Description
Book SynopsisIn 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 Using unpublished diaries and letters, this book offers a unique and cross-disciplinary approach to Cultural History.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.
Table of ContentsContents: Introduction; Neither English nor Foreign: Australian Colonial Identity; Familiar and Yet Strange: First Experiences of Britain; Aborigines at the Crystal Palace: Portable Colonial Spaces; Roast Beef and the Epsom Derby: Social Status and National Identity; Cleopatra's Needle: Antiquity, History and Modernity in Britain and the USA; A Disgusting Climate: Being Australian in Wales, Ireland and Scotland; Australia has more of a Continental Atmosphere: Twentieth-Century Visitors to Britain.
