Return migration from Australia back to Malta is examined in the light of Australian, Maltese and West European studies on returns.1 A survey of 114 returnee parents of high school child ren, supplemented by 33 personal accounts in interviews and letters explore the motives and experience of return of men and women. Return migration to Malta does not fit neatly into many existing models. Few of the returnees are either unsuc cessful settlers or successful 'guestworkers' coming home according to plan with the fruits of their savings. For men there has been no articulation between different modes of produc tion and little movement between wage earning and indepen dent production. The transfers can perhaps be better concep tualised as occurring within an internationality mobile component of the world urban working class. For women the contrast has been greater, with a change from a particularly restrictive wage earning status into an expanded and com munally supported role in domestic labour. Emigration and return have made available to workers a range of perspectives, an awareness of alternatives which can encourage a critical stance, contributing to currents which see Malta in a wider horizon, which are hostile to political patronage and which would seek an improvement in working conditions and an extension and formalisation of workers rights. Neither emigra tion nor return have involved clean breaks, but rather a residue of nostalgia and loss.
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