In the vast, imaginary, library containing the products of all research into Italian international migration since 1870, considerable shelf-space would need to be reserved for the materials - books, articles, PhD theses, reports - devoted to the study of the arrival, reception and lives of the Italians who migrated to Australasia. Although that migration ended many years ago, its social, cultural and demographic features continue to generate research interest and significant publications. Loretta Baldassar (2001) and Adrian Boncompagni (2001) have renewed the study of the relationship between territory and identity by inaugurating a genuinely transnational approach to the migration process; Chiro and Smolicz (1999) have advanced our knowledge of language use and maintenance in the sociolinguistic tradition pioneered by Camilla Bettoni and Nina Rubino; Antonio Paganoni and Desmond O'Connor (1999) and Stefano Girola (2001) have added serious depth of study to the under-researched field of religiosity and ritual among migrants; and surveys of the role of Italians as the makers and subjects of film and fiction (Rando 1997) have extended our appreciation of the diversity of ways in which features of Italo-Australian life have been presented to non-Italian publics. Complementing these studies are Ros Pesman's innovative account of twentieth century Australian women travellers to Italy and elsewhere (1996) and Richard Bosworth's stimulating insertion of post-Unification Italian migration into the analysis of national foreign policy (1996).1 With such a wealth of wide-ranging material available, it may be rash to claim that several aspects of migration remain neglected or ignored, in addition to those ripe for re-examination and reinterpretation thanks to changes in intellectual frameworks and methods of enquiry. This claim is none the less supported by the contents of the four papers in this Supplement, deriving from earlier and considerably shorter versions presented at the conference 'The Importance of Italy', held at the Humanities Research Centre of the ANU in September 2001, by authors who were then postgraduate students in the process of completing their PhDs in Australian universities.