Cirrus@Austlit

The publication in 2008 of the English translation of Emilio Gabbrielli's novel Polenta e Goanna based on Italian migrants in the West Australian goldfields brings into focus the themes of the bush, the outback and migration that since the mid 1850s (Raffaello Carboni, Rudesindo Salvado) have emerged as a constant thread in texts produced by Italian Australian writers. Italian settlement in rural and outback areas of Australia during the late 1800s and early 1900s has remained a largely unsung saga while most Italians migrating to Australia after 1947 ultimately settled in urban areas. Among the few who have written creatively about their experiences even fewer have engaged in themes related to the bush and the outback. Only four narrative writers - Giovanni Andreoni, Giuseppe Abiuso, Ennio Monese and Franko Leoni - have written about non-urban Australia in substantially social realist terms. More recently, this trend had taken a post-modern perspective in a few Italian Australian (Emilio Gabbrielli, Antonio Casella) and Italian writers (Stanislao Nievo, Dario Donati, Paolo Catalano) who depict the Australian outback as providing a solution to the protagonists' life quest and promote a discourse on nature as a dynamic, positive and vital element that contrasts with man's static negativism. This paper proposes to explore this latest trend and the resulting temporal and spatial dislocations that arise from the mapping of two overlapping cultural and geographical contexts. [Author's abstract]

This paper compares the discursive and experiential valence of the two fullest autobiographical accounts of internment written by Australian Italians, that by Claudio Alcorso in The Wind You Say (1993) and that by Peter Dalseno (1994), both of whom were in Loveday from 1942 to 1944 (while Alcorso had been in Hay from June 1940). Beyond the shock of unmerited deprivation of liberty and the equally unmerited stigma of being defined as "enemy aliens", the experience of, and discourse on, internment of the two turns out very different, despite the relative closeness in age when detained. For Alcorso, a patrician from Rome, the internment experience is one of opening up to and enamourment with the world and with life - the Australian outback, working-class and other Australian Italians, human creativity - and the worst crisis comes with release. For Dalseno's alter ego, Peter Delano, raised in the Ingham area, the initial shock is worst, denying him his hard won Australian identity component, and internment represents an intensification of the sordidness of life outside, while release brings with it reacceptance into the wider Australian society. This study thus shows the diversity of ways in which a common history is experienced and discursively conveyed by individuals. [Author's abstract]

This paper examines the narration of diasporic experiences by writers of Italian descent. It investigates the ways in which relationships between ‘home’ and ‘destination’ cultures are negotiated across the generations. Narratives by three women writers, Rosa Cappiello, Anna Maria Dell’oso and Melina Marchetta are analysed to show how negotiating the tensions between nostalgia for the past and the needs of the present transforms and translates notions of ‘home’ for writers who are living ‘in between’ cultures. Through a reading of the narratives of these three authors, each representative of a different generation, the paper considers the ways in which space, place and identity interact in determining the politics of belonging. It is argued that the role of the hyphenate writer has changed over the decades and across generations, from that of a raconteur of what took place, a role that may lean more toward nostalgia than analysis, to that of cultural mediator and, more recently, cultural examiner. Further, the texts chosen for analysis reveal a distinctive strategy of representation – a rhetoric of location – in which spatiality functions as a symbolic conduit between the plotting of identity constructions and Italian/Australian realities. [Author's abstract]