(Folk)writing in post-colonial Australia

I think there have been signs of the fostering of a new monoculturalism in Australia. As well as the more obvious signs such as the hostile reception of asylum-seekers by the current Australian government, articles have started to appear in major newspapers questioning the practice of multiculturalism within Australian society.

I was quite stunned to see the Prime Minister, John Howard, quoted as the new expert on multiculturalism in The Weekend Australian, (4-5 May, 2002), presumably reflecting traditional Australian values when he emphasized the "absorption" and "integration" of any newcomers. This was put forward within the framework of the desirabiltiy of a new cultural "unity" in the face of the fragmentation of nation states as a result of the effects of globalization.

In his latest book, Donald Horne - roused from retirement and his sickbed to making an urgent analysis of the growing racial prejudice in Australia - maintains that there was no such thing as a mono-(folk)culture in Australia. Instead, there was right from the start a negotiated coexistence between the many varied cultures that came to these shores from the British Isles. The whole story has yet to be told, and it makes sense to unravel the past in terms of an oppressive culture of non-inclusion where unpalatable colonial realities were not dinner-time conversation and certainly did not appear in the English Imperial literature of the times. Or, if they did, only as mysteriously acquired sudden fortunes that came to the new ruling elites.

As a migrant woman writer I can appreciate the importance of embracing an awareness at least of the existence of a great variety of pre-sixties Australian cultures some of which have yet to surface.

Taking the lead from Donald Horne I think it's a responsive situation: not an assertion of realities into a sort of void, or the projection of concerns of no relevance to anyone else, but an interaction of realities in which we'll keep on defining Australia as a vital piece in the post-colonial global literary landscape. A post-colonial awareness takes as it base the many cultures that make up Indigenous Australia and includes the writings of more recently arrivals exploring their buried pasts as well. I agree with Antigone Kefala who wrote in 1992: "One lives, one writes out of a continuum - a past, a present, a landscape, family, cultural knowledge, languages or a language, changes and everything that cumulatively has happened to oneself, the family, the group. In this total interdependence from which personality, language and writing emerge, to apply such a brutal process of negation of the past and all its interconnections will kill everything else with it."

However, writing from a migrant woman’s perspective in Australia has been far from easy. It is a literary history marked by a sense of irrelevancy to more "mainstream" literary concerns supported by perceptions of unrelenting non-inclusion. Sneja Gunew observed as early as 1988 that writers from non-English speaking backgrounds are somehow expected to remain within the framework of their migration experience. Anything beyond that is generally seen as being of little or no interest to the larger community. It wasn’t until last year that I finally saw a way forward from this impasse when I was doing research on the advancement of migrant women’s writings within the framework of Australian international post-colonial literary publications. It dawned on me that perhaps I myself could strive to be seen as one of the "missing" pieces in the jigsaw of Australia’s multi-cultural post-colonial women’s literary landscape, rather than keep on working from a perceived positioning of presumably pushing for unrelated concerns as an outsider.

I started to write poems that I now consider post-colonial around 1984, when I first came into contact with my Aboriginal peer group at my workplace. It was the first time I was able to articulate some of the impressions of my own family’s colonial history which had been buried by the requirements of being allowed to immigrate to Australia (alongside other "secrets" such as legendary eccentricities in the family and my own particular deficiency of having been born with a not-quite-normal heartbeat). I’m now set on making these poems the hinge on which to hang a whole collection of old and new poems tracing my development as a migrant woman writer from a non-English speaking background in Australia. Hopefully the publication of such work will be of general encouragement to other Australian post-colonial writers whose first language isn’t English and who likewise feel they haven’t been heard because of perceptions of incomprehensible cultural difference or apparent irrelevancy.

I’m the youngest daughter of Dutch migrants who came to this country in the early sixties. Like most migrant children from that time there was no or very little support for learning English. I had early in life shown a talent for reciting poetry and was an avid reader before I came to Australia. However, everyday language problems proved to be too overwhelming to be able to continue these and other interests, and I soon found myself functioning purely on a survival level. I’d become quite apt at mimicking language and picking up subtleties in grammar and syntax, so I found myself paradoxically surpassing others at school in my achievements in learning French even though I couldn’t speak or write English at all well. If things had been different, I would have probably gone on to study English because of my interest in writing poetry. Instead I took French and German at tertiary level, and I just scraped through because of my continuing less-than-adequate English language skills.

Later on, after I’d been writing poetry for quite a few years, I realized that the English-Australian Literature Canon was and would probably never be within my reach. I never really quite got the hang of the terms of reference that are made to the English literature canon (Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc), and my framework of Europeanness, because of the predominance of English-speaking-background writers associated with the Australian literature canon, appeared irrelevant and perhaps even incomprehensible to some of my own peer group. It appeared that, because of the lack of adequate ESL teaching at that time, I and others like myself would continue interpreting the Australian experience mainly through the framework of literatures from the countries left behind. In my case, as I’ve only fully come to realize recently, from reading post-colonial European (Dutch, German, French) literatures where the colonial realities expressed seemed to find resonance here when my family arrived in the early sixties.

From the early seventies onwards I found myself in an Australian post-colonial literary landscape where the lid was taken off for many Australian English speaking background cultures to talk to each other, finally, after almost two centuries of exclusion from the English Literature Canon. However, I think many writers from non-English speaking backgrounds were stimulated by the sudden rush of finding expression, but got left behind because of the urgency of the existing situation. I survived by finding recognition as a performance poet in a great diversity of Australian post-colonial cultures, and it’s the performance aspect that has become the keystone to all of my writings. Hopefully this time around we can survive by pulling this whole range of Australian (folk)writing cultures closer together.

The copyright of the article (Folk)writing in post-colonial Australia in Performance Poetry is owned by Jeltje. Permission to republish (Folk)writing in post-colonial Australia in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.


Go To Page: 
1 
2
3

Articles in this Topic   
Discussions in this Topic