'Today, roughly 100,000 Gypsies call Australia home, yet until now their experiences have been hidden from our history, and from our present.
'Here, award-winning memoirist and novelist Mandy Sayer weaves together a wide-ranging and exuberant history of Gypsies in Australia. She begins with the roots of Romani culture, and traces the first Gypsy people to arrive in Australia, including James Squire, the colony's first brewer. She meets Gypsy families who live all over Australia, who share the stories of their ancestors and their own lives.
'With her own nomadic early life and experiences as a street performer, Sayer brings unique insight into the lives of the people she meets, and a strong sense of their extraordinary history. She also demolishes some longstanding but baseless myths along the way. Her original and compelling book reveals a rich part of our history that few of us even know is there. ' (Introduction)
'How much do we know about Gypsy – or Roma – peoples in Australia and the making of a specifically Roma Australian culture? It turns out, very little before Mandy Sayer’s Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History which offers a unique insight into an uncharted area of Australian social and cultural history. An intriguing example of how history can be approached by an historically inquisitive non-academic writer, Sayer brings previously untold stories to the page in an affecting and sincere way. In her mission to uncover the lived experience of Roma in Australia she introduces us to an underexamined historical topic that engages with both Australian and Romani histories. Her contribution sets out to ‘discover the true history of the Gypsies’ and to address how and why they were marginalised by Australian mainstream society (x). The book attempts to break down remarkably durable stereotypes, populate the historical imagination with significant Roma individuals, families, and communities, and give voice to a self-identifying Romani Australian population. The book will interest informed specialists – including Australian folklorists, migration historians, oral historians, and memory studies scholars – as well as the broader public.' (Introduction)
'A few months ago our teenage daughter sat down to dinner wearing large hooped earrings. “What’s with the gypsy earrings?” we asked.A lively interchange followed, concerning the ideological soundness of the word gypsy. All a normal part of living with a politically sensitised millennial: but it wouldn’t have occurred to any of us that there was a substantial group of people in Australia that this issue affected directly.Mandy Sayer’s thorough, affecting, if slightly eccentric, exploration of the lives of Australian Roma reveals a long history and an idiosyncratic culture that largely has faded from view in the present era.' (Introduction)
'A few months ago our teenage daughter sat down to dinner wearing large hooped earrings. “What’s with the gypsy earrings?” we asked.A lively interchange followed, concerning the ideological soundness of the word gypsy. All a normal part of living with a politically sensitised millennial: but it wouldn’t have occurred to any of us that there was a substantial group of people in Australia that this issue affected directly.Mandy Sayer’s thorough, affecting, if slightly eccentric, exploration of the lives of Australian Roma reveals a long history and an idiosyncratic culture that largely has faded from view in the present era.' (Introduction)
'How much do we know about Gypsy – or Roma – peoples in Australia and the making of a specifically Roma Australian culture? It turns out, very little before Mandy Sayer’s Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History which offers a unique insight into an uncharted area of Australian social and cultural history. An intriguing example of how history can be approached by an historically inquisitive non-academic writer, Sayer brings previously untold stories to the page in an affecting and sincere way. In her mission to uncover the lived experience of Roma in Australia she introduces us to an underexamined historical topic that engages with both Australian and Romani histories. Her contribution sets out to ‘discover the true history of the Gypsies’ and to address how and why they were marginalised by Australian mainstream society (x). The book attempts to break down remarkably durable stereotypes, populate the historical imagination with significant Roma individuals, families, and communities, and give voice to a self-identifying Romani Australian population. The book will interest informed specialists – including Australian folklorists, migration historians, oral historians, and memory studies scholars – as well as the broader public.' (Introduction)
