Readers of this collection of scholarly studies on migration do not need to be told of Eric's unsurpassed mastery of the widely neglected English diaspora, his seemingly effortless intellectual sweep, or his adroitness in juxtaposing general findings with telling individual narratives. These qualities were all evident at the conference in his honour that gave rise to this book, followed so soon by his shocking and sudden death in London. I could not attend, being gravely ill myself, but was later able to watch the proceedings on video. I imagined that I was there with Eric and exchanging glances with him in the lecture room, along with so many of his friends and mine. It never occurred to me that September that it would be my lot to bid Eric farewell.

We were friends and collaborators for over 30 years, brought together by our obsessive desire to make sense of ‘mass’ migration and find some way of sifting through that mass and recovering its individuality, with all the consequent quirks and aberrations. We were particularly interested in looking at unfamiliar sub-strands to set beside the trans-Atlantic diaspora, and (along with Richard Reid) initiated a series of slim volumes entitled Visible Immigrants to uncover neglected sources for migration to Australia. This required me (I was far from reluctant) to make many brief visits to the Australian National University (ANU) and Flinders University so that we could plan and execute our next moves in the struggle for scholarly enlightenment. The small workshops generating that series have continued intermittently and did much to revive interest in the field.

We began with the thorny challenge of emigrant letters, so rich individually yet so hazardous to use as the basis of generalizations about the migratory experience. Eric was a devotee of Charlotte Erickson's classic Invisible Immigrants, which stood alone for so long in British diaspora studies in its incisive use of personal testimony. We amassed vast quantities of letters throughxiv appeals in Australia, abstracting and transcribing many of them during my longest spell at the ANU in 1990–91. Eric was always the sceptic, I the optimist intent on converting a non-sample into a sample by some magic formula.