What’s really at stake in what is obviously now a hardy perennial has little to do with PhD theses, and everything to do with whether there’s a place in Australian publishing for historical writing - or perhaps any non-fiction writing – that does more than tell an easily digestible tale. I have nothing against storytelling – it’s a rather important skill for an historian, to say the least – but it’s alarming that anything that seeks to move beyond anecdotage to argument and analysis is now considered fair game for reviewers. This can only lead to the impoverishment of public culture in Australia. Of course, when academic writers dare to raise such objections they are accused of elitism, of excusing their own incapacity to write engagingly, or of promoting the fallacy that serious writing can’t also be enjoyed by a ‘general reader’. In short, they can’t win. It’s ea.sy to sympathise with Wright in her frustration, especially as it’s clear her book has, to some extent, crossed the magic barrier between a specialist and non-specialist audience.

Frank Bongiorno, Invergowrie, NSW

Australian–Malaysian connections

Dear Editor,

Readers of ABR, including librarians, may be interested in an unusual post-colonial novel, posthumously published, involving Australian–Malaysian connections: Lee Kok Liang’s London Does Not Belong to Me, edited by Syd Harrex (Flinders University) and Bernard Wilson (La Trobe), with an introduction by the writer–publisher K.S. Maniam (Maya Press, 2003). The novel, drawing on the author’s experience, is set in the London of the 1950s and centres around a Straits Chinese narrator from Malaya (as it was then), alienated on the fringes of society, along with his drifting friends, mainly expatriate Australians. It is thus a novel of the imperial metropolis and of ‘colonials’ abroad, observed from an unusual angle, and notable for its muted, penetrating study of social interaction and setting. In post-colonial terms, it offers an interesting contrast to the experience of Christopher Koch and other Australian writers living in the London of the time.

Lee Kok Liang (1927–92), a pioneer of Malaysian writing in English, and author of Mutes in the Sun and of Flowers in the Sky, studied at Melbourne University, where he began publishing short stories, and went on to study for the Bar in London. In 1954 he returned to Malaysia to practise law, then worked both as a barrister and politician, based in Penang.

Laurie Hergenhan, Brisbane, Qld