Edition 6
Our Global Face
- Published 7th December, 2004
- ISBN: 9780733314544
- Extent: 268 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
They still call Australia home, but in the global village notions of belonging and place have changed – the stunning new writing in this issue bursts with new insights into what it means to be Australian today.
Writers explore how they move between countries and worlds, belonging, adjusting and moving on.
Writers include: Desmond O’Grady, Gillian Bouras, Patrick McCaughey, Brian Castro, Anna Haebich, Creed O’Hanlon, Peter Skyznecki, Susan Varga, Melissa Lucashenko, Ghassan Hage, Peter Doherty and many more.
In this Edition
The third and fourth countries
IN THE FRONTISPIECE of my next novel, La Tombe de Thu Le, I have used a quote from the British writer and historian Ronald Fraser: "What actually happened is less important than what is felt to have happened. Is that right?"Set in Hanoi, the...
A long way back – reflections of a genealogical tourist
Earlier this year I made a brief visit to my mother's family homeland in Germany on the edge of the North Sea. Since I was a child I had dreamed of this country but as an adult had resisted making the journey, until a...
Beyond exile
She, poor lady, hath by sad experience learnt how good a thing it is never to quit one's native land.– EuripidesExiles feed on hope.– AeschylusMY GRANDFATHER CAME to Australia because he was sick of eating polenta and cheese, Zio Tony told me. My mother...
Caesura
In place of a homeland / we hold the transformations of the world.– lly SachsSOMETIMES I THINK the idea of home is just a failure of nerve. I must have been about 14 years old. Alone in Australia, I was farmed out to different...
Globalisation, Kimberley style
TAKE A TRIP down the old corrugation road with some Bardi people and you'll soon find out something about globalisation, indigenous people and the exact location of your own tailbone. Dubbed Australia's "second-worst road" by locals – who measures such things? – the red...
Ithaca: Home
AT A YOUNG age I knew of Ithaca. Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia, the Classic Comics Mythology series and Kirk Douglas's Ulysses film (an early special-effects extravaganza) retold the story of Odysseus, blown from island to island around the Mediterranean, set upon and tempted, but...
Like mother, like son
WE NEVER LIKE to think about the fact, but history repeats itself. Well, often it does: I am now exactly the age my father was when he farewelled me at Tullamarine Airport one morning in 1980. "Mind you come back," he said, while tears...
At home in both places
I STILL CALL Australia home. But I have another home in Italy. Virtual bilocation is my thing rather than geographic schizophrenia: I am at home in both places. Having insufficient money to move between them at will, I am not anguished by having to...
Small stories of the planet
COULD IT BE true? Had we just made the first ever Halal Irish stew?The lamb's slaughterer could not have predicted such a destiny. I said my thank you in Arabic to the butcher and strolled past the Filipino grocery shops and South African estate...
The gift of tongues
LANGUAGE AND PLACE no longer define us as simply as they once did. We can slip and slide between languages and places in ways difficult for our parents, impossible for our grandparents. Language, culture, family, place. Out of that mix emerges the individual personality....
Two wives in Krakow and a house in Treptow
IN 1989,WHILE on a visit to Poland, I was introduced to Piotr (Peter) Skrzynecki, the famous cabaret and artistic director who lived in the city of Krakow. I had heard of him and knew that his reputation was legendary. That we shared the same...
Sensual degrees of separation
Q: Mum, how can you tell when politicians are lying?A: Their lips are moving, sweetheart.I MUST HAVE been a masochistic child. I loved talking politics with Dad: his history with the Labor movement, the horrors of Communism, the rightness of our participation in Vietnam,...
Prodigal daughter
AS I DRANK wine in my narrow South London garden with blaring reggae beats from three neighbourhood parties, I dreamed of going home to Australia, to the land of light and air and space.I tore myself away from my job, my high-flying friends and...
Beating the tyrant distance
ALTHOUGH AUSTRALIANS MAY be increasingly conscious of our unique, ancient, indigenous culture, the national psyche is very much attuned to the reality that most were either born elsewhere or are descended from people who arrived from Europe, Asia or the Americas less than 220...
Reflection
MARIAN IS AMERICAN, from Chicago. I've known her 15 years, ever since she arrived in Hong Kong. About five years ago she left Hong Kong and moved to Paris. Occasionally, she rings."I don't know what I look like anymore," she said during one conversation....
Antipodeans in America: a cautionary tale
I LEFT AUSTRALIA in 1988 with a bad conscience. Eighteen months earlier, the trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria had given me leave to take up the visiting chair in Australian studies at Harvard for a full academic year. Within weeks of my...
The Greek in me
MY FATHER IS George, a Greek refugee from Turkey. That requires some explanation. Until 1922, the western coastline of Turkey was occupied not only by the Turks but by several million Greeks, Turkish citizens of Greek descent to be precise, who lived lives of...
A boat called Brotherly Love
ON THE DAY they launched Brotherly Love, the whole village accompanied them on the long descent to the bay. At the head of the procession, a step ahead of his two sons, walked Andonis. Behind them swayed Brotherly Love, balanced on a horse drawn...
Refuge
EMRE ALWAYS RISES at five. His palliasse has to be slid beneath the couch so that Frau Losberg might use the tiny room through the day for her piecework sewing. Emre is sincerely grateful for this space. It is much more tolerable than the...
Dinner with my brother
WENT TO MY brother's new town house for dinner last night. Bro cooked up a fine dinner – sweet and sour pork using the traditional recipe passed down from generation to generation within our family. After dinner, we got into a discussion re our...
Invisible moon
SHE STANDS AT the window, dropped into a jet-lagged dream. The street below is covered in snow. She knows what subtropical heat feels like. She knows the frisson of an electrical storm, the thundering sound of violent rain on a tin roof, the clean,...
Featured Contributors
Peter Skrzynecki
Peter Skrzynecki is an award-winning author of twenty books of poetry and prose. He is an adjunct associate professor...
Ghassan Hage
Ghassan Hage teaches and researches in the areas of globalisation, migration, nationalism, racism and multiculturalism from a comparative perspective.His...
Susan Varga
Susan Varga has worked in film and video and briefly as a lawyer. Her first book, Heddy and Me...
Arnold Zable
Arnold Zable is an award-winning writer, storyteller, educator and human rights advocate. His books include Jewels and Ashes (Scribe,...
