‘what we might call Australian literature’. The ‘loss to Australia’ on their reading is that so many of the expatriate writers have a much bigger readership abroad than at home. Emphasised too are the detached and different perspectives that the writers have presented on Britain and its people and the ways in which their British experience has shaped interventions in Australian debates. As an example, the authors point to the British and international experience of human-rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in his arguments for an Australian charter of rights.

The authors have chosen a sample of forty-seven Australian writers in Britain for their collective biography, focusing on writers for whom the expatriate experience made a difference. Many of the chosen are well known in Australia; others, like the Truth moralist Willis, barely at all. Despite the considerable space given to Martin Boyd, Patrick White, Christina Stead, Barry Humphries, Peter Porter, Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Peter Conrad, the authors want to restore to the Australian canon lesser-known Australian-born writers, particularly women, who achieved considerable success in terms of publishers, sales, and reputation in Britain and elsewhere overseas. A chapter is devoted to the women such as Rosa Praed, Louise Mack, Alice Grant Rosman, and Velia Ercole who wrote romances in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and another to the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writers such as Jill Neville, Elizabeth Harrower, Barbara Hanrahan, and Madeleine St John, who, Bennett and Pender argue, ‘Australianised the very English genres in which they wrote’.

While drawing attention to writers that they believe have been ignored locally, the authors also have pertinent things to say about the famous symbols of expatriate Australians in Britain. They draw attention, for example, to Greer’s creation of the roles for herself of ‘master satirist’, polemicist, and performer, to her extraordinary popularity in Britain, and to her ‘gradual accretion’ to insider status there. And as one would expect from his biographer, Porter is drawn out as a fine and subtle exemplum of the complexity of living and writing elsewhere and of how simple the explanation can be. Britain was for Porter ‘an agglomeration of friends, colleagues and sites’, the place where he raised his children, where his first wife died, and where he pursued his ‘uncertain’ career as a writer.

From a Distant Shore makes significant and new contributions to the broadening of our understanding of our expatriate writers, but the book is somewhat annoying in its organisation and structure. It unevenly, and at times unconvincingly, moves between organisation by theme and by individual biography, and it would have profited from better editing. Readers will have their quarrels with the selection of writers. As a historian, I wonder why classicist Gilbert Murray is included but not historian Keith Hancock, author of one of the more interesting memoirs on the conflict of country and calling. The neglect of Alan Moorehead, surely one of the most successful writers in English in the mid-twentieth century, seems strange.

The inevitable selectivity in this study and the often tantalisingly brief biographical notes raise the question as to whether it is now time to consider the production of a biographical dictionary of Australian expatriates, to recognise that in this global world in which we now live, work, and play, that Australian history is about Australians wherever they may reside.