After graduating from Newcastle University College with first-class honours, Anna Rutherford travelled to England where she worked as a school teacher. In 1966 she accepted a lectureship in Commonwealth literature at the University of Aarhus, in Denmark. Continuing to develop the program after the death of its founder, Greta Hort, Rutherford began to organise conferences on Commonwealth literature and established the Commonwealth Newsletter in 1971 for members of the European Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Study. In 1979, aiming to include creative writing and art, the newsletter changed format and was renamed Kunapipi.
Kunapipi is one of the oldest and most well-respected forums for the discussion of Commonwealth (or postcolonial) literature. In addition, it has published the work of creative writers from many Commonwealth countries, including India, the Caribbean, Africa, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Australian writers who have appeared in Kunapipi include Mark O'Connor, Randolph Stow, Les Murray, Frank Moorhouse, Judith Rodriguez, Thomas Shapcott, Marion Halligan, Antigone Kefala, Beverley Farmer, Ouyang Yu, Thea Astley, Kate Grenville, Jennifer Strauss and Yasmine Gooneratne{w). A special 1988 issue on Aboriginal culture included contributions from Oodgeroo, Mudrooroo, Stephen Muecke, Sally Morgan and Archie Weller.
Rutherford returned to Sydney in 1996, bringing Kunapipi and her successful Dangaroo Press with her. After Rutherford's death in 2001, Anne Collett was appointed editor. Kunapipi has been based at the University of Wollongong since that time, maintaining an influential position in Commonwealth studies.
As a researcher for AustLit, I have tried to identify and locate points of entry through which even a monolingual researcher might access and build awareness of Australia’s multilingual literatures. Community language newspapers, which have existed in Australian since the nineteenth century, and which continue with substantial circulations in the twenty-first century, are excellent resources if one is fluent in the respective language. Bilingual or multilingual magazines or newspapers are not as common, but can provide an English reading researcher with documentation of community literary activities that would otherwise remain inaccessible. These magazines are like islands – multilingual islands in the midst of the dominant monolingual literary culture. In the Australian literary context it may be appropriate to think of the production of literature in other languages as islands of literary activity where multiple languages are maintained amidst the surrounding English writing. In this essay I’ll discuss a number of literary journals that provide access to Australia’s multilingual literary activities. Two of these are indeed multilingual, carrying articles and creative writing in a number of languages. The third is bilingual, publishing content in English and Vietnamese only, but will be included it here as an indication of the breadth and significance of writing in Australia in languages other than English, writing that is diasporic and transnational as well as multilingual. (Author's abstract)
