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"Refugees Australia Fiction."
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Spinifex & sunflowers
Nick Harris has been drifting for years -- until the day he finds himself amid red dirt and razor wire, a refugee-prison guard in a detention centre. Nick is no crusader and no bleeding-heart. He's just a man in debt who needs a job. Time passes slowly behind the wire, no matter who you are. To distract themselves, the asylum seekers tell Nick about their lives and cultures, and the families they have left behind. They steal from him with good humour, and swear at him with bad. Nick breaks all the rules: slacking off when he guards the cordial machine, swimming with crocodiles, brawling with locals, romancing workmates. And then there is the cardinal sin -- becoming friends with the detainees. The novel is a realistic window into the hidden world of immigration detention centres, drawn from the experience of a former guard. It is one man's vision, looking through the wire at the people locked inside our desert prisons, and looking out at the people who put them there.
Book
At Home in Exile
This is a story of a girl's construction of her identity, and of her family’s search for a place in the world, for the Heimat that is so resonant for those of German background. We follow Helga through an adventurous childhood in Iran, whose vast open spaces her mother called 'my spiritual home’. Her engineer father worked on a grand scale, designing and laying roads and railways, and tunnelling through mountain ranges. Then came the invasions of World War II, and the family, half-German, half-Austrian, found themselves on a long voyage to Australia, designated enemy aliens. They were interned for nearly five years in the dusty Victorian countryside. On their release at the end of the War, stranded in Melbourne, they sought another home. The children were dispatched to convents, and at the Academy of Mary Immaculate, Helga found a temporary homeland, in faith. Everyday life in the Australia of the late 1940s and early 1950s is freshly seen by this feisty, loving migrant family. Through their eyes, we encounter a strange place, Australia, as if for the first time. Helga’s development from a thoughtful, sensitive child to a self-possessed young woman, wrestling with her faith and with how to live a decent life, is vividly recounted.
eBook
The Bone Sparrow
\"Subhi's contained world as a refugee in an Australian permanent detention center rapidly expands when Jimmie arrives on the other side of the fence and asks him to read her late mother's stories to her\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Destabilising notions of the unfamiliar in Australian documentary theatre: Version 1.0's CMI (A certain maritime incident)
In 2004 the ensemble of artists version 1.0 staged A Certain Maritime Incident (CMI) in Sydney. This show about asylum seekers arriving by boat successfully challenged notions of the unfamiliar, that is perceived by audiences as different, foreign or insufficiently known: Rather than (re)presenting 'boat people' as strangers, it invited audiences to discover the unfamiliar sides of the self and within their own culture through an effective use of destabilisation strategies which opened up new spaces of meaning.
Journal Article
Maybe
1946. Europe is in ruins. Millions dream of finding happiness somewhere else, and 14 year-old Felix is one of them. When he's offered a journey to somewhere far away, he seizes the opportunity. So does someone very dear to him, even though she wasn't actually invited. They have high hopes for their new land. But before Felix and Anya can embrace the love and friendship of their new world, they must confront the murderous urge for revenge still alive in the old. Felix knows he hasn't faced anything like this before. He may not survive, but he's hoping he will. Maybe.
Book
Paranoid Projections: Australian Novels of Asian Invasion
Ross examines the most substantial and detailed textual expression of Australia's ongoing fear of Asian invasion: the sizeable body of popular fiction novels that depict the actualization of the invasion event and provide grim warnings of Australia's potentially Asianized future. These formulate novels flesh out these stock elements of the Asian-invasion narrative--a detailed set of discourses centering on Australian vulnerability and Asian menace--to provide instructive tales of a future Australia riven by race war. Throughout the history of the novels' production, the threat of Asian invasion has been presented as a pressing contemporary concern, often characterized by a sense of hysterical urgency that implores the reader to believe that invasion is nigh.
Journal Article
The Exception that Proves the Rule? National Fear, Racial Loathing, Chinese Writing in \UnAustralia\
The interplay of Asian, Aboriginal, and European identities and histories in Ouyang Yu's poetry and in Simone Lazaroo's The Australian Fiance (2000) is complemented and complicated in Hsu-Ming Teo's Behind the Moon (2005) where she creates a mixed-race Asian refugee character who is of Vietnamese and black American descent. These texts bring into post-Hansonite Australia the history of racialized fear and loathing that is foundational to the formation of Australia as a territorial nation-state, as many commentators have noted. There is interest in the textual representation of moments when the \"homeliness\" (Freud's heimlich)of the hegemonic national narrative is disrupted by confrontation with the excluded \"Other\" and these moments of \"unhomeliness,\" these irruptions of Freud's \"uncanny\" (unheimlich), shape the symbolic textures of Lazaroo's novel and Teo's, and are perhaps best introduced in terms of Ouyang Yu's poetic deconstruction of normative Australian national discourses. Madsen explores the idea that an exceptional cultural space, which is called \"unAustralia,\" offers a deconstructive vantage point from which one can observe at work the normative ideological processes that promote an experience of national belonging for some by excluding others.
Journal Article
Homelands
Maria and Carlos, refugees from the war story of in El Salvador are living in suburban Melbourne. After 7 years Maria has flourished. Carlos has not. After peace arrives in his homeland Carlos chooses to return and rebuild his country. Maria and their 4 children decide to remain in Australia. However 6 month later and with no sign of Carlos returning, Maria decides to track him down. What she discovers tests their marriage to the limits.
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