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Once an Australian : journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes

Ian Britain
Melbourne : Oxford University Press, 1997

ISBN: 0195537424

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Book description
The four Australians featured in this book: Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes, are all writers and performers who decided to leave their native land in the late 1950s or early 1960s and to pursue their brilliant careers abroad.  Ian Britain's profiles of their careers concentrate on the reasons for their expatriatism and consider what aspects of their Australian identity they have retained.  This is the first detailed study of this generation of Australian expatriates.  It richly combines elements of biography, cultural criticism and social history.
As well as charting the life and work of four vibrant individuals, the book suggests what is distinctive about them as a generational group, and reflects on how far they may be seen as the 'last expatriates' - the most vivid flowers of a dying breed.

About the author
Ian Britain was born in India in 1948.  He has studied and journeyed extensively in Australia, Europe and the USA.  A historian by training, he has taught literature and film as well as history, and contributed articles or reviews on theatre, opera, painting, and fiction to a range of magazines and journals.  A scholar-gypsy for several years, he currently holds a research fellowship at Monash University, Melbourne, where he is studying the mythology of the English public school from the middle ages to the present.

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