Transcultural Perspectives in Journalist Memoirs of Growing Up with Non-Anglo Migrant Parents

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on memoirs by three Australian journalists, each of whom was born to European parents from a non-native-English-speaking background: Elisabeth Wynhausen’s Manly Girls (1989), Tom Dusevic’s Whole Wild World (2016) and James Jeffrey’s My Family and Other Animus (2018). I also discuss Jeffrey’s Paprika Paradise (2007), an earlier memoir of travelling in his mother’s homeland of Hungary with his northern English father. The article explores the extent to which these memoirs are examples of transcultural life writing, attuned to questions of language and culture. I argue that at least two of the texts are, while one is more equivocal on these questions. All three authors take care to translate their non-native-English-speaking family members’ cultural and political attitudes into an idiom that makes sense to a contemporary Anglophone Australian readership. At the same time, they often read familiar “Anglo” cultural norms critically, through a transcultural lens.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian life writing
• transcultural life writing
• non-Anglo migrants
• memoir
• representing parents in memoir

Transcultural Life Writing

Despite predictions of the rise of an undifferentiated globalised culture in the 21st century,¹ contemporary life writing in English, as in other languages, continues to speak of lives shaped by distinctive and often divergent cultural outlooks.² This is true of transcultural life writing in Australia by Indigenous and non-indigenous authors alike, as seen in works by Kim Scott, Alice Pung, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Ellen van Neerven, Michael Mohamed Ahmed and Kgshak Akec, among others. My article looks at memoirs by three Australian journalists born to parents from non-native-English-speaking European backgrounds. Two of the authors were born in Europe (one in the Netherlands, the other in England, although “conceived in Hungary”³), but arrived in Australia aged four; the third was born into a Croatian-speaking immigrant household in Sydney. The memoirs are Manly Girls (1989) by Elisabeth Wynhausen; Whole Wild World (2016) by Tom Dusevic; and Paprika Paradise (2007) and My Family and Other Animus (2018) by James Jeffrey.⁴ While the texts all allude to the authors’ journalism, their narrative focus, hence that of this article, is experiences of growing up in a bilingual family in mostly monolingual “Anglo” Australian settings.

My interest lies in how Wynhausen, Dusevic and Jeffrey represent their non-native-English-speaking parents in relation to the local—mainly Anglophone, though also migrant—suburban Sydney neighbourhoods where the writers grew up, in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s, respectively. How do the texts orient readers towards remembered non-Anglo migrant characters?⁵ Each of the books recalls family interactions in terms of certain kinds of sociality, linked implicitly or explicitly with a particular language: Dutch, Croatian and Hungarian—languages that were, and remain, minority languages in Australia, albeit those of postwar migrant populations broadly perceived as white, if not always welcomed.⁶

In her groundbreaking 2003 essay, “Multiculturalism and the Problem of Multicultural Histories”,⁷ writer and historian Hsu-Ming Teo makes a plea for an inclusive approach to “Australian history and identity”⁸ that recognises the role of what has since come to be called “intersectionality”⁹ in the lives of non-Anglo Australians. Whereas Teo rightly highlights key dimensions of migrant experience including sexuality, race/colour and class, largely overlooked in “ethnic” histories in favour of (often reified) categories such as ethnicity and nationality, I would argue that we need to add language—or more accurately “linguaculture”—to the interpretive mix, given that non-Anglophone immigrants to Australia inevitably encounter a language barrier. “Linguaculture” is a term coined by American linguists Paul Friedrich and John Attinasi to capture the intricate interrelatedness of language and culture.¹⁰ The memoirs I discuss here likewise all link language with culture.

In using the word “transcultural” about these narratives, I find helpful Spanish literary scholar Rosalia Baena’s definition in Transculturing Auto/Biography (2007),¹¹ which draws on the words of Ukrainian-Canadian writer Janice Kulyk Keefer:

I privilege the term “transcultural”, which I use as Janice Kulyk Keefer does, to refer to the manner in which the dominant culture “becomes part of a larger, looser structure within which literary texts which foreground the experience of ‘minority’ as opposed to ‘dominant’ groups both present themselves and are received as representative, even paradigmatic forms for an entire social formation, and not just for the ethnic or racial group with which the text’s author is associated” … [As Keefer goes on,] “what is important in transcultural writing is the circulation and exchange of ideas, energies, vision between different ethnocultural groups as well as between ‘center’ and ‘margin’, ‘dominant’ and ‘minority’ groups.”¹²

The value of this account for my purposes lies in its claim that transcultural “auto/biography” (or life writing) aims to set off an “exchange of ideas, energies, vision between different ethnocultural groups”, including what are experienced as “dominant” and “minority” groups. An “exchange” between groups implies that they have something approaching equal status; at least symbolically, then, such exchanges can alter established dynamics between “centre” and “margin”. The claim that transcultural life writing circulates different ethnocultural perspectives (or “vision”) is amply borne out by two of the texts I discuss, and is, as I will show, more unevenly, ambiguously applicable to the third and fourth.

Like “linguaculture”, “transcultural” presupposes a particular notion of “culture”. “Culture” as I use it here is a shorthand for partly shared ways of thinking and speaking characteristic of communities linked by certain languages and histories. As anthropologists have come to acknowledge, culture in this sense is neither unchanging nor monolithic.¹³ Individuals may identify with two or more linguacultural communities at a time; in an era of global migration and decolonisation, this phenomenon is widespread.¹⁴ Nevertheless, both translingual memoirs (which address experiences of living with more than one language)¹⁵ and research on bilingual experience¹⁶ indicate that many multilinguals associate their languages with different ways of thinking across various domains.

Wynhausen, Dusevic and Jeffrey all deal in their memoirs with cultural differences between non-Anglo migrant parents and dominant local culture(s) of the time. In doing so, each anticipates possible cultural assumptions of readers in their own way. Wynhausen and, in particular, Dusevic take care to translate their parents’ perspectives into an account that makes them intelligible to readers from other cultural backgrounds. They portray attitudes encountered by their families in Australia—and sometimes relatives’ own attitudes—critically, through a transcultural lens. Wynhausen offers mordant recollections of shuttling between her Dutch Jewish parents’ home, where sunlight was welcomed, conversations carried on loudly between rooms and visiting schoolfriends urged by her mother to eat, and the quieter houses of “Anglo” neighbours, with living rooms shrouded in “crepuscular gloom”, where children helped themselves unsupervised to “lime cordial” in the kitchen.

Dusevic sheds light on his parents’ experiences in World War II and postwar Yugoslavia, and how their consequent anticommunism endured in Australia. Affectionately, but not uncritically, he describes the Sydney Croatian community to which they belonged as vibrant yet “insular”. Whole Wild World depicts life in a household ruled by an overbearing, if loving, father, “Joso” (or “Joe”), and more oppressively by an intrusive maternal aunt, “Teta Danica”, to whom Tom’s adolescent social life was anathema. Jeffrey’s My Family and Other Animus portrays his Hungarian-born mother as impulsive and irrational, in contrast to his “sensible” English father, in a way that often seems to fall back on cultural stereotypes about non-British Europeans. Paprika Paradise, his earlier memoir, while no more complimentary about his mother, offers a more appreciative account of aspects of the emotional culture he associates with speakers of Hungarian.

Why These Three Authors?

In researching what has been published about these three authors—very little—I found that each had at some point written enthusiastically about one or both of the other two. Dusevic is named second in the acknowledgments to Wynhausen’s 2011 book, The Short Goodbye, thanked in the third line for “always … sharing” his “knowledge”.¹⁷ In the acknowledgments to Dusevic’s Whole Wild World, Wynhausen is singled out by name among his “terrific comrades” in journalism: “Their work and loyalty have inspired and sustained me, no one more obsessive, generous and loving than the late Elisabeth Wynhausen”.¹⁸ In the text, she features as a welcome role model to the newspaper-reading teenage future journalist: “In the National Times I’d search out Elisabeth Wynhausen’s zesty dispatches from America”.¹⁹ In 2016, James Jeffrey reviewed Dusevic’s book for their common employer, the Australian, in a glowing and characteristically buoyant fashion: It is exuberance, it is joy. Whole Wild World is the rare pearl that needed no irritant, no niggling little grain of sand at its heart, to make it grow. It bursts with the curiosity and energy of a child, the same open eyes, the same open heart.²⁰

Also for the Australian, Dusevic, in turn, wrote a highly appreciative, wryly humorous review of Jeffrey’s My Family and Other Animus and Sofija Stefanovic’s Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, describing them as “two new books by first-gen migrants” that reveal how, “despite inner turmoil, parental tension and a haze of nicotine the authors prosper in a strange, overlit land, ‘the arsehole of the world,’ far from the beating heart of bickering, crisis-prone waltzing old Europe”.²¹ The personal resonance of this discussion is clear to any reader of Dusevic’s own memoir (published two years earlier) and is spelt out when he comments on Stefanovic’s book that alleviating the “grim environment” of “flagrant corruption, commo privations and grinding make-do” in 1980s Yugoslavia, there is the succour of extended family, the beautiful world of noise, banter, argument, nicknames, fire pits, suspect calories and home brew familiar to anyone from Southern Europe. It’s a deep, welcoming culture cutting through ethnicities, religions, topography and social strata.²²

Jeffrey titles a chapter of My Family and Other Animus about his fondness for swearing “For Special Occasions”, borrowing the phrase as he explains from “my friend the writer Elisabeth Wynhausen”, a “zestful” swearer who used it as a sly euphemism for “the ‘c’ word” after an exasperated colleague asked her to “save [that] for special occasions”.²³ The parallels among Wynhausen’s, Dusevic’s and Jeffrey’s early lives and the intra-textual allusions by which they reach out to one another in print add further impetus to a comparison of their portrayals of their foreign-born parents and the implications of these for a reading of recent Australian memoir in terms of transcultural perspective.

Manly Girls (1989)

Journalist Elisabeth Wynhausen, born in Maastricht, Netherlands, in 1946, arrived in Sydney in 1951 aged four with her parents, younger brother, Julian, and two sets of maternal uncles and aunts. Her Jewish parents had survived the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands by escaping to Switzerland; many in both their families were murdered. This traumatic history figures in Wynhausen’s powerful essay On Resilience.²⁴ The memoir touches on it but has more to say of her parents’ experience as immigrants.

Manly Girls gives a vibrant, often caustic account of Wynhausen’s first couple of decades in Australia. It recalls her childhood impressions of the monotonous-looking food at school friends’ homes: “The same scoop of mashed potato. The same subservient beans. The same lamb chop, as dried out as the Nullabor Plains.”²⁵ Of relations between school friends and their parents, she writes: I thought they were unnatural. In public, parents and children acted as if they hardly knew each other and they weren’t much different in private. If they kissed at all, they kissed like people worried about giving each other ‘flu. It did not surprise me that my friends couldn’t wait to get away from home  … I couldn’t wait to get away from school.²⁶

The narrator of this passage clearly still views physical expressions of affection between children and their parents as “natural” and their (apparently enforced) absence as a kind of poverty. The lack of overt affection between parents and children recalled here and the implicit contrast with the narrator’s non-Anglo family plainly draw on some culturally specific approaches to emotional expression.

Wynhausen remembers thinking, as an 11-year-old, that “something was missing from the domestic arrangements that the locals made”, while being “intrigued” by how “they lived”.²⁷ The next-door neighbours’ television set held a strong allure for her and her brother, “Jules”. These neighbours, the Turners, are recalled in terms of their customary taciturnity relative to the Wynhausens. If “Mrs T” and her husband were “at war”, they would not speak to each other, which “called for a degree of self-restraint unimaginable in our household”.²⁸ The phrase “self-restraint unimaginable” conveys amusingly both how bizarre the Turners’ mutual silent treatment is for the Wynhausen children and their own family’s expectation of a ready flow of talk whatever the mood. Equally strange to the children is the fact that they are still invited to visit the Turners, “regardless of the conflict”; this reaction conveys that within their family, a different line is drawn between insiders and outsiders. On such awkward occasions, Tom Turner, “a wiry, freckled boy” the same age as Jules, “ran messages from one parent to the other. ‘Mum says tea’s ready’”. The description continues:

The neighbours’ tea seemed to be the only thing they had agreed on when they were married. It was a mixed grill with a pork sausage, a small lamb chop, a rasher of bacon, half a grilled tomato, a puddle of peas and a scoop of mashed potato  … Tom Turner and his little sister were left to their own devices  … [Together with them] we sat on the living room floor, with our plates on our laps, the lights switched off and the telly turned up loud. In our house, in contrast, the only excuse for being left alone was that you had homework, or a headache, conversations went on uninterrupted between two rooms and everyone had to report in for meals around the kitchen table.²⁹

The young Wynhausen is especially struck by the way that the parents next door seem to occupy entirely discrete domains: Mrs T in the kitchen, Mr T in the shed. The chairs lined up in front of the television at the Turners’ place are used, according to the sardonic narrator, only “on the one or two days a year that [they] were together in the same room”.³⁰ While the Wynhausens might not invite neighbours to visit if they are arguing, whenever their children’s friends do visit they are automatically included in the family’s meals at the kitchen table. The satirical portrait of the Turners gives way to a glimpse of the relative noise and gregariousness of the Wynhausen household.

Home life is remembered particularly in terms of a Dutch word that Wynhausen finds hard to translate:

“Leave my little sister alone,” Uncle Nick bellowed in Dutch as he clumped through the back door, into the kitchen  … Three people spoke at once. The benches scraped on the linoleum as we shifted along to make room for Nick, who filled any room to bursting.

There is a Dutch word “gezellig” which recurs again and again in everyday conversation, as a refrain that hints at the superior domestic habits of those fortunate enough to have been born in Holland. It does not translate at all well. The English words “cosy” and “convivial” do not begin to suggest the infinite variations on the theme, but in its purest form, “gezelligheid” demands the company of intimates  … enough food for a garrison  … 

Our clan specialized in gezelligheid, even after we had stopped living on top of each other. The aunts and uncles trooped in at least once a week  … Uncle Nick would lean back luxuriantly, saying, “ah, gezellig”.

“Ja, gezellig,” someone would immediately agree. If my brother and I were in the room, there would be a short pause, and a meaningful look from mum, until one of us vigorously asserted: “Ja, echt gezellig … ”³¹

The way the passage signals the mother’s expectation that her children affirm the scene’s “gezelligheid” is characteristic of Wynhausen’s ironic tone, suggesting some reluctance to chime in with the expected verdict. The phrase “superior domestic habits of those fortunate enough to be born in Holland” acknowledges that this self-perception sails close to smugness, but the end of the passage also suggests that it protects her family from internalising local prejudice against them: They picked up the habit expected of immigrants and loudly sang the praises of the local way of life; but there was a subtext  … every repetition of the word gezellig  … told us that we had a certain flair: we knew how to live well.³²

“Echt gezellig” is at once a family motto enforced by the mother, a kind of Dutch cliché, all the stronger for being invoked in exile, and a concept that, according to Wynhausen, actually does animate the family’s interactions in a way that she remembers fondly.

Wynhausen’s approach is transcultural in that although she lets us hear her curious and sometimes negative childhood reactions to cultural expectations encountered outside her Dutch Jewish family, the book does not set up an idyllic view of family life. The scene used to explain the concept of “gezelligheid” depicts liveliness and warmth, but also tension between her father and her mother’s relatives. Her mother’s brother Uncle Nick, for example, roars “leave my little sister alone” when Wynhausen’s father, Paul, teases his wife, Marianne, for her nostalgic memories of “swimming baths in the Rhine”.³³ Paul, we are told earlier, is “a provincial” from Heer, “a village in the south of Holland”, who feels “excluded” from the “complicated intimacy” of Nick’s and Bram’s banter.³⁴ The men expect to be waited on by the women, who oblige.

The aunts, meanwhile, “take an insistent interest”³⁵ in how Marianne has decorated the flat, and there are hints throughout the book that aunts and uncles regularly offer unwelcome advice: “The family had never hesitated to tell my mother that she had been too lax with us. Upset at first, she eventually came to see it as amusing.”³⁶ When Wynhausen moves out of home at 21 without any plans to get married, her mother “acted as if there had been a death in the family, wailing that decent Jewish girls did not run away from home unless they had something to hide.”³⁷ The narrative pokes fun at this attitude, as well as at Wynhausen’s own belligerent response at the time: “I dropped the bombshell at breakfast  … getting the whole thing off on just the right footing by announcing furiously, ‘I’ll never have to eat liver for breakfast again’.”³⁸

“Gezellig” occasions offer family members an opportunity to recount daily challenges. Wynhausen briefly but tellingly depicts relatives’ experiences as non-Anglo migrants in the Sydney of the 1950s. Her Uncle Bram, finding work as a salesman for a meat company, joins his new workmates for a drink at the pub and reports being told: “You Dutchies are orright  … You don’t stick together like them dagoes.”³⁹ This comment neatly combines welcome with a trenchant reminder that inclusion is conditional on not preferring the company of your own people; unspoken but palpable here is the sense that the family's Dutchness camouflages their Jewishness, the full extent of their otherness (even more marked, given antisemitism, than that of “dagoes”). The non-verbal response of passers-by when Paul and Marianne stand together laughing and speaking Dutch in the street also speaks volumes: “tight, disapproving faces of the people passing them by”.⁴⁰ While renting a house in Mosman, Uncle Bram and Aunt Ali let Uncle Nick and Aunt Nan stay with them, but secretly, so as not to put their landlord offside. The landlord has told them that “people took an interest”, which they understand to mean: “He did not want the neighbours complaining that the house was swarming with foreigners.”⁴¹ Nick and Nan hide whenever strangers knock on the door.

Wynhausen’s relatives’ close interconnectedness outlasts their initial economic situation as postwar immigrants who had lost everything. They identify not as three nuclear families who happen to be related, but as a wider “clan” made up of her parents, Wynhausen herself and her brother, her aunts, uncles and cousins, all of whom migrated to Australia together (on the strength of her Aunt Ali’s impressions of A Town like Alice in Dutch translation). As new arrivals, they are forced to “live on top of each other”, but once each set of parents and children has somewhere to live, they still choose to be “trooped in at least once a week”. By implication, Wynhausen’s sardonic portrayal of the Turner family as lacking in any warmth effectively champions the value of her own Dutch Jewish family’s particular embodiment of “gezelligheid”, without idealising its members.

The family’s Jewishness is deeply embedded in their Dutch lives—and shadowed by the Nazi genocide. The older generation has some prejudice against Eastern European Jews: “They were probably typical in believing themselves a cut above anyone from the ‘east’.”⁴² At first, in Australia, they “overdo” Christmas celebrations in an “eagerness to conform”,⁴³ but when a Sydney neighbour is surprised to learn they are Jewish, Marianne is equally surprised that this is not “obvious”, projecting Dutch experience onto the Australian context.⁴⁴ Although neither parent is observant, Marianne makes the children attend a synagogue (whose snobbish atmosphere the book skewers). The narrator reflects: “Of course I knew what I was meant to do: I was neither to conceal my Jewishness nor to make a show of it.”⁴⁵

Wynhausen recalls, counter to this mandate, asserting her Jewishness at school—“No one was allowed to forget that I was the school’s official Jew. I played it to the hilt”⁴⁶—in contrast to a classmate whose mother had warned her not to reveal she was Jewish. Marianne explains to Elisabeth: “Some people we knew had been so traumatized by the war that they lived in terror of discovery.”⁴⁷ Wynhausen sees her own teenage outspokenness as both an attempt to impress peers and a challenge to WASP dominance: “I paraded my identity as if I were getting into war paint, just to put the wind up the other tribe.”⁴⁸

Like Wynhausen’s other writings, Manly Girls is characterised throughout by a sharp eye for dissonance in all contexts. At the same time, there is a readiness to defend her family’s ways of doing things, and a lack of concern about alienating readers by portraying Anglo-Australians as suspicious and insular. Anglo-Australians are also portrayed as often disarmed by her mother’s warmth. After Wynhausen’s father is injured at work unloading a truck, he buys a milk run with his savings. To “make ends meet”, his wife drives the milk truck to outlying suburbs during the day to sell second-hand women’s clothing, forcing herself to do it as she “dreads” the work. Even so, she manages to engage customers: “People responded to her friendliness.”⁴⁹

When they move into a house with “French doors”, the Wynhausens often leave these doors open, and unlike their neighbours, “frequently” eat “alfresco.”⁵⁰ This practice inadvertently encourages visits: “Mrs Turner  … said it was very Continental, and since we were so casual about what belonged inside and outside, she felt free to wander over for a natter if she saw us setting the table on the terrace.”⁵¹ Inconvenient as these visits are (the “potatoes burn” while Marianne listens reluctantly to Mrs T’s complaints about Mr T), in effect the scene inverts the identities of host and guest cultures. Reconstructed in these interactions, something of Wynhausen’s family’s “gezelligheid” is shown to spill beyond its borders through the figure of her mother.

Whole Wild World (2016)

In Whole Wild World, Tom Dusevic introduces readers to his immigrant parents via vivid scenes from the family’s early years in Western Sydney, in the 1960s. These include tales of his older brother, Šime, who at the age of two would regularly bolt, driving their mother to put an improvised harness on him when they were out, to keep him off the road. Dusevic deftly connects his brother’s youthful escape art to their parents’ experiences as displaced Croatians from Yugoslavia: “Escapes were the family business. My parents were refugees, having separately fled Tito’s regime in the 1950s. World War II destroyed their youth, and war’s bitter and complicated aftermath split their families. It brought them to Australia, impoverished, as displaced persons.”⁵² The passage highlights the ethnic and linguistic mixedness of the Dalmatian coastal country Dusevic’s mother and father came from:

Born in 1924, they were children from large clans in idyllic coastal villages in Dalmatia. Croatia was then a part of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which itself had come out of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. The city that was the focal point of their families was Zadar, which Italy had long desired for its splendour and commercial potential. A 1920 treaty between the two kingdoms led to the creation of “Zara”, an Italian enclave that included nearby districts and several islands.

There were ethnic Croatians now living in Italy and Italians in Croatian territory. Families from the Velebit mountains to the Adriatic sea were functionally bilingual, and the native language was bastardised, a stew of dialects. History was a living thing, politics were complicated and identity was fluid.⁵³

While recognising this ethnic complexity, Dusevic does not romanticise it, following the passage with references to the alliance of Croatian nationalists and Italian fascists, and the effects of oppression under the Yugoslav communist regime. He goes on to recount some of his parents’ wartime stories (for reasons of space I refer here only to his father’s⁵⁴). When civil war in Yugoslavia spread to Zadar in 1944, Joso, aged 20, chose to enlist in the nationalist Ustaše army, like some older relatives, but unlike his sister Matija, who had been beaten by Italian fascists, allied to the Ustaše; she supported the communist partisans.⁵⁵ When Tito’s forces won, Joso was imprisoned for three years for spreading (in his words) “anti-commo propaganda”.⁵⁶ On release, forced to work as a border guard, he managed to escape across the border into American-occupied Italy and from there migrated to Australia.

It is characteristic of Whole Wild World that the narration slips easily between lively anecdotes from the author’s childhood and sober glimpses of his parents’ wartime experiences. A significant scene the book opens with is Tom’s stand-off at age three with his father, who unlike his mother will not give him lollies. Tom demands:

“Zašto?” Why? “Zašto?” I pound and plead like a dissident. He folds the paper and looks me straight in the face.

“Zašto? Why? Perche? Warum? Zakaj?” He mocks me in five languages, but to my ears he’s simply conjured up from nothing a cruel nursery rhyme. Tata worked his shtick for decades; like a nightclub entertainer and his catchphrase, he savoured the rising inflection of those last six syllables.

That’s it. Too far, mate … 

“Ja idem”, I’m going, I say, poised at the front door.⁵⁷

His father stops him from venturing far by warning him slyly to “watch out for the doggie on the corner”.⁵⁸ Fearfully returning inside, “inconsolable in defeat”, the small boy feels his father’s “cackle like a face slap” and sees “his barrel chest pumping like a piston, bottom teeth a regiment of gaunt yellow soldiers. He’ll remind me of this episode for years. Ja idem. Ja idem”.⁵⁹ The striking image of the father’s teeth as “gaunt yellow soldiers” prefigures the later reference to his fighting in the civil war, just as the playful comparison of Tom’s protests to those of “a dissident” anticipates the later mention of Joso’s years in a Yugoslav prison. The father’s mockery, which seems cruel to the three-year-old, is presented in retrospect as a sardonic demeanour gained through harsh experiences, a biting sense of humour that the adult son can appreciate even if the child could not.

Instead of buying a lawnmower himself, Joso cannily hires an Anglo neighbour, Jack, who already owns one, to mow the lawn for them, paying him in cash and beer. Of “Jack”, Dusevic writes: “Jack spoke as if he had once swallowed a nasty insect, near fatally, and would never again take the risk of opening his mouth.” Tom eagerly mimics him for his parents: “Chrissalmightee! I’mdyingoffarkenthirsteersonneee”. Dusevic observes:

Jack served as an exemplar of what not to be for our parents. “Work hard at school or you’ll end up a garbage man, like Jack,” Tata often said, half-joking, half-serious, judging and not judging.

Our parents had a troubled relationship with Australians. These “kangaroos” were drunks and no-hopers, people who had to rent because they didn’t have the discipline to save  … Or they were snobs: Queen-loving wog-hating Poms, or the uppity Irish who had lived in the same street for years but cut you short at the shops  … My experiences were entirely different, the teachers and parents I knew from school were nothing like that and neither were the kids. “I’m Australian,” I’d say  … “No, you’re not a kangaroo,” Tata said. “You’re a Hrvat.”⁶⁰

The figure of Jack and his equally drunk brother, shunned by more middle-class neighbours, is reminiscent of a household of “delinquent” boys on her street described in Manly Girls by Wynhausen (in both cases, ironically, the child sees them as “genuine” or quintessential Australians). Dusevic suggests that this marginal, caricatural if recognisable shambolic-alcoholic Australian is taken by his father as a typical “kangaroo” because this is the only relationship to Anglo-Australians the father is able to manage, to have some control over; interactions with others would require both more English and greater reserves of tolerance and flexibility than he can draw on.

Dusevic allows his father to voice his views of settler Australians as alcoholics, “posh” “Poms”, or “uppity Irish”. The passage conveys that these views both express prejudice (given what Tom’s child self sees, that “the [people] I knew  … were nothing like that”) and reflect actual experiences of discrimination. At the Kellogg’s cereal factory where Joso works—a stifling “furnace”, as Tom later discovers—those working on the floor are Greek, Turkish, Lebanese, Croatian and Italian, the foremen all “Anglo-Celt”.⁶¹ These sayings of Dusevic’s father hint at hierarchies the child Tom does not experience firsthand, given his early fluency in English and admission through school to a wider social world, signalled by his own preliterate phrase learnt from television, “whole wild world” (creatively mishearing “wide” as “wild”; this supplies the book’s resonant title). They express Joso’s Croatian nationalism (“You’re a Hrvat”), a cultural insistence on continuous identity across generations, but also the position of non-Anglo migrants in poorly paid hazardous work.

In Transculturing Auto/Biography, Baena observes that a “fundamental concern” of “transcultural self-inscription” is “how meaning itself evolves”.⁶² This concern is especially evident in the way that Dusevic frames scenes with his relatives. Small, telling details convey how whatever is happening is being construed differently by those present, in a fluctuating way by the remembered child-self, and differently again by the narrator. An early memory illustrates the child’s own shifting understanding. On his first day at kindergarten, Tom expects his older brother, Šime, to speak Croatian with him when they meet on the school grounds. He soon learns that at school Šime wants to be called “Sam” and does not want to be heard speaking Croatian; after that, Tom uses “Šime” only when complaining about his brother to his parents.⁶³

Another memorable example of this contrasting construal of situations is Teta Danica’s indignant response to Tom as a teenager going out with friends after school: “Pasha, where do you think you are going?” He parries with “‘Pušti me na miru!’ Leave me in peace”—the “Croatian phrase” he and Sam use to keep their “killjoy aunt” at bay.⁶⁴ Teta comments sourly on his unwarranted (as she sees it) freedom to come and go: “House to house. Who knows where pasha goes?”⁶⁵ The phrasing keeps the Croatian grammar of her utterance (with no definite or indefinite articles), giving us an impression of Teta’s own voice. The word “pasha”, which Tom learns from a book is Turkish for a high-ranking dignitary in the Ottoman Empire, is a reminder of the complex history of Teta’s birthplace. It also highlights how domination can occur within tight-knit families cut off by emigration from wider networks of relatives and neighbours. Both the boy Tom and the narrator retrospectively shrug off Teta’s notion that he should stay in and do more homework (or yard work). The narrator points out that his mother’s “daily happiness” was also “hostage to the mood swings of her older sister”; his aunt’s interventions proceed as much from her baleful personality as from her culturally shaped expectations of the younger generation. Yet his parents’ deference to her does seem to have a cultural basis: “Unless hounded to action by Teta, our parents were content to stay out of our lives as long as Sam and I didn’t squander their resources.”⁶⁶ Teta Danica uses cultural expectations of deference to the older sibling to exert her will on others (within the only arena open to her, as an unmarried migrant woman with no English).

Tom’s feelings about being part of a Croatian-speaking community in Sydney are shown to vary according to situation. An episode in which Sam accidentally runs an umbrella tip into Tom’s mouth is characteristic of these oscillations in the child’s—and the adult narrator’s—sense of cultural connectedness:

One Saturday evening … we had cousins over: nonstop action, ball games, chasings, hide-and-seek  … Our boy noise was louder than the table talk of the adults, which was always raucous. A non-Croatian could walk in and think the gathering was on the verge of a gunfight but it was actually a sign of what a wonderful time everybody was having and how close we were. My dad loved nothing more than a house filled with the laughter of guests and a passionate political free-for-all.

“Have you lost your mind? Tito is playing them for fools, all of them, the Soviets, China, America.”

“Bullshit. Tito’s not that smart, he’s being used by everyone, especially the Serbs.”

… 

The kids had been warned to be quieter, but our spirits could not be dampened.⁶⁷

Here, the children and grown-ups are remembered as being at one (“what a wonderful time everybody was having”), even if the adults had tried unsuccessfully to “dampen” the children’s exuberance. The cousins’ excited play-fighting (which ends in Tom being taken to hospital for his injury) parallels the adults’ own “raucous” verbal stoushing. Once at hospital, however, seven-year-old Tom sits in the emergency waiting room with his father “for an eternity, longer than a school day, although not as excruciating as a Croatian national day speech-fest”.⁶⁸ Tom and “Tata” obviously diverge over the entertainment value of such “speech-fests”. The narrator’s viewpoint also shifts, warmly recalling the family gathering (“how close we were”) and the gusto with which Tata enjoyed combative “table talk” with his relatives⁶⁹—translating the mood for non-Croatian readers—then gently mocking Tata’s political passion: “I generated so much wailing it was enough to stop Tata in mid anti-Tito tirade.”⁷⁰

The different viewpoints depicted in the book are partly linked, then, with historically and linguaculturally specific understandings. These are not reducible to fixed norms of “neatly bounded” groups:⁷¹ Dusevic makes clear at the outset how ethnically and politically complex his parents’ Zadar region was and, later, how multi-ethnic the Sydney he grew up in. Nevertheless, his memoir does identify a deepening cultural gap between his parents’ and his own emerging attitudes. On a visit to the factory from which his father has recently retired, Tom and Sam are introduced to Joso’s former workmates: “This one does very well at school,” Tata said, pointing me. “Second last. At least he’s not last!” Tata didn’t have to boast about us, but I resented him cutting us down, especially me, which he always justified by saying he didn’t want to spoil us, or have us ease off on the effort, by praising us too much. I just wanted my due or for him not to say anything about me.⁷²

Joso’s justification for “cutting down” his sons, to ensure they do not slack off at school, seems equal parts cultural, class-based and idiosyncratic: a deft way to express pride in his sons without alienating his fellow “wog” workmates by appearing to boast. Tom’s annoyed reaction conveys that there is a compelling alternative way of thinking available to him—that his father is being unfair—shared by his native-English-speaking schoolteachers and peers, which has a strong pull of legitimacy because it conjures a “wider” local world than that of the Sydney Croatian community.

In both Manly Girls and Whole Wild World, then, the authors’ parents are recognised as complex individuals whose ways of thinking, feeling and behaving differ from the authors’ ways along cultural and other lines, while also having helped shape their own evolving transcultural perspectives.

Paprika Paradise (2007) and My Family and Other Animus (2018)

James Jeffrey’s My Family and Other Animus was published in 2018, two years after Dusevic’s Whole Wild World. It is a collection of linked autobiographical essays on various topics ranging from his parents’ divorce when he was 10 to the therapeutic value of swearing in the face of work frustrations (another kind of “animus”). As the blurb explains, the essays developed out of Jeffrey’s “Home Truths” column in the Australian (published 2015–2016). His earlier book, Paprika Paradise (2007), is a memoir of a six-month visit to Hungary with his wife and young children, seen in the light of his overall relationship to the country (the subtitle is “travels in the land of my almost birth”). Paprika Paradise gives more detail about how Jeffrey’s parents met (in Pécs, Hungary, where his mother, a town native, was working in a shoe shop; his father was a British engineer contracted to install his company’s machinery in a local colliery). They soon left Hungary for Britain, Jeffrey’s mother pregnant with him, then migrated to Australia when he was almost four.

Native English speakers are typically associated in both books (mainly but not only through the figure of Jeffrey’s mild-mannered northern English father, Ian) with reasonableness, fairness and common sense (if also a lack of excitement); Hungarian speakers, primarily via the figure of his mother, Eszter, with “emotion”, “impulse” and explosive theatricality: “operatic drama”, “vivacity and hysteria”;⁷³ “theatrical”, “theatrically”, “intensity”, “operatic aftershocks”.⁷⁴ Eszter is likened at one point to an impending “spontaneous human combustion”.⁷⁵ What emerges early in both memoirs is that these perceptions draw on some traumatic childhood experiences deriving from a bitter custody battle between his parents that began when Jeffrey was eight.

Reflecting on a lifetime of interactions with his mother, Jeffrey observes: “No position taken was ever entirely consistent or immune to sudden whiplash-inducing reverses of emotion.”⁷⁶ The idea that wanting to appear “consistent” and “reasonable” to others might itself have a strongly linguacultural basis, as linguist Anna Wierzbicka has argued,⁷⁷ is not considered. What is considered is the question of how representative of an entire culture any one person can be. In Paprika Paradise, Jeffrey humorously recalls thinking, as a child: “I pondered the same questions that troubled so many others. Were all Hungarians like this?” He then acknowledges, “All of Mum’s fits of strangeness and operatic drama were tied, in my head, to her Hungarianness.”⁷⁸ Commenting on his impressions of Hungary after his first extended stay there as an adult, he notes that while Eszter’s behaviour made more sense when viewed within that cultural context, there appeared to be somewhat “less hysteria” among other Hungarians.⁷⁹ In the later book, however, his mother is treated as straightforwardly representative of Hungarians in general.

In My Family and Other Animus, Eszter’s behaviour is often portrayed as absurdly aggressive. Jeffrey recalls how he and his wife, Bel, used to compete with each other over whose family was the most “weird”, or “further from the norm”.⁸⁰ He describes how he won this contest in parental weirdness: a family lunch at which Bel witnesses his mother, “a wild light in her eyes”, suddenly offer his older half-sister (also named Eszter) a “bulging envelope” of money to make up for the favouritism she has always shown their brother Laszlo. “As I watched [Bel’s] jaw enter a sort of holding pattern, I knew one thing was certain: victory was mine.”⁸¹ The narrative then returns to his childhood and the custody battle that preceded his parents’ divorce, characterised by “madness and strain and vendetta and daftness and acts of love both beautiful and misguided”.⁸² While these elements are ostensibly evenly distributed between his parents, most of the “madness” and “daftness” is associated in the narrative with his mother’s actions. Her solicitor was “unprepared for the baroque realm of the emotion in which Mum preferred to operate”;⁸³ “With the tide running ever harder against her, she decided to escalate”;⁸⁴ “Mum brought a solid flare for melodrama to many things”.⁸⁵

The night his parents separate, while his father is out of the house, Mum moved swiftly, almost as if stirred by centuries of ancestral Magyar memory and all the enemies and invasions that entails. Armed with the potty that had served me and Olivia through toddlerhood, she barricaded us into the bigger of the two front bedrooms.⁸⁶

Jeffrey recounts how, on returning home the next day, his father tries to communicate with his children from the garden, over the cactuses that the potty has been emptied onto. The immediate cause of the split is that Eszter has fallen in love with a rare fellow Hungarian encountered at a barbecue (“Magyar compatriots in the Shire were not all that common”), who at the time is still married to the barbecue’s host, Edit. When Edit realises at her next barbecue that her husband, Janós, is about to leave her for her guest Eszter, she responds by raising a knife and screaming at them. Jeffrey writes: “Unless you speak Hungarian, it’s difficult to convey the particular intensity with which her anger was articulated, the culturally and linguistically specific way in which her soul Krakatoa’ed all over the southern Sydney living room. But the short version is that it included an offer to cut out her husband’s still beating heart and package it for Mum to take home; an adulterer’s doggie bag, if you will.”⁸⁷

The scene appears in very similar form in Paprika Paradise.⁸⁸ In both contexts, readers are invited to gasp and laugh at dramatic interactions between Jeffrey’s mother and her rival Edit, apparently very much from within a normatively “Anglo” cultural vantage point. The local “whitebread” “Anglo-Saxon” culture of the Sutherland shire (where Eszter “sticks out like an orangutan on an iceberg”) is also satirised (for its blandness—“smug niceties”), but it remains firmly in the background, while the Hungarian material is presented as comic gold.

Yet the degree of exuberance with which Jeffrey writes about his mother’s culture, in both his books, suggests the perspective of an enthusiastic exponent of at least some of the emotional expressiveness and brutal candour that he also pokes fun at. An example in Paprika Paradise is Eszter’s reunion with her cousins in Hungary, where the women tell each other zestfully how fat the other has become: “The cousins’ reunion was a jolly affair, five small women with almost identical dumpling-like builds rocked by raucous gales of laughter and bouts of merry honesty. ‘Oh, look at you, you’re in good flesh aren’t you?’”⁸⁹ In dramatising his mother’s outrageous (by Anglo-Australian standards) behaviour in both books, Jeffrey effectively joins her retrospectively in breaking taboos of his “whitebread” childhood neighbourhood and—potentially, therefore—of many Australian readers. In his review of My Family and Other Animus, Dusevic praises what he calls Jeffrey’s “gentle, sly, ribald and incontinent mirth”.⁹⁰ The word “incontinent” aptly captures both Jeffrey’s trademark lack of inhibition and the relatively more contained, less overtly countercultural style of Dusevic himself.

In My Family and Other Animus, in the scene with Jeffrey’s mother and Edit, the joke is largely at the expense of the Hungarian participants, but Paprika Paradise offers a more celebratory portrayal of aspects of this sociality—the possibility that James’s wife, Bel, might not like Hungary is recalled as a potential “stumbling block” in their relationship, thankfully avoided.⁹¹ The writing about Hungarian-speaking culture in Paprika Paradise is more detailed and more enthusiastic—and therefore varied in tone—than in My Family and Other Animus. Here is how Jeffrey describes his maternal aunt Joli waiting to meet him, his wife and their toddler (Daisy) and baby (Leo) as they reach Pécs train station from Budapest (after arriving in Hungary from Australia):

Then  … the [sight] of my Aunt Joli quivering on the platform with her load of shopping bags, ready to pounce and explode with five years worth of pent-up kisses.

“Hello, hello,” she called, throwing her arms around Bel and me in turn. “Thank God you have arrived safely.” Then, with a cry of “my beautifuls”, she fell upon the children, kissing them ferociously.⁹²

While Aunt Joli’s behaviour is clearly meant to raise a smile (“ready to pounce”), the writer revels in her ecstatic response, presenting it as endearing and even infectious: “my beautifuls”. Jeffrey notes how much Joli resembles “her younger sister”, his mother—“two dumplings boiled in the same batch”—thus connecting the exuberant warmth of Joli’s welcome to his mother’s expressions of love for her grandchildren, reported elsewhere in the book. When Eszter arrives in Budapest to visit them while they are living in Pécs, her response on seeing Daisy and Leo at the airport is almost identical to her sister’s: “‘My beautifuls, my little beautifuls,’ she boomed.”⁹³

Throughout the book, this kind of ebullient warmth is forthcoming from complete strangers as well. A homeless man’s exclamations over Jeffrey’s young daughter are presented as charming: “‘Oh, she’s so pretty, so cute. Jaj, de szép, de aranyos,’ he beamed. Aranyos literally means gold-like.”⁹⁴ Zsuzsa, the wife of Jeffrey’s step-brother, Attila, is described as emerging from her front door to greet James, Bel and the children “like a small blonde cannonball”. Her warmth towards them is conveyed humorously but appreciatively: “She was all but vibrating with excitement that we were all together again in Hungary. Particularly as it meant she could continue her mission to kiss Leo’s fuzzy little blond head bald … lavishing doses of worship on Leo while expressing her hope that we might stay in Hungary for at least a few years.”⁹⁵ Even when James is “scuttling” away from his mother in the wake of a bitter argument, the Hungarian idiom she hurls after him appealingly expresses grandmaternal love: “Mum’s voice booming ‘I kiss your children’ down the street.”⁹⁶

The use of humour at the expense of the non-Anglo mother in My Family and Other Animus resembles what has been called “wogsploitation” in the context of Australian television comedy created by and about children of non-Anglo migrants.⁹⁷ As Nektaria McWilliams argues was the case with the sitcom Acropolis Now,⁹⁸ a key characteristic of My Family and Other Animus is the connection the text builds with an audience deemed likely to respond well to humour at non-Anglo migrants’ expense and therefore also potentially more open to a story with non-Anglo migrants as central protagonists. Acropolis Now was created in 1989; more recent series such as The Family Law (2016) suggest Australian television’s depiction of immigrant lives has moved on since then, whereas Jeffrey’s book was published in 2018. This may, however, indicate less about Jeffrey’s own take on cultural differences (given his earlier, more nuanced writing) than it does about the new book’s implied readership. My Family and Other Animus appears pitched at a wider Australian readership than Paprika Paradise. The narrator’s accent of amused tolerance asks readers to make allowances for Jeffrey’s mother on the grounds of her ethnicity or nationality, “Hungarianness” acting as a mitigating factor to be kept in mind. The work done here by the stereotype of an irrational non-Anglo migrant is not intended to indict people in that category but to foster some indulgence in culturally Anglo readers for the character’s colourfully obnoxious behaviour.

The author of My Family and Other Animus presents himself as a cheerful guide for Australian readers to the startling oddities of the Hungarian side of his family. The assumption is clearly that farce is the most effective way to render non-Anglo migrants interesting to a range of Australian readers. For a reader like me impressed by more multilayered depictions of immigrant experience and therefore more taken with the approach of Paprika Paradise, it is a pity that in the better-known book the non-Anglo family member only ever appears in a starkly cartoonish guise. Arguably, Jeffrey does give us a sense in both books of his (English-born) father’s personal perspective, as when he writes movingly of his father’s “anger and fear of what was to come” when faced with dementia.⁹⁹ Jeffrey’s mother’s own perspective and subjectivity, by contrast, remain opaque.

Conclusion

In Manly Girls and particularly in Whole Wild World, the authors’ non-Anglo migrant parents are represented as multidimensional figures, whose outlooks—culturally, politically or otherwise distinct from the authors’ own—the narratives engage with and try to make sense of. In Paprika Paradise and My Family and Other Animus, there is a seemingly irrepressible, often attractive exuberance in the portrayal of family members and of cultural differences between them. In the latter book especially, these differences are located, however, not in contrasting ways of thinking about or seeing the world so much as in the incongruous, “weird”, entertaining behaviours of the non-Anglo cohort. The essays in My Family and Other Animus tend to reinforce the idea that non-native-English-speaking Australians (and foreigners) inevitably have a degree of emotional illiteracy. Paprika Paradise offers a more nuanced picture. While the lives depicted in all four texts are clearly transnational, only the narrative lenses of Wynhausen’s and Dusevic’s memoirs are unequivocally transcultural.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the insightful comments of Susan Tridgell on earlier drafts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, cited in Françoise Král, Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 90.

2 For discussion of recent translingual memoirs in Spanish, French, German and Italian, as well as English, see Mary Besemeres, “Translingual Memoir,” in The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism, ed. Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich (New York: Routledge, 2022), 3–17.

3 James Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus (Carlton, VIC: MUP, 2018), back cover.

4 Elisabeth Wynhausen, Manly Girls (Ringwood, VIC: Penguin Books, 1989); Tom Dusevic, Whole Wild World (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2016); James Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise: Travels in the Land of my Almost Birth (Sydney: Hachette, 2007) and My Family and Other Animus (see previous note).

5 For the term “non-Anglo migrants”, see Andonis Piperoglou and Zora Simic, “Their Own Perceptions: Non-Anglo Migrants and Aboriginal Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 53, no. 4 (2022): 519–30.

6 See Aileen Moreton-Robinson on the relative perceived “whiteness” of post-WWII immigrants to Australia, cited in Piperoglou and Simic, “Their Own Perceptions,” 520; See also Helen Andreoni, “Olive or White? The colour of Italians in Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies, 27, no. 77 (2003): 81–92.

7 Hsu-Ming Teo, “Multiculturalism and the Problem of Multicultural Histories: An Overview of Ethnic Historiography,” in Cultural History in Australia, ed. Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003), 142–55.

8 Teo, “Multiculturalism,” 154.

9 On intersectionality, see Kimberle Crenshaw’s landmark essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Colour,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99.

10 John Attinasi and Paul Friedrich, “Dialogic Breakthrough: Catalysis and Synthesis in Life-Changing Dialogue,” in The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, ed. Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 33.

11 Rosalia Baena, “Introduction,” in Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing (London: Routledge, 2007), vii–xvii.

12 Baena, “Introduction,” vii.

13 See, for example, Norma Gonzalez, “Beyond Culture,” in Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms, ed. Norma Gonzalez et al. (Routledge: New York, 2005), 29–47; Claudia Strauss, “Research in Cultural Discontinuities,” in A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning, ed. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 210–51.

14 See Král, “Critical Identities,” 9; 146.

15 See Besemeres, “Translingual Memoir,” 3–17.

16 See, for example, Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko, “Web Questionnaire Bilingualism and Emotions,” University of London, 2001–2003; Julie Sedivy, Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).

17 Elisabeth Wynhausen, The Short Goodbye: A Skewed History of the Last Boom and the Next Bust (Carlton, VIC: MUP, 2011), vii.

18 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 257.

19 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 224.

20 James Jeffrey in the Australian, cited on UNSW Press website: https://unsw.press/books/whole-wild-world/.

21 Tom Dusevic, “Comedy and Chaos,” Australian, 7 April 2018, 16.

22 Dusevic, “Comedy and Chaos,” 16.

23 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 78–79.

24 Elisabeth Wynhausen, On Resilience (Carlton, VIC: MUP, 2009).

25 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 95.

26 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 22.

27 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 20.

28 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 21.

29 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 21.

30 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 20–21.

31 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 13–14.

32 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 14.

33 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 12.

34 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 3.

35 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 5.

36 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 87.

37 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 117.

38 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 117.

39 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 3.

40 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 4.

41 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 4.

42 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 52.

43 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 37–38.

44 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 37.

45 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 53.

46 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 59.

47 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 59.

48 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 58.

49 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 9–10.

50 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 17.

51 Wynhausen, Manly Girls, 17–18.

52 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 7.

53 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 7.

54 Dusevic writes movingly and illuminatingly of his mother, Milenka, in the book; I regret being unable to include any of this portrayal in my discussion (as it would then be too long relative to the other texts).

55 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 8.

56 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 8.

57 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, x–xi.

58 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, xi.

59 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, xi.

60 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 136.

61 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 4; 192–93.

62 Baena, “Introduction,” x.

63 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 32–33.

64 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 225.

65 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 226.

66 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 226.

67 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 49, my emphasis added.

68 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 50.

69 Croatian-born Australian sociologist Val Colic-Peisker’s observation resonates with what Dusevic writes of his father’s love of table talk: “When Croatians need to unburden their souls they sit around the kitchen table or in a coffee shop with their friends for hours.” See Colic-Peisker, Split Lives: Croatian Australian Stories (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2004), 291.

70 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 49, my emphasis added.

71 Gonzalez, “Beyond Culture,” 33.

72 Dusevic, Whole Wild World, 192.

73 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 10.

74 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 1, 18, 12, 24.

75 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 8.

76 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 25.

77 Anna Wierzbicka, “Reasonable Man and Reasonable Doubt: The English Language, Anglo Culture and Anglo-American Law,” Forensic Linguistics: The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 10, no. 1 (2003): 1–22.

78 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 8–10.

79 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 10–11.

80 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 10.

81 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 11.

82 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 13.

83 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 30.

84 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 30.

85 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 49.

86 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 16.

87 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 12.

88 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 7–8.

89 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 181–82.

90 Dusevic, “Comedy and Chaos,” 16.

91 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 12.

92 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 29.

93 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 195.

94 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 65.

95 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 44.

96 Jeffrey, Paprika Paradise, 231.

97 David Dale, “Wogsploitation Makes its Mark in Mainstream,” Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 2003, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/wogsploitation-makes-its-mark-in-mainstream-20030517-gdgrvx.html.

98 Nektaria McWilliams, “Acropolis Now: Comedy, Cultural Politics, and Greek-Australian Identity,” CST Online, 22 June 2018, https://cstonline.net/acropolis-now-comedy-cultural-politics-and-greek-australian-identity-by-nektaria-mcwilliams/.

99 Jeffrey, My Family and Other Animus, 156–57.