Through Australian Eyes

In the last 25 years of the nineteenth century, around two hundred thousand visitors from Australia landed in Britain. As members of the colonial elite, they sailed to the Old Country to experience their Britishness: they toured Westminster Abbey; they visited graves of parents; they threw snowballs at Christmas. As one visitor expressed it on arrival in London in 1889: Spotted St Pauls in the distance & felt at home.' Using unpublished diaries and letters, this book offers a unique and cross-disciplinary approach to Cultural History. It considers both British and Australian national identities as the products of cultural displacement.