AustLit

The authors draw on Govinnage's short stories and poetry to demonstrate the ways in which the work of the Sri Lankan born writer 'reflects on issues of cultural identity, otherness, citizenship, and coexistence in the framework of Australian multiculturalism in the 1980s-1990s' (p. 282).

Mathur writes: 'In their attempt to represent themselves and give voice to their ideas and feelings, Asian-Australian writers are turning the traditional image of the 'other' created by white Australian writers on its head. Their writing not only revises and subverts the hitherto white representation of mainstream writing but also is a way of writing back, a challenging of the stereotypical portrayal of Asians in mainstream literature. By doing this, Asian-Australian writers have inverted the gaze. By looking at themselves, asserting their own point of view, they are changing what had once been passive (object) into an active agent of change and speech (the subject)' (p. 316). The author goes on to demonstrate this through Mena Abdullah and Ray Mathew's In the Time of the Peacock.