The illustration on the front cover of Angela Woollacott's latest book is of Beatrice Kerr, Australian champion swimmer, who delighted English audiences not only with her swimming and diving displays in the early twentieth century but also with her healthy, athletic body in fetching and brief (for their time) costumes, this one announcing Kerr's antipodean difference by the crest of a kangaroo rampant above the word 'Australia.' Furthermore, visually structuring the layout of the titlepage and each chapter opening, is an illustration of Annette Kellerman in mid-dive in one of the mermaid costumes she wore in her displays as the 'Diving and Dancing Venus.' The image of the physically sturdy, modern Australian woman is at the heart of Woollacott's thesis that female travel 'home' to London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (1870-1940) illuminates important intersections between colonialism, whiteness, modernity and gender in the period. Also, and incidentally, that image underpins the freshness and energy of this study of a little explored aspect of the colonial adventure. There have been a number of studies of the way in which British imperial power structured colonial stereotypes (particularly through popular literature and magazines of the period), but few surveys of the experiences of colonial subjects as they interacted with that imperial power at its centre. The importance of Woollacott's book is that it bases its thesis mainly on personal accounts of such experiences and weaves them into what is, for the most part, a compelling argument.

The chapters of the book themselves chart the logical trajectory of the journey: the actual voyage by steamship; the arrival in London and finding a place to live; making friends and setting up networks; the challenge to male exclusivity in the establishment of feminist organizations; the acts of self-definition and consolidation of not only colonial identity, but also imperial and national identities; and finally the modern sexual and physical freedoms experienced by these women who made the long journey to London.

The introduction begins with an excerpt from the fictionalized travelogue of Louise Mack, who was in many ways typical of these women. Tasmanian born, NSW raised, Mack was a working journalist in Sydney before leaving her husband and going to England in 1901 where she remained until World War One when she returned to the southern hemisphere and for a while travelled extensively in New Zealand and Australia promoting the war and collecting for the Red Cross. She continued to write journalism and fiction until her death in Sydney in 1935. Mack is typical in her adventurousness and her reliance on her own ability to find work but, more importantly, she captures the lure of the old world in her 'surrender to the spell of the City of Mists' in words that recall Dr Johnson's 'If you are tired of London, you are tired of Life.' These women, whose experiences Woollacott chronicles through examples from a wide variety of novels and stories, autobiographies, diaries, letters home, newspaper and magazine articles, helped to shape not only the culture they had left behind and to which many of them returned, but also the culture of the imperial centre itself that was still 'hierarchical, racist, and gendered, even as it was changing.'

In the first chapter Woollacott articulates what is in fact a self-evident point, but which I have not seen so clearly discussed before; that is that the ship itself was a signifier of modernity with developing attendant cultural rituals such as the dockside farewell and the on-board class distinctions; the long voyage entailed stops at exotic places (outposts of empire) where even the lowest class of passengers in steerage became transformed into colonial plutocrats in relation to the indigenous people they encountered at these colourful ports of call (vendors and rickshaw drivers, for example). Woollacott links these often temporary attitudes to a developing knowledge among travellers about an imperial hierarchy of colour and their own whiteness and gender in that hierarchy, a knowledge, however, which on most occasions merely served to reinforce pre-existing beliefs in racial divisions within Australian society and the privileges of whiteness. She problematizes the issue of whiteness by drawing particularly on the work of several American scholars who discuss the structured invisibility of indigenous peoples and the ways in which non-Anglo-Saxons are reduced to an undifferentiated other.

Similarly the second chapter on settling into a new urban space draws on the work of historians and cultural studies scholars on the city and urbanization in the nineteenth century; in a section on 'Colonial Geographies: Mapping London' Woollacott notes that, for Australian women, London was a place of particular geographic and social spaces according to their interests and work. The subsequent two chapters record the establishment of colonial networks and organizations in London and the challenge to a masculinist culture which these represented. The strength and sense of communal solidarity which such organizations engendered - such as the feminist focus in the Lyceum Club and the British Commonwealth League and their commitment to female suffrage - furthered a growing sense of a coexisting national and imperial identity, sometimes at odds (resentment at being labelled 'colonial'), sometimes enabling a robust criticism of the imperial centre and its masters. Being seen as physically (and sexually) active, and embodying political freedom also (having won the federal vote in Australia in 1902), Australian women were seen as bearers of modernity, both in London and when they returned to Australia (particularly artists and musicians who participated in and brought back techniques and ideas of European modernism), in much the same way as Woollacott has argued in previous work for women munitions workers in the First World War as symbols of modernity. Nevertheless her claims for the potency of Australian women as equally symbols of modernity appear at times to be at once self-endorsing (different, adventurous, therefore modern) and historically disproportionate. Rather the strength of this study lies in its use of multiple and wonderfully diverse source materials to support the complex argument about colonialism and modernity and the role played by Australian women travellers in these historical movements.

Dr Barbara Garlick taught for many years in the English Department at the University of Queensland where she is now a Research Associate.