AustLit

This paper draws upon findings from a project undertaken to interview writers who came to Australia as ‘Displaced Persons’ (DPs) after the Second World War, and examines the literary cultures within their communities. The focus is on four women writers, who exemplify the talent, resourcefulness, and contribution these immigrants made to literary and cultural life in Australia, and who significantly contribute to establishing alternative histories of Australian literature. The writers are Elena Jonaitis, originally from Lithuania; Helen Boris from Ukraine; Elga Rodze-Kisele from Latvia; and Pavla Gruden from Slovenia. The four women reveal how ethno-cultural identity and national attachments are an important aspect of these literary cultures. Their work also shows how their personal experience of immigration and the specificities of the DP experience impacts on literary production. These writers have had work published in their ethno-cultural community in Australia, their wider international diaspora and their original homeland. They have also established literary and cultural networks within their local community, and managed to engage a wider Australian audience. [Author's abstract]

'This article examines ways in which the fiction of the acclaimed Australian writer Amy Witting, dubbed Australia’s Chekov and whom Helen Garner acknowledged as her ‘literary mother,’ interrogates the disempowerment of women in the domestic sphere, asserting that the home is a contested space and conflicted place for women. Witting subverts the notion that a ‘woman’s place is in the home’ by demonstrating that many

women are actually displaced and dispossessed in the inhibiting domestic spaces that are their ‘homes.’ In her fiction, women are isolated and excluded because of gender inequity

in regard to women’s rights and duties in the domestic sphere. Women are also marginalised in regard to inadequate financial rewards for domestic productivity and are affected by circumstances underpinned by discourses of poverty, class conflict and domestic violence. Witting asserts that the disempowerment of women in the home often leads to women appropriating masculinist attitudes and behaviours of oppression towards other women less powerful than themselves. In this article, these concepts are explored with close reference to five of Witting’s novels and interviews conducted with the author.' (Author's abstract)