AustLit

'This analysis considers post-war Australian immigration and multiculturalism through the lens of mistaken literary identities and their corresponding texts. Nino Culotta's They're a Weird Mob, Helen Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper (1994), and Norma Khouri's Forbidden Love were all ostensibly autobiographical texts that were very popular in Australia at their times of publication. I begin with a brief overview of the events surrounding each text before locating them within the history of Australian multiculturalism. The different receptions of these books and subsequent revelations concerning the identity of their authors offer us a way of thinking about the shifting landscape of Australian national identity and its relationship to multiculturalism. The chapter concludes with some tentative reflections on how we make sense of these events and what they might tell us about historical shifts in Australian multiculturalism and identity politics more generally.' (95)