The fourth volume of ASAA, the Australian Asian Studies Association, gathers thirty-three papers read at its conference in Kandy, Sri Lanka, towards the end of 2008, at a time when peace negotiations between the warring parties in the country had not yet been brought to an end. The more courageous proved the presence of participants from about ten foreign countries to meet local scholars and discuss a conference theme the Sri Lankan organisers had proposed, a theme that aptly related to the political situation in the country. Perhaps understandably, the dozen Sri Lankan academics preferred to address cultural rather than political issues whereas several of their Australian colleagues did not shirk from looking at recent changes in the Australian political sphere, in particular the long hoped-for government apology to the "Stolen Generations" by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in February 2008. This change in attitude may not have been shared by each and every white Australian but was a promising sign, as Keith Truscott, himself a "second-generation child of the 'stolen generation'" (372) put it in the opening article of the collection. Several more contributions in the first of seven sections of the book underline the aspect of political change in Australia while the following half a dozen essays discuss future paths the country will hopefully follow, in particular the one of acknowledging its multicultural set-up, as Baden Offord argues, who puts his finger on Australia-Asian relations (45), thereby highlighting the geographical aspect of the conference title. In his most interesting essay, "Postcolonial Legacies and the 'Small Country Syndrome,'" Stephen Alomes returns to A.A. Phillips's famous phrase of 1958 of the "cultural cringe," which he feels does not only persist in Australia but can be extended to New Zealand, Canada and Sri Lanka (74), one proof of which he locates in postcolonial scholars' inclination -and practice -to prefer working in the so-called metropolitan centres instead of at "the periphery": a state of the art, Bill Ashcroft's negotiation about "Australian Literature and Alternative Modernities" cannot really put aside. While the number of papers by Australian scholars in this collection is the same as in previous ASAA conference publications, their host country's colleagues play, laudably, a more visible role than Indian voices had done in the two previous conferences held in the subcontinent.