AustLit

‘Sweeping from Aboriginal-settler clashes to current controversies over refugees, Migrant Nation […] reveals how national identity has never been about One Australia, but always about how its peoples have dealt with One Another.’
—Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA

'The essays in ‘Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity’ work within the gap between Australian image and experience, focusing on particular historical blind spots by telling stories of individuals and groups that did not fit the favoured identity mould and can therefore offer fresh insights into the other side of identity construction. In this way this collection casts light onto the hidden face Australian identity and pays respect to the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity, a story that is rapidly unravelling.

'Whether in terms of language, history, culture or personal circumstances, many of the subjects of these essays were foreign to the settler dream. The stories reveal their efforts to establish a sense of legitimacy and belonging outside of the dominant Australian story. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews, documentary fragments and archives, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.' (Publication summary)

Over the past two decades, memory, understood as both the act of remembering and a means of storing memories, has been relocating itself. In its daily usage it has been moving from the mind to the computer—from neurological systems to digital technologies—as people increasingly outsource memory to digital devices. In this essay I focus on the changing nature of remembering—and forgetting—in the digital era. With an emphasis on personal stories I ask: How is intergenerational memory transfer changing as a result of digital media technologies? Specifically, what are the implications of the shift to digital storage and communication processes for the way we retain, pass on, or receive private and intimate material? How has this changed the way we see ourselves and view our lives, and allow others to see ourselves and our lives? [Author's abstract]

My Ukrainian grandparents Nadia and Petro Olijnyk arrived in Australia as post-war refugees in 1949. Petro died in 2005 and Nadia in 2009, each in their mid-90s. My grandfather loved telling stories and holding an audience. Nadia would sit with him, listening, but Petro would never allow her to take over. However, when he was not with her she would sometimes tell her own stories and I was struck by how different they were from his. This paper focuses not on Nadia's storytelling but her story writing, something she began to do in her late 80s for the first time in her life. Always a voracious reader (in Russian, Ukrainian and English), she also wrote fluently, mostly in English. Nadia wrote several hundreds of pages of notes, including many of her stories, in various notebooks—in the nursing home where she was immobile and totally bedridden for her last 10 years. Many people in the latter part of life communicate their early experiences through an unexplained feat of memory that brings back vivid details, but the motivation for Nadia to recall early experiences was much stronger than is usual. Her desire to recollect and to re-store her experiences was a kind of holding on to life, and claiming and asserting it as valuable and meaningful. [Author's abstract]

'Virtual Voyages is a fascinating account of the European discovery of the elusive 'great south land' told through the literature of 'imaginary voyages'. Written at the height of the era of European maritime exploration, these bizarre and captivating tales, with their wildly imaginative visions of antipodean inversion and strangeness, reveal a hidden history of attitudes to colonization. By exposing the relationship between myth and reality in the antipodes, this book casts new light on the power of fiction to influence history.

In the post-colonial studies field, books about travel writing and empire have tended to focus on the high period of nineteenth-century imperialism and on the colonial settings of Africa and India. This book offers a fresh perspective by focussing on the eighteenth century, and referring to the geographical region of Australia and the Pacific, which has had far less attention. The book also breaks new ground by being the first to approach the genre of the imaginary voyage from a post-colonial perspective.

In addition to the new insights into European colonialism that it offers, the book illustrates many broader themes in eighteenth-century history and thought. These include connections between the rise of science and modern imperialism, the development of narrative history and fiction and the influence of romanticism, the evolution of the early novel in Britain and France, and the role of mythology in the development of national identity.

Readership: The book is aimed at an academic readership and will be of interest to scholars working across a wide range of fields. These include travel writing, eighteenth-century and early modern studies, post-colonial studies, history of the novel, British and French colonial history, transnational history, Australian studies, Pacific studies, romanticism, realism, mythology, and utopian thought.; (Publisher website)