'Australia was the last continent to experience the transformation wrought by new settlers arriving to make it their own. For centuries, explorers had set forth to discover lands which others already called home, but that were conquered and renamed by European seafarers. When King George III dispatched the First Fleet to Sydney in 1787, to accommodate prisoners no longer welcome in the newly independent United States, the history of British settlement (and Indigenous displacement) commenced. Reduced to a percentage on the scale of human occupation of this land, the past two hundred and thirty years would disappear – a number so small it would not even register as a rounding error. But over this short time it has become home to millions who together have forged a new Australian identity.' (Editorial introduction)
Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
The great transformation : Hooked on migration by James Button & Abul Rizvi
Citizenship elegy : In search of the elusive passport by Antje Missbach
Race and representation : Challenging the myth of the mainstream by Tim Soutphommasane
They must not talk by Andrew Jakubowicz
No, I'm not your 'Asian model minority'! by Masako Fukui
Self-imagery and self-deception by Gabrielle Appleby
Homesick by Adele Dumont
Beyond the pale by Alex Reilly
The hospital for bare life by Annabel Stafford
Where are you from? by Donna Lu
Who do they think we are? by Stuart Glover
Discrimination and the body by Fiona Murphy
Re-imagining Parramatta by Phillip Mar & Sarah Barns
History never repeats? by Jennifer Forest
Good fences by Sheila Ngoc Pham
Debt in paradise by David Peetz
A bird flew from the mournful left By Michael Dulaney
'Every morning I would press my nose against the glass and try to imagine what this place could be. A bare room with white walls and beautifully polished floorboards in a shopfront next to a laundry and a bus stop. As I waited there for the last of the three buses to my new school, I saw pictures on the walls which were routinely replaced by others. Nothing else changed. What was this place for? What did the simple, hand-lettered name on the window-glass mean? There was no furniture, nothing obviously for sale, nothing to indicate a function. I was nine years old, and I had no idea that public places existed for experiencing and discussing art.' (Introduction)
'During my doctoral fieldwork researching Islamophobia from the point of view of the ‘Islamophobes’, I spent many weekends in the town of Bayside on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where my parents had bought a holiday house. I had detected that Bayside’s unmistakable Anglo-Australian majority population was ‘disrupted’ in the holiday season and long weekends when many ethnic and religious minorities from Western Sydney descended on the town. Among the crowds was a highly visible and growing Lebanese Muslim tourist population. One evening I was walking with my father when a car slowed down beside us. One of its occupants, a young Anglo guy, leant out of the window, yelled, ‘Go back home you bunch of pumpkin seeds!’ and promptly sped off.' (Introduction)
‘Straylya’. That's how I can remember first hearing it – stray-lya – as if it was a place filled with strays. I wasn’t aware at that very young age of paying too much attention to the origins of the country’s name. But later I recall a growing sense of satisfaction that it suited the place my small family had decided to make their home. My parents had been dedicated strayers well before they got here. They’d ridden motorbikes all across Scotland and the north of England in the postwar years. Proud owners of a BSA Golden Flash, they were members of a club that set off each weekend to rumble through the Royal Mile and head out beyond the Edinburgh boundary lines, into the moorlands and hills and glens. When I came along there was a sidecar added, and I became the club’s baby. Lots of pictures of me being passed around – all rugged up with fat, wind-chafed cheeks – to members posing proudly by bikes lined up against backgrounds of fairly grim grey landscapes. Looking back at those old photos now, I realise the club was training me in the art of straying.
'Swinging in my hammock, it’s hard to get to sleep. Beside my head the sea bounces between hull and wharf – a hollow liquid sound, repetitive scrape and gollop. The rhythm hauls up lines from a sea shanty:
'Oh the anchor’s onboard and the sails are unfurled
We’re bound for to take her halfway round the world.' (Introduction)
'On a dusty corner just before the Oodnadatta Track begins to unfurl across the centre of Australia, there is an unassuming mud-walled building on the edge of Marree, a town with a population of one hundred and fifty. Grey nomads pull up outside the general store across the road in their four-wheel drives to stock up on beer coolers and meat pies, and they barely notice the humble thatch-roofed structure. Behind them, young families clamber over the platform of the old Ghan railway, paying no attention to the building. The only identifying mark next to the dirt walls and old wooden beams is a small notice stuck on a stick in the ground, which looks like it is stencilled on in pen. It proclaims that this spot is ‘Dedicated to the memory of the pioneering Muslim cameleers and families of Hergott Springs (Marree)’. It is also the remains of the first mosque in Australia.' (Introduction)
'What I want is for three people to speak to you. Merlinda Bobis, Julie Koh and Mammad Aidani. You may know one of them, three of them, none of them. Whatever. I will speak to you too, I guess. So it’s one of you and four of us.' (Introduction)
'On Australia day in 2016, artist Elizabeth Close was at an Adelaide shopping centre speaking to her young daughter in Pitjantjatjara, when a woman approached and said to her: ‘It’s Australia Day. We speak English.’ Close was shocked, and replied, ‘Pardon?’ The woman slowed down her speech and repeated herself. Close retorted that as she was speaking a native Australian language, she ‘could not get more Australian’. The woman walked off without another word.' (Introduction)
'The new issue of Griffith Review is about the perennially newsworthy subjects of immigration and multiculturalism, and the lead essay by James Button and Abul Rizvi is essential reading. It offers a concise but clear-eyed account of our nearly total dependence on skilled immigrants for continued economic prosperity and challenges our leaders to break with the decades-long habit of undermining public debate about the implications of this dependence.' (Introduction)
'The new issue of Griffith Review is about the perennially newsworthy subjects of immigration and multiculturalism, and the lead essay by James Button and Abul Rizvi is essential reading. It offers a concise but clear-eyed account of our nearly total dependence on skilled immigrants for continued economic prosperity and challenges our leaders to break with the decades-long habit of undermining public debate about the implications of this dependence.' (Introduction)