Tully Barnett

As I sat down to write this review, a media release popped into my email inbox with the excited news that more than 400,000 people had visited the National Gallery of Victoria’s MoMA exhibition over its four-month duration, making it the NGV’s ‘second most attended ticketed exhibition on record ...

This digressive collection of essays, extracts, cartoons and poems is unified by an interest in colonial and post-colonial responses to London. It stems from a 2003 conference, ‘Writing London’, organised by Flinders University’s Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English (CRNLE). Part 1 focuses on the Malaysian writer Lee Kok Liang (1927–92), in particular his posthumously published and wry first novel, London Does Not Belong To Me (2003), from which this book takes its name: ‘London was full of rooms. I went from one to the other. Slowly I adjusted myself and lived the life of the troglodyte, learning the tribal customs of feints and apologies.’ Part 2 comprises examples of, and critical and scholarly essays relating to, literary, journalistic, artistic and cinematic responses to London (mostly by Australians).