Law Commons^™

Transnational Imaginaries: Reading Asian Australian Writing, Wenche Ommundsen

Wenche Ommundsen

When did ‘Asian Australian writing’ come into existence? Answering this question is almost as difficult as deciding when people from the regions now known as Asia first arrived in Australia. We know, for example, that Chinese settlers filed petitions protesting their treatment by colonial governments as early as 1855 (Broinowski 11), and that autobiographical writing appeared in the 1920s (Shen 2001). Creative writers started publishing in the 1950s (Mena Abdullah), 60s (Chitra Fernando) and 70s (Ee Tiang Hong, Brian Castro) – and when we know more about publications in languages other than English, these dates are likely to be pushed …