Invisible Words: Cultivating Multilingual Australian Literature

ABSTRACT

Australia prides itself on its multicultural identity. This identity is increasingly explored in Australian literature. Yet these narratives are predominately constructed in English, and there is little support for cultivating multilingual writing and literary translation. Despite the lack of support, multilingual Australian literatures do exist, and have existed for centuries, dating back to Australia’s First Nations’ oral, multilingual storytelling traditions. The challenge is to not only document Australia’s multilingual literatures, but to nurture Australia’s literary translation tradition to cultivate a space for multilingual Australian literature within Australia’s literary canon. Prioritising monolingual English literature rejects the nation’s multilingualism, and thus ignores key perspectives through which to examine Australian society. This article firstly analyses multilingual Australian literatures from a historical perspective to examine why multilingual literature has not been actively cultivated as part of Australia’s literary canon. It then highlights key multilingual literary projects from 2010 to explore how multilingual Australian literatures are finding space within the sector and what barriers need to be overcome, and how they can be overcome, to truly foster a multilingual Australian literature that is representative of the nation’s history, landscape and voices.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingual literature
• Australian literature
• multilingualism
• translation
• monolingualism
• First Nations literature

Introduction

One hundred kilometres south of Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, in the tiny town of Batchelor, stands a mini replica of the Czech castle Karlštejn. Batchelor is a township also known for its contributions to tertiary education opportunities for First Nations people in the Top End. The castle replica was built by Czechoslovakian man Bernie Havlík between 1978 and his death in 1990. Havlík migrated to Australia to escape the communist rule imposed on Czechoslovakia after World War II and worked at the Rum Jungle mine in Batchelor until the mine’s closure in 1971.¹ He subsequently became the town’s gardener, where he was given the task of removing a rocky outcrop, but the intrusion would not budge. Instead of removing it, Havlík decided to build a replica of Karlštejn over the rock.² A plaque beside the castle is inscribed with a verse from Czech poet Jaroslav Vrchlický, in both Czech and English:

To the visiting Czechs and Slovaks:

Poutníče postůj, v dálku než

bludná tě zanese noha!

Kamenů poslouchej hlas,

vlasti Ti jimi zní řeč!’

Halt, oh pilgrim,

‘before your wandering

foot takes you afar!

Listen to my voice,

Your own language can be heard!’

The castle replica and the plaque symbolise and represent Australia’s multilingual and multicultural identity. The replica stands on Kungarakan Country, where the traditional language of the land is Kungarakan.³ English has now dominated the land for many years, shifting what was traditionally a multilingual society back to a monolingual one. The castle represents that despite the nation’s monolingual, English-speaking dominance, in a traditionally multilingual society, people from many different lands, and who speak many different languages, have crossed this land as visitors, or migrated to this land to call it home.

The experiences of Australians who speak languages other than English are not constructed through English alone, but also through their first (and subsequent) languages. The results of the 2021 Census reveal that more than one-fifth of Australians speak a language other than English at home.⁴ The actual number of Australians who speak a language other than English is likely much higher, as the Australian Census only accounts for those Australians speaking another language in their households and does not collect data on Australians who speak other languages yet use English in their households. Yet this linguistic diversity is not represented in Australian literature. Australian literary narratives are predominately constructed in English, presenting a narrow lens through which to examine the Australian experience.⁵ This renders the experiences of Australians in languages other than English invisible. National literatures are spaces to reflect on the character of a nation and offer analysis on and insight into a society. In a multicultural nation such as Australia, it is a limitation that the majority of the nation's literary canon is constructed in English, as it ignores the experiences and perspectives of Australians constructed through languages other than English, including the experiences of Australia’s First Nations Peoples, many of whom do not speak English as a first language. It reinforces the myth that Australia is a monolingual, English-speaking nation, others non-English Australian voices as ‘not Australian,’ and, in turn, refuses to acknowledge Australia’s fraught history.

This article analyses Australia’s multilingual literatures, firstly from a historical background to examine why multilingual literatures have not been actively cultivated as part of Australia’s national literature. It then analyses recent multilingual literary initiatives, published from 2010 onwards, to highlight both the ways in which Australia’s literary sector is making space for multilingual literatures and the limited opportunities that still exist to publish in languages other than English in Australia. This lack of opportunity is detrimental to accurately representing the experience of Australia and Australian society in the national literature. It further argues that an almost non-existent tradition of literary translation is limiting Australian literature to a majority monolingual English perspective, thus silencing key voices and perspectives in Australian literature. Additional funding and cultivating a tradition of literary translation are essential in creating and fostering multilingual Australian literatures as a visible and integral part of Australia’s national literature.

A note on terminology: defining multilingual and multicultural literature in the Australian context

The terms ‘multilingualism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ are often used interchangeably, given the inherent connection between language and culture. In this article, I deliberately distinguish between the two terms. I use the term ‘multilingual literature’ to refer to Australian literature written in languages other than English. I use it to refer to both works that are written entirely in a language other than English and works that code switch between English and other languages. Where I use the term ‘multicultural literature’ or ‘multicultural writing,’ I am referring to writing by Australian writers from non-English backgrounds that may or may not be written in English. I use this term when I am discussing a journal that has specifically described itself as multicultural or as a space for multicultural writing or when I am discussing the work of Australian writers from non-English backgrounds choosing to write in the English language. The exception to this is when I am writing about First Nations writers. The rationale for this distinction is based on Australia’s historical context. Australia as a nation defines itself as a multicultural country, yet multilingualism has historically been rejected as part of the nation’s multiculturalism. Since the nation’s Federation in 1901, language has actively been used to discriminate against those deemed ‘worthy’ of being Australian, most notably through the Dictation Test.⁶ Before Federation, hundreds of First Nations languages were violently lost through colonisation, some irretrievably. Many communities are in the process of working to revive the languages that were taken from them.⁷ Due to this history and the way the term ‘multiculturalism’ has been used as an identity marker for modern Australia, often in the context of Australian migrants, using the term ‘multicultural literature’ for the purpose of this article not only excludes the First Nations writers and texts included here, but would further erase their place as the Traditional Custodians of the continent. For these reasons, I have chosen the term ‘multilingual literature’ as the term to capture all Australian literature written in languages other than English, as the emphasis and focus of this article is specifically on the linguistic diversity within Australian literature.

Australia's tradition of multilingual literature

Australian migrant narratives, and fiction based on the migrant experience, have received wider publication and readership over the past twenty years, contributing more diverse voices to Australian literature. Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem (2006), Li Cunxin’s Mao’s Last Dancer (2009), Ahn Do’s The Happiest Refugee (2010) and Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race (2016) are all memoirs that have contributed more diverse voices to Australian literature. From a fiction perspective, Rosanna Gonsalves’s The Permanent Resident (2016) and Nam Le’s The Boat (2008) are both collections of short stories that cast a critical eye over Australia from the perspective of the migrant experience. Likewise, many of Australia’s most critically acclaimed writers are First Nations writers, with writers such as Tara June Winch, Melissa Lucashenko and Evelyn Araluen, among many others, winning some of Australia’s top literary awards. While there has been more visibility for culturally diverse stories in Australian literature over the past twenty years, Michelle Cahill, editor of Mascara Literary Journal, argues that there is still a long way to go to achieve true diversity and inclusion in Australian literature. She points out that Australia's key arts funding body, Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council), only contributes funding to two literary journals that focus on publishing diverse voices: Mascara Literary Journal and Peril.⁸ This assertion is further supported by research undertaken by Natalie Kon-Yu and Emily Booth which demonstrated the disproportionate number of Australian First Nations writers and writers of colour published in Australia.⁹ Further, the published works Cahill, and Kon-yu and Booth, refer to are mostly written in English, indicating that when it comes to Australian literature written in languages other than English, the discrepancy only increases. In the case of these writers, English is the language they choose to write in, and it is important to recognise that not every Australian who knows more than one language or who migrated to the country from elsewhere would wish to write in a language other than English. For many writers, English is their dominant or only language. But equally, it is essential to recognise that for all the Australian literature that is published in English, there are many Australians who prefer to write in languages other than English as a way of articulating their experiences of Australia and of being Australian. These multilingual voices are an essential yet underrepresented component of Australia’s literary canon, in part due to modern Australia’s fraught history with accepting languages other than English. Research shows that Australians rate speaking English as a higher marker of being Australian than being born in Australia.¹⁰ This perception misaligns with the nation’s linguistic diversity and traditionally multilingual society. Including space for multilingual narratives as part of national literature is an important part of making this multilingual reality visible so readers experience Australian stories in the myriad of different voices that accurately reflects Australian society.

The distinction between writers who choose to write in English and writers who choose to write in a language other than English is an important one, as illustrated by Japanese writer Minae Mizumura in her book The Fall of Language in the Age of English (2014), originally written and published in Japanese.¹¹ Mizumura discusses her own experiences of choosing to write in Japanese, and also highlights the plight of writers whose mother tongue is a minority language. Mizumura took part in Iowa University’s International Writing Program (IWP) in 2003, a residency programme for established writers from around the world. During her stay, she found that all of the writers, bar one, write in their own languages, not English. She observes: ‘all writers are writing in their own language, as if to do so was their mission in life.’¹² The exception is a writer from Botswana, Barolong Seboni, who writes in English and not his mother tongue of Tswana. Mizumura marvels at this and Seboni explains that he chose that language because he spent much of his secondary school years in England and felt more comfortable writing in English. Another example is European author Elena Lappin who is fluent in six languages, and ultimately chose to write in English (the fourth language she learned) because that is the language she felt most comfortable in as a writer. Her brother is also a writer, yet he chose to write in German.¹³ Failing to acknowledge that not all Australian experiences can be adequately expressed in English rejects a key aspect of what it means to be Australian in the twenty-first century. Mizumura reflects deeply on this phenomenon of writers choosing to write in a language that is not their mother tongue:

I used to wonder what it would feel like to write in a language not one's own. I also used to wonder if such writing could be considered part of ‘national’ literature. Not anymore. Now those African writers seemed to me to be heralding a new era by embracing the English language and opening a new world with their writing. This may be a perverse thing to say, but they even seemed like a blessed group. Not only because they could adopt the English language with such ease but because they, at least, would not have to watch their literature and language irrevocably fall.¹⁴

These writers choosing to write in English are still contributing to their national literatures, despite using a non-native language to do so. Seboni acknowledges the debates between African writers on this point, where some believe their ‘first allegiance is to [their] mother tongue,’ while others point out that English is also their language and they have a right to it, even if the language is steeped in a colonial history.¹⁵ In Mizumura's own experience, despite living in the USA for twenty years and completing her schooling and a degree in English, English was never a language she felt comfortable in. She writes that she ‘took the trouble of majoring in French literature as a way to continue avoiding English.’¹⁶ Yet choosing which language to write in is a personal choice for an author, and, just because a writer writes in a language that is not a national language, does not mean that works written in those languages cannot be considered part of the national literature.

In Australia's case, the fact is that multilingual Australian writing does exist, and has existed, for many years. Michael Jacklin wrote in an essay for Southerly that very few of Australia’s multilingual literatures have been closely studied, with only Italian, Greek and Mandarin being examined in detail.¹⁷ In 2013, Jacklin became part of an ARC-funded project titled ‘New transnationalisms: Australia’s multilingual literary heritage,’ along with researchers Wenche Ommundsen, Nijmeh Hajjar and Tuấn Ngọc Nguyễn. The project explores the history of Australian literature in Spanish, Arabic, Vietnamese and Chinese. Ommundsen wrote in an essay for the Sydney Review of Books that the research so far has brought about ‘numerous frustrations about the different ways in which Australia’s entrenched monolingualism has impacted our national literature.’¹⁸ Australian linguist Michael Clyne described Australia as a nation with a ‘monolingual mindset,’ that sees speaking one language as the norm and being multilingual as unusual, when globally, the inverse in true.¹⁹ There are more multilingual language users than monolingual language users in the world, and as identified earlier, in the Australian context, more than one-fifth of Australia’s population speaks a language other than English at home.²⁰ The monolingual mindset is not exclusive to Australia. Other English-speaking multicultural societies, including the USA and the UK, are also seen as possessing monolingual mindsets despite their multilingualism, and even nations where English is not the national or official language, such as Germany, have been described as monolingual.²¹ The stark contradiction between Australia's multilingualism and majority monolingual English literature mean that the nation’s national literature is not representative of the nation’s linguistic diversity and therefore, the nation’s literature does not accurately reflect and portray the diversity of Australian culture.

Despite the majority monolingual English literature that characterises Australia's literary tradition, historically there have been publications that prioritised multilingual writing. In his Southerly essay, Jacklin examines three bi/multilingual publications from the 1900s: The Muses’ Magazine (1927–1929), Ambitious Friends (1994–2001), and Integration: The Magazine for Vietnamese and Multicultural Issues (1993–2003).²² These publications all provided a space for multilingual writing, yet in each case, the magazines eventually ceased publication. Additionally, multicultural and multilingual publication Outrider: a journal of multicultural Australian literature, published from 1984 to 1996 and edited by bilingual German-Australian writer Manfred Jurgensen, aimed to ‘extend the concept of Australian literature.’²³ Despite this aim, the journal's publication policy was that all work, except for poetry, must be published in English. Translations from other languages into English were accepted, and poetry was published in the original language as well as in English. Jurgensen wrote about the designation of the journal as ‘multicultural,’ arguing that the editors at the time were unsure of labelling the journal as such, given that all writers are multicultural. Even so, they persisted with the label as ‘new voices demanded to be heard’ and ‘hardly any derived from the multilingual ethnic press.’²⁴ Jurgensen acknowledges the support of the government through the Literature Board in creating a space for multicultural writing to find its place within mainstream Australian literature. They supported the journal for a decade, but with the shift away from multiculturalism in Australia’s politics, the support fell away, and, in 1996, the same year that former Australian Prime Minister John Howard renounced multiculturalism as Australia’s national identity, Outrider ceased publishing.

The valuable space Outrider provided for Australian literature in languages other than English, and work that could not find a home elsewhere cannot be understated. German-Australian writer Walter Kaufmann's novel Tod in Fremantle (Death in Fremantle) (1987), a book set in Australia and about Aboriginal characters, was never published in full in Australia. It is due to Outrider that excerpts of the novel were published in English for Australian audiences at all.²⁵ Kaufmann was born in Germany in 1924, before being evacuated to London during the Second World War and then deported to Australia at the age of seventeen due to his German heritage.²⁶ Kaufmann subsequently enlisted in the Australian army and spent seventeen years in Australia before moving back to East Germany, where he took a job as a writer for publications in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).²⁷ Death in Fremantle is described as a ‘faction’ story, as it is a fictionalised narrative based on real events. The narrative is about a young Aboriginal boy who is living in East Germany with his Australian foster mother, and the story is based on the lives of two Aboriginal boys who ‘were taken’ to East Germany in 1964 with their Australian foster families.²⁸ The boys eventually returned to Australia. Despite the English translation of the novel being submitted to Australian publishing houses, the novel was not published in Australia until it was serialised in two parts and published in two issues of Outrider in 1989. The novel explores key themes relating to life in Australia and the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia at the time, and yet could not find a place with an Australian publishing house. Outrider provided an opportunity for English-speaking Australian readers to gain access to this important narrative about Australia, yet as the work did not receive mainstream publication it remained invisible from the wider Australian population.

Similarly to publications such as Outrider, Australia has always had a rich tapestry of media in many community languages, and some of those newspapers and magazines published poetry and short stories. Beyond foreign language media, multilingual publication opportunities are sparse. Furthermore, pieces published in language-specific publications rarely find an audience outside of that language community, as they are rarely translated into English for a wider readership.²⁹ Even so, there are signs that this is shifting. As members of language communities often include second and third generation Australians, these members may not always be fluent speakers of the language, and this creates a necessity to publish community language newsletters bilingually. An example of this is the Barossa German Language Association’s quarterly newsletter Das Blatt.³⁰ South Australia’s Barossa Valley was once a bilingual German-English speaking community, before the German language was ostracised during the World Wars and ceased to be spoken publicly in the community.³¹ In 2012, linguist Dr Peter Mickan began working with German speakers in the Barossa Valley to establish a German-speaking community again. As the members of the community all have varying levels of German, to ensure that no one is ostracised, the newsletter is published bilingually in both German and English. This also provides a space for members outside of the language community to learn about the history and experiences of German-speaking Australians through the words of the community members. Where established national literary journals fail to include multilingual literatures as part of their regular publishing schedules, community language media play a vital role in capturing these stories and experiences of Australian life. Yet while those publications remain in the domain of the communities they are produced for, these narratives remain invisible as part of Australia’s national literature.

For a nation with English as the national language, cultivating and accessing national literatures is challenging in two key ways: firstly, a need for outlets where writers in languages other than English can publish their work, and secondly, translation. The first issue has historically been rectified by community language magazines and newspapers, where writers writing in languages other than English have had their literary works published. The second is an ongoing challenge. There have been many multilingual literary projects over the years providing space for multilingual Australian literatures, yet these have mostly been one-off projects or special events, rather than initiatives to firmly embed multilingual literatures as a cornerstone of Australian literature.

Modern multilingual Australian writing

Historically, publications such as Ambitious Friends and Australian foreign language media provided an outlet for multilingual and multicultural Australian writing. Since these publications either stopped being produced or scaled back their publishing, there had been no dedicated Australian publication for literary work of this kind until Australian writer Nadia Niaz launched the Australian Multilingual Writing Project (AMWP) in 2018, an online publication publishing multilingual Australian writing.³² The magazine is a ‘space to showcase the linguistic complexity that resists and persists in Australia today,’ and the purpose is to provide a space where writers who use more than two languages can represent their ‘code switching’ in their literature. Code switching refers to the ‘shifting’ between languages within one conversation or text and is a common occurrence within multilingual communities and families, although the term is not used exclusively for switching between different languages.³³ ‘Cultural code switching’ is a term used to refer to the way a person may change their behaviour in a different social context to fit in or reach a certain level of achievement.³⁴ Morton gives the example of former President of the United States, Barrack Obama, and his cultural code switching between his ‘affluent’ political circles and the ‘socio-economically diverse members of the congregation he attended.’ In doing so, Morton explains, people who have the ability to code switch in this way can benefit from belonging to both communities. Providing a space for literature that code switches reflects the way multilingual language users draw on their linguistic repertoire in their day-to-day lives and reflects Australia’s linguistic landscape, countering the myth that monolingualism is the norm within Australian society.

To date, the AMWP has published six issues between 2018 and 2022. The first issue was published in November 2018, with a focus on mixed language poetry, featuring poetry in fourteen different languages. All poems also included an audio file of the poets reading their poems.³⁵ This format continued for Issue Two, published in May 2019 while Issue Three, published in January 2020, included short prose as well as poetry. The stories and poems integrate English and other languages, showing the reader the complexities, insecurities and losses that come with being multilingual within Australian society. As Johanna Ellersdorfer writes in her piece ‘That Difficult Austrian Language’:

Deutsch ist schwer. It weighs on my chest like cases and declension; an incomplete puzzle that was fast mine Muttersprache … the first time I visited Austria, die Heimat meines Vaters, I cried at the airport and couldn’t remember how to conjugate verbs.³⁶

The code switching used in the piece highlights the difficulties and realities of existing in more than one language. Currently, Niaz’s publication is the only regular, dedicated space for multilingual Australian writing and it is creating an essential platform to explore Australia’s multilingualism within literature. Still, prior to the AMWP, since 2010 there have been many one-off projects advocating for and showcasing multilingual Australian literatures.

In 2010, the Northern Territory Writer’s Centre and IAD Press, with the support of the Northern Territory government, published an anthology of writing by First Nations writers in the Northern Territory, called This Country Anytime, Anywhere. Most of the writing in the anthology was published in both English and an Aboriginal language. Notably, the foreword mentions:

The multilingual aspect of this anthology is groundbreaking. With eight NT Indigenous languages as well as English included, some of the strength and beauty of NT Aboriginal languages is conveyed. It is also noteworthy that translation into some languages was not possible.

Despite a rigorous national search, translators for two particular languages who were confident to translate literature onto the page could not be sourced. Both language speakers and linguists were active in this search.³⁷

The project acknowledges that few publications had previously prioritised multilingual works in Indigenous languages, and not only showcases the richness of the country’s Indigenous languages, but illustrates the devastating effect colonisation has had on the nation’s linguistic ecosystem, as they were unable to source translators for two languages. The anthology was an important initiative to contribute writing in First Nations languages to Australian literature, yet at the same time, publishing an anthology of text conforms Indigenous literatures to a Western literary medium. To truly shift the monolingual dominance of Australian literature, embracing storytelling in all forms, including visual, oral and audio storytelling, as part of Australian literature is an essential part of this process, to cater for the different storytelling traditions in different languages and cultures.

This void is partly filled through organisations such as Language Party (previously Treasure Language Storytelling). The organisation is an initiative that creates storytelling events to share and celebrate local languages.³⁸ The initiative developed from the Aikuma Project, coordinated by Professor Steven Bird from Charles Darwin University and University of Berkeley graduate Robyn Perry. The Aikuma Project is dedicated to sustaining ‘thousands of living languages.’³⁹ To date, the organisation has held performances in San Francisco, Melbourne and Darwin, in various languages. In July 2017, their performance during the Darwin Fringe Festival sold out. It was a performance, not a reading: the storytellers recreated the traditional Aboriginal way of telling stories, gathered together around a campfire, and invited the audience in to be part of that experience. The stories were first told in either Tiwi or Yolngu, and then translated into English.⁴⁰ The small theatre became another world, oblivious to the city beyond the theatre’s walls. The atmosphere was electric as the storytellers shared their languages and cultures with the audience and gave a glimpse into the history of the land through language. The format provides not only space and access to Australian literatures in languages other than English, but also to non-written literary traditions, shifting Australia’s literary landscape to better reflect the rich language and literary traditions that exist in the nation.

Another spoken multilingual literature initiative giving a voice to multilingual Australian literatures is The Multilingual Poetry Slam held by the organisation World Travels in March 2016 and 2017.⁴¹ Poets performed in more than fifteen different languages. As they performed, their pieces were projected in English onto a screen, but the audience got to experience the poetry in language. One attendee of the 2016 event commented that the English was not necessary, as the audience could understand enough through the emotion of the readers.⁴² The broad meaning was conveyed without the need for English and provided the audience with a richer experience of the poetry and the poet. Similarly to the Language Party storytelling events, understanding story through concrete meaning itself becomes, to a certain extent, irrelevant: it is about place, emotion and immersing oneself in language. Language is intimately connected to place, and, in a place like Australia, where language has played such an important role in all phases of the nation’s history, including languages as part of our national literature is to strengthen our understanding of our place.

Gunai poet Kirli Saunders developed the Poetry in First Languages Project in conjunction with Red Room Poetry to ‘celebrate, share and preserve knowledge of First Nations languages and culture through poetry, music, dance and art.’⁴³ The project connects First Nations students with First Nations poets to foster the creation of poetry in first languages. The programme highlights not only poetry by Indigenous poets, but also in First Nations languages, and provides a space for the development and publication of poetry in language. A key aspect of the project was connecting language and poetry to country. In 2018, the project published more than 300 poems in eleven First Nations languages.⁴⁴ An evaluation of the project found that the students who participated experienced an increase in pride and connection to country and culture. They grew in confidence as they saw their culture and languages being used and celebrated. To conceptualise Australia through English-only narratives offers only a surface-level insight into the continent, neglecting the languages and stories that embody this landscape. Providing spaces for writers to engage with landscape in this way also opens opportunities for readers to forge a deeper connection with place through language.

Language, narrative and landscape

Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch’s Miles Franklin Award winning novel The Yield (2019) opens with the following:

I was born on Ngurambang – can you hear it? – Ngu-ram-bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language – because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.⁴⁵

Winch’s narrative interweaves the past and the present, following Wiradjuri man Albert Gondiwindi as he records his language for future generations before his imminent death, and his granddaughter August Gondiwindi as she returns to her land for the first time in a decade to attend her grandfather’s funeral. As August confronts her past, she finds her grandfather’s words, revealing another layer to the land she grew up on. Albert writes in his dictionary entry for the phrase ‘where is your country? – dhagunhu nagurambang [sic]’: ‘ … this country is made of impossible distances, places you can only reach by time travel. By speaking our language, by singing the mountains into existence.’⁴⁶ His dictionary differs from the vocabulary lists constructed by missionaries as they learned and recorded native languages as a means to convert communities to Lutheranism and Christianity in that no single English word suffices. Albert ascribes not only an English equivalent, but a paragraph attaching a story, a memory, landscape, wisdom, to each ancient Wiradjuri word.

The real Wiradjuri language is used in the novel, set against a fictional town in New South Wales and tells the story of fictional characters, yet it is the language that colours the fictional landscape and breathes so much life into the setting and characters. It is difficult to believe that the Gondiwindi family and their home of Massacre Plains on the Murrumby River exist only on the page. Fiction and reality blur as the history of Massacre Plains and the Gondiwindi family were very much the reality for so many Aboriginal Australians who had their people, languages and cultures massacred, both literally and figuratively. Winch’s book embodies the searing bond between language, place and culture and in doing so interrogates some of the most confronting aspects of Australia’s history. Constructing this narrative entirely in English would not only ignore the fact that these languages ever existed and the violence that resulted in their loss, but it would simply not be possible to have created this novel, with this insight into Australia, using only English. It is a multilingual narrative, born of a multilingual land, that was violently stripped of its languages. Embedding Wiradjuri into the story is essential in conveying the connection between language and landscape, telling this story and actively showing readers, who may or may not speak more than one language themselves, how language, place and culture intertwine, and how deeply English devasted those ecosystems. To not actively create space for multilingual narratives within Australian literature continues to enable a history of erasing stories that do not fit the dominant white, colonial, monolingual narrative that plagues the nation’s modern history. It is through texts like The Yield that readers are gifted insight into the intricate connections between language, place and landscape and, in the case of Australia, how embedded languages are to the history and stories of the continent.

In 2020, Wiradjuri author Dr Anita Heiss wrote an essay for Griffith Review, describing her experiences of learning her language and reflecting on Australia’s past discriminatory policies that actively sought to break the connections between language, culture and land. She writes she was ‘full of self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy’ and that she was ‘the first in [her] immediate miyagan (family) to do so.’ Heiss found solidarity in her fellow students:

Most of us students were on the same journey; most of us had come from mayiny (people) denied the right to speak language, to pass on culture, to learn on our own lands, with and from our own mayiny. Policies and acts of protection and assimilation had always had at their core the disconnection of Aboriginal mayiny from ngurambang, culture, community and identity – and this was often overlaid with a belief, a desire, that we would eventually die out and disappear.⁴⁷

As an accomplished academic and author of sixteen books, Heiss is initially confronted by the time and effort it will take to reacquaint herself with her language, but on reflection comes to the realisation that ‘Our language has been alive for tens of thousands of years; catching up with it would take a little time.’ Heiss’ essay and experience of learning her language further highlights the importance of providing multilingual storytelling spaces where these languages can be shared. Doing so is a tiny piece of a much larger story of unravelling and confronting the violence inflicted on languages and speakers of languages other than English on this continent.

Poet Evelyn Araluen also shared her experience of learning her language, Bundjalung, in her poem ‘Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal,’ which was the runner-up in Overland Magazine’s 2016 Nakata Brophy Prize.⁴⁸ The poem was included in her 2021 Stella Prize winning poetry collection Drop Bear. She writes:

It is hard to unlearn a language:

to unspeak the empire,

to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape,

a topographic intonation.

So in this place the shape of my place

I am trying to sing like hill and saltwater,

to use old words from an old country that I have never walked on:

bundjalung jagum ngai, nganduwal nyuyaya,

and god, I don’t even know

   if I’m saying it right.

In an interview with ABC Radio National, Araluen shared that the poem was the first poem she’d written, and elaborated on what learning language meant for her:

When I started learning language, I was taught that the way that you speak has to reflect the landscape. And it will reflect the landscape. The intonation and the cadence of your speaking will. For me it’s been a process of trying to learn what’s around me in the rawest way I possibly can. And to engage. And that means talking to birds … and making sure that wherever I go, I am greeting the place that I am. That it knows who I am.⁴⁹

Notably, both Heiss and Araluen embed Wiradujuri and Bundjalung language respectively into their pieces sharing their experiences of learning their languages. These pieces demonstrate not only the existence of multilingual Australian writing, but how embedded Australia’s multilingualism is to the land. Understanding language is understanding country, and including these multilingual literatures as part of Australia’s national literature articulates this connection. It is through the layers of multilingualism that we understand Australia’s history and multilingual writing contributes important conceptualisations of what it means to be Australian and of Australian society. Refusing to give space to these literatures denies a core part of what it means to be Australian. Still, multilingual Australian writing must find regular space within mainstream Australian writing, and not be relegated to one-off or special publishing projects. These projects are important, but they need to morph into consistent opportunities to publish multilingually, in the way the AMWP provides a dedicated place for multilingual writing, and demand to share space alongside English language Australian literature.

While there are some outlets and projects that cater to multilingual Australian writing, Jacklin writes that often, Australians writing in languages other than English are published overseas or in community language magazines, and therefore their work is not accessible to a wider Australian audience.⁵⁰ The research project ‘New transnationalisms: Australia’s multilingual literary heritage’ is uncovering multilingual writing that has been hidden and not accessible to a wider readership.⁵¹ Therefore, it is not enough to only have publications and projects that support multilingual writing. The second part of the equation is more support for fostering a tradition of literary translation in Australia, so that multilingual Australian literatures can reach a wider audience.

Literary translation in Australia

From an Australian perspective, literary translation has always been an overlooked aspect of the nation’s literary oeuvre. When Australian literature researcher Stephanie Guest proposed a topic on literary translation for her Honours thesis in the University of Sydney’s Australian Literature programme in 2013, she was told to go to the Comparative Literature department instead, because ‘Australian Literature was not equipped to deal with languages other than English.’⁵² She was allowed to undertake her project in the end, so long as ‘it focused on works from other languages being translated into English by Australian translators and not the other way around.’⁵³ Outrider was a journal dedicated to publishing literature in translation, and in their 1990 anthology, John Vasilakakos wrote about the state of literary translation in Australia at the time. He described it as ‘permanently marginalized as the disowned child of the cultural field, which subsists on the peanuts thrown at it’⁵⁴ and further wrote that ‘In Australia, the state of literary translation can be described as being in a coma, if not clinically dead.’⁵⁵ Thirty years on, and the situation has not improved. With the closure of journals such as Outrider and Ambitious Friends, it is possible the situation has worsened. Like other English-speaking nations, Australia publishes a tiny percentage of literary translations each year. Estimates from Australia’s PEN Centre indicate that less than six books are translated in Australia annually.⁵⁶ In comparison, less than 300 titles are translated in the USA each year, and in the UK literary translation makes up 2% of the total number of works published.⁵⁷ Most translated titles that are published in Australia have been bought from overseas publishers, rather than the translation itself occurring in Australia.

As Vasilakakos recognised thirty years ago, a large reason why literary translation forms such a small portion of the literary landscape is to do with funding. Arts funding as a whole has been cut dramatically over the past five years in Australia.⁵⁸ During that time, only eleven multilingual literary projects received direct Australia Council (as it was then named) funding.⁵⁹ That does not include multilingual literary projects which may have been indirectly funded through organisations that received organisational funding, such as writers’ centres. Cahill further argues that ‘small CaLD organisations such as Mascara that do not have institutional support are permanently contingent on the ad hoc grants system, peer reviewed which require garnering of popular support bases to fund projects.’⁶⁰ This system disproportionately impacts on literary organisations who might prioritise multilingual literary projects. Before the funding cuts were implemented, the Australia Council offered a funding programme called the LOTE publishing initiative, for the translation and publication of works by living Australian authors writing in languages other than English, including the publication of Indigenous titles in language. Despite the little support for multilingual literary projects, Creative Australia actively welcomes grant applications in languages other than English.⁶¹ Yet very few literature projects directly related to languages other than English have succeeded in winning funding. In an already extremely competitive funding pool, there is simply not enough funding to go around. This is not to suggest that government funding is the only option available to literary organisations. Philanthropy and crowdfunding are also possibilities. I have previously written extensively on funding ecosystems for literary journals within Australia and researched philanthropy and crowdfunding in the Australian context.⁶² With Australia’s comparatively small population base, opportunities for philanthropy and crowdfunding are less lucrative than overseas. Considering this context, it is admirable that any literary translation finds its way to publication in Australia, and it is not without concerted efforts from editors, translators and publishers to ensure literary translation continues to find space within Australian literature. It does raise the question of why persevere with literary translation, when such little support is available. In a 2013 essay for the Sydney Review of Books, Joshua Mostafa reviewed Emily Apter’s book Against World Literature, and in the essay he writes of Barbara Cassin’s 2004 multilingual encyclopaedic work Vocabulaire europeén des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (the book was subsequently translated into English and published as Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon in 2014), that collects words of philosophical or linguistic significance and maps their origins and cultural meanings.⁶³ In the English translation’s introduction, the editors explain that the work’s purpose is to find the meaning of a word in one language by exploring ‘the networks to which the word belongs.’⁶⁴ In doing so, it ‘seeks to understand how a network functions in one language by relating it to the networks of other languages.’⁶⁵ In Mostafa’s essay, he translated and summarised the work’s point of departure from Cassin’s original French introduction as below:

We can either opt for a single master-language (probably English) and, by translation, flatten out the world in a way that makes it palatable to the Anglo-American tradition, with its emphasis on common sense and ‘ordinary language’; or we can preserve the specificity of untranslatable words and expressions, and retain the full richness of ideas in the language in which they were originally inscribed.⁶⁶

This last point, ‘retaining the full richness of ideas in the language in which they were originally inscribed,’ speaks to the importance of not only literary translation more broadly but of fostering literary translation within a multilingual Australian literature to fully represent and share conceptualisations of Australia within the literary canon. This is why persisting with literary translation despite the lack of support is integral to Australian literature.

Over the past decade, Australian literary journals Southerly and Meanjin have published issues dedicated to works in translation, yet while the translators are Australian, the original works themselves are by overseas writers, and not Australian writers writing in languages other than English. The edition of Southerly focused on which texts from abroad Australian translators choose to bring to an Australian readership, while the edition of Meanjin published translations as well as essays on the art of translation.⁶⁷ Both issues focused on encouraging the reading of works in translation, without a specific focus on translating or fostering multilingual Australian writing. There are a few other Australian literary journals that regularly publish translations. Mascara Literary Journal focuses on multicultural literatures and publishing ‘contemporary migrant, Asian Australian and Aboriginal writers,’ and often publish translations.⁶⁸ HEAT is another Australian literary journal that commits to publishing translations. The journal, first published in 1996 under the editorship of Ivor Indyk, was established in the aftermath of the Demidenko Affair, a literary hoax where an Australian author of English background claimed to be Ukrainian in order to add credibility to her novel, set during the Holocaust.⁶⁹ The journal committed to publishing ‘genuinely diverse writing’ with the aim of publishing ‘innovative Australian and international writers of the highest standard.’⁷⁰ Still, HEAT publishes translations from international writers and translators and is therefore not solely a space for the work of Australian translators and translations. Cordite Poetry Review, a quarterly ‘Australian and international journal of poetry, criticism and research’ offers further space for the publication of literary translations, but again, the focus is on translating works from poets who live abroad, and not on publishing Australian writers in translation.⁷¹ That is not to say that providing space for all kinds of literary works in translation is not an important and necessary endeavour; in a climate where literary translation is so underfunded in an already under resourced literature sector it is encouraging that these publications find space to publish translations at all. How, in these limited spaces and with these limited resources, do we carve out more space for translating and publishing multilingual Australian writers?

In 2014, Global Express, part of Express Media, an Australian literary organisation prioritising opportunities for writers under thirty, published an anthology called Dialect.⁷² The anthology published writing by writers from refugee and migrant backgrounds. There is a section in the anthology titled ‘microfiction,’ where the stories appear side-by-side in English and in the native language of the writer. Here, the reader is privy to the writer’s work in both of the writer’s languages, and thus gains deeper insight into the background of the piece of writing itself. Even if the reader cannot understand the story in the original language, a story written into language and translated into English will render very differently to a story originally written in English.

The book Multiples tests this very phenomenon. Different writers and translators were asked to translate a story into and out of languages, thus forming a translation chain, before the story eventually arrives back into English.⁷³ The outcome is a very different story from the original, but the essence remains. For example, one of the included stories in the anthology is the English short story The Making of a Man by Richard Middleton. The story is firstly translated into Spanish by Javier Marias, and then Marias’ version is translated back into English by Andrew Sean Greer (now titled How to Become a Man). Greer's translation is translated into German by Julia Franck, and then A.S Byatt returns the story to English (now titled Manhood). Byatt's translation is then translated into Hebrew by Orly Castel-Bloom, before being translated back into English by Adam Foulds (titled Manhood: Strophes). Greer, Byatt and Foulds all translate the first line of the short story differently, based on the versions they were translating from:

Greer:

‘Here he was: a runty little clerk on a hapless midnight quest for Vauxhall Station, lost in a maze of twisting, sordid little streets.’

Byatt:

‘There he was, an unremarkable little clerk in the middle of the night, trying to find Vauxhall station, lost in a labyrinth of mean and twisting streets.’

Foulds:

‘It is a question of the separation and joining of bodies, first one and then the other.’

The differences in the translations come both from different approaches to translation and different source texts, yet it shows how part of the context is missing by seeing texts created in more than one language published in only one language. Including the original and the translation alongside each other reveals part of the narrative of the construction of the story, even if, as in the example of Dialect, that narrative is simply to reveal to the reader that the author operates in more than one language. Translation is key to fostering a tradition of multilingual literature to nurture the ability to translate ourselves to ourselves and publish both the original and the translation where possible, to provide visibility to all of the languages in the translation process and not only centre the finished, English translation as the version that claims status as the work of literature.

In 2023, Northern Territory literary journal Borderlands, which I co-founded with Adelle Sefton-Rowston and Glenn Morrison and have been an editor of since 2018, published a special online issue themed on the Voice to Parliament Referendum.⁷⁴ The referendum saw the Australian public vote on whether to change the Australian constitution to allow an independent body of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to provide representations to Parliament on issues related to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs (the result of the referendum was a majority ‘no’ vote, meaning Australia remains without an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament).⁷⁵ In the journal’s special issue, three of the poems published were translated into Yolngu Matha and published alongside the original English poems.⁷⁶ In this case, it wasn’t about translating work originally written in another language into English and making it accessible, but about making English literature accessible to an audience who do not have English as their first language. At the issue’s launch, the poems were read out in the original English, followed by the translators, Brenda Muthamuluwuy and Galathi Dhurrkay, reading the poems in language. Prioritising publishing translations as part of the issue spoke directly to the issue’s theme and also emphasises the importance of nurturing a culture of not only translating out of other languages into English but translating from English into other languages.

Conclusion

The first question people ask when they realise there is a mini replica of a Czech castle in a remote town in Northern Australia is ‘why?’ This question unravels a story of language, people and place, sharing a glimpse into a nation laced with more than 300 different languages. Languages have shaped Australia’s history and continue to shape Australia’s future and yet they have been invisible as part of Australia’s national literature. The projects and initiatives discussed in this article demonstrate that multilingual Australian writing does exist, and has existed for all of the country’s history, but too often it remains hidden, hindered by lack of funding and lack of space to make it visible as part of national literature.

To make multilingual Australian literature visible, and cultivate a truly multilingual national literature, direct action needs to be taken within the industry to fund and create space for publishing Australian literatures in languages other than English. Firstly, literature in general needs to be allocated a fairer share of Australian arts funding. In the changes announced to the Australia Council in 2023, along with a change in name to Creative Australia, they announced the creation of Writers Australia, set to launch on 1 July 2025, with more funding earmarked for literary projects.⁷⁷ Within this funding, specific initiatives need to be created that foster multilingual literatures. Rather than the one-off projects like Dialect, and many of the other projects discussed in this article, it is important that these initiatives are more in line with the AMWP, with ongoing, dedicated space to publish multilingual writing. Ensuring projects of this kind have access to multi-year funding where editorial teams can focus on publishing instead of writing and acquitting grant applications is critical to their survival and longevity. An added layer to this is creating opportunities for multilingual editors to be part of every aspect of the publishing process. The black&write! programme run out of the State Library of Queensland offers editing internships to First Nations editors.⁷⁸ Creating similar programmes for multilingual editors will help foster a multilingual literary sector. Additionally, introducing audiences to multilingual writing and ways of accessing and reading multilingual writing will create a sense that these narratives belong within Australian literature and stop othering their inclusion.

Translation is essential to this process, both into and out of English. Creating space for translation as part of Australian literature and understanding its essential place within Australian literature, rather than something that happens to Australian literature when it leaves Australian shores is a key part of this process. So too is showing the translation trail, publishing the languages alongside each other to truly represent the linguistic landscape of the nation within national literature. Despite the role of English in Australia as the national and common language, recognising that until we start translating ourselves to ourselves and make visible the multilingual narratives covered with English, Australia’s national literature will never truly represent the nation’s identity or reflect the reality of Australian life is the first step in finding more space for multilingual voices. The writers, publications and initiatives discussed in this article have laid solid foundations for demonstrating how it can be done and how, with the support of Creative Australia and the literary sector, we can continue to publish and elevate multilingual voices to cultivate a truly multilingual Australian literature, that is truly representative of the nation’s history, landscape and voices.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Monument Australia, “Bernie Havlik,” Monument Australia, 2020, online, Internet, 23 Feb. 2020. Available: http://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/community/display/80055-bernie-havlik.

2 Monument Australia.

3 Kungarakan Culture & Education Association, “Kungarakan Culture & Education Association,” Kungarakan Culture & Education Association, 28 Feb. 2023. Available: https://kungarakan.org.au/about/.

4 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “2021 Census Highlights Increasing Cultural Diversity,” Australian Bureau of Statistics, 20 Sep. 2022, online, Internet, 1 Nov. 2023. Available: https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/2021-census-highlights-increasing-cultural-diversity.

5 Michelle Cahill, “Who Is Lobbying for Migrant Writers?” Sydney Review of Books, 13 Nov. 2015, online, Internet, 1 Nov. 2023. Available: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/13-november-2015-who-is-lobbying-for-migrant-writers/; Michael Jacklin, “Islands of Multilingual Literature: Community Magazines and Australia’s Many Languages,” Southerly 72.3 (2012): 129–45; Wenche Ommundsen, “Multilingual Writing in a Monolingual Nation,” Sydney Review of Books, 24 Jul. 2018, online, Internet, 18 Jul. 2018. Available: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/multilingual-writing-monolingual-nation/.

6 See Raelke Grimmer, “Südaustralien,” Westerly Online Special Issue: South Australia 6 (2018): 24–31.

7 Leda Sivak et al., “‘Language Breathes Life’ – Barngarla Community Perspectives on the Wellbeing Impacts of Reclaiming a Dormant Australian Aboriginal Language,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16.20 (2019): 3918; Rob Amery, Warraparna Kaurna!: Reclaiming an Australian Language, vols. (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2016); Rob Amery and Vincent Kanya Buckskin, “Handing on the Teaching of Kaurna Language to Kaurna Youth,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (2012): 31–41.

8 Cahill, “Who Is Lobbying for Migrant Writers?”

9 Natalie Kon-yu and Emily Booth, “Who Is Telling ‘Australian’ Stories? The Results from the First Nations and People of Colour Writers Count,” Journal of Language, Literature & Culture 69.2/3 (2022): 107–23.

10 Centre for Social Research & Methods, “Australian Attitudes Towards National Identity,” ANU Centre for Social Research & Methods (The Australian National University, 27 Oct. 2015), online, Internet, 5 Sep. 2016. Available: https://csrm.cass.anu.edu.au/research/publications/australian-attitudes-towards-national-identity.

11 Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Trans. Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winter Carpenter, vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

12 Mizumura 39.

13 Elena Lappin, What Language Do I Dream In? vols. (Great Britain: Virago Press, 2016).

14 Mizumura 44.

15 Barolong Seboni, “Why I Write What I Write” (International Writers’ Program Iowa University, 2003), online, Internet, 21 Aug. 2020. Available: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/SeboniWhyIWrite.pdf.

16 Mizumura 17.

17 Jacklin.

18 Ommundsen.

19 Michael G. Clyne, Australia’s Language Potential, vols. (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005).

20 Australian Bureau of Statistics.

21 Elizabeth Ellis, Ingrid Gogolin, and Michael Clyne, “The Janus Face of Monolingualism: A Comparison of German and Australian Language Education Policies,” Current Issues in Language Planning 11.4 (2010): 439–60.

22 Jacklin.

23 Manfred Jurgensen, “A Look Back in Doubt ‘Confessions of a Heretic’: Multicultural Literature in Australia.” Coolabah 26 (2019): 12–32.

24 Jurgensen.

25 Tom Jordan and Matthew O’Halloran, “Death in Fremantle- About,” Ed. Manfred Jurgensen, Outrider: A Journal of Multicultural Literature in Australia VI.1 (1989): 179–80.

26 Alexandra Ludewig, “Walter Kaufmann: Walking the Tightrope,” in Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading Through the Iron Curtain. Ed. Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel, vols. (London: Anthem Press, 2016).

27 Ludewig.

28 Jordan and O’Halloran.

29 Jacklin.

30 Barossa German Language Association, “Das Blatt,” Barossa German Language Association Inc., n.d., online, Internet, 23 Feb. 2020. Available: http://barossagerman.com.au/das-blatt/.

31 Grimmer.

32 Australian Multilingual Writing Project, “Australian Multilingual Writing Project,” Australian Multilingual Writing Project, 2020, online, Internet, 23 Feb. 2020. Available: https://australianmultilingualwriting.org/.

33 Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching, vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), online, Internet, 26 Sep. 2020. Available: http://site.ebrary.com/id/10289139.

34 Jennifer M. Morton, “Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap,” Journal of Political Philosophy 22.3 (2014): 259–81.

35 Australian Multilingual Writing Project.

36 Johanna Ellensdorfer, “That Difficult Austrian Language,” Australian Multilingual Writing Project, 2020, online, Internet, 15 Aug. 2020. Available: https://australianmultilingualwriting.org/writing/johanna-ellersdorfer-that-difficult-austrian-language.

37 Karl Jabanbi Dank, ed., This Country Anytime Anywhere: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing from the Northern Territory, vols. (Alice Springs: IAD Press in Partnership with the Northern Territory Writers’ Centre, 2010).

38 Language Party, “About,” Languageparty.org, 2023, online, Internet, 21 Aug. 2019. Available: http://www.languageparty.org/about.html.

39 The Aikuma Project, “About,” Aikuma, n.d., online, Internet, 21 Feb. 2020. Available: http://www.aikuma.org/about.html.

40 Language Party.

41 Word Travels, “Who,” Word Travels, n.d., online, Internet, 5 Aug. 2018. Available: http://www.wordtravels.info/who-are-we.

42 Shami Sivasubramanian, “Australia’s Multilingual Poetry Slam Celebrates Diversity,” SBS News, 2016, online, Internet, 30 Nov. 2017. Available: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australia-s-multilingual-poetry-slam-celebrates-diversity.

43 Red Room Poetry, “Poetry in First Languages,” Red Room Poetry, 2020, online, Internet, 23 Feb. 2020. Available: https://redroomcompany.org/projects/poetry-first-languages/.

44 Jackie Bailey, Poetry in First Languages Evaluation, vols. (BYP Group, 2019), online, Internet, 23 Feb. 2020. Available: https://redroomcompany.org/media/uploads/pifl_report_(red_room_poetry_x_byp_group)_.pdf.

45 Tara June Winch, The Yield (Sydney: Penguin Books, 2019), 6.

46 Winch 34.

47 Anita Heiss, “Ngumambinya: Trust for Help,” Griffith Review, 2020, online, Internet, 15 Feb. 2020. Available: https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/ngumambinya-anita-heiss/.

48 Evelyn Araluen, “Runner-Up: Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal,” Overland Literary Journal, 11 Jul. 2016, online, Internet, 15 Feb. 2020. Available: https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-223/nakata-brophy-prize-evelyn-araluen/.

49 “The Poetics of Language and a Lover’s Condescension,” ABC Radio National, 30 Apr. 2016, online, Internet, 15 Feb. 2020. Available: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/awaye/nakata-brophy-prize/7364830.

50 Jacklin.

51 Ommundsen.

52 Stephanie Guest, “Barbecued Sunrise: Translation and Transnationalism in Australian Poetry,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature: JASAL 18.3 (2018): 1–15.

53 Guest.

54 John Vasilakakos, “Literary Translation in Australia,” Ed. Manfred Jurgensen Outrider: A Year of Australian Literature (1990): 132.

55 Vasilakakos 135.

56 Esther Allen, To be Translated or not to be: PEN/IRL Report on the International Situation of Literary Translation, vols. (Barcelona: Institut Ramon Llull, 2007), online, Internet, 6 Jun. 2017. Available: http://www.pen-international.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Translation-report_OK-2.pdf.

57 Allen.

58 Steve Dow, “Arts Companies Hit Hard by Australia Council Funding Cuts,” Text The Saturday Paper, 21 May 2016, online, Internet, 2 Nov. 2023. Available: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2016/05/21/arts-companies-hit-hard-australia-council-funding-cuts/14637528003274.

59 Australia Council, “Australia Council Grants List,” Accessed 21 (2017), Available: https://online.australiacouncil.gov.au/ords/GrantsList.

60 Michaela Cahill, “Why Specific Strategy is Needed for the CaLD Literary Sector,” Mascara Literary Review, 31 May 2023, online, Internet, 1 Nov. 2023. Available: https://www.mascarareview.com/why-specific-strategy-is-needed-for-the-cald-literary-sector/.

61 Creative Australia, “Languages other than English,” Creative Australia, 2023, online, Internet, 2 Nov. 2023. Available: https://creative.gov.au/investment-and-development/protocols-and-resources/languages-other-than-english/.

62 Raelke Grimmer, Adelle Sefton-Rowston, and Glenn Morrison, “Breaking Borders: Launching a Regional Literary Journal in Times of Arts Funding Uncertainty,” TEXT 25.2 (2021): 1–25.

63 Mostafa Joshua, “Quand même: Against World Literature by Emily Apter,” Sydney Review of Books (2013), online, Internet, 31 Jan. 2024. Available: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/emily-apter-against-world-literature/.

64 Barbara Cassin et al., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), online, Internet, 31 Jan. 2024. Available: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cdu/detail.action?docID=1543267.

65 Cassin et al.

66 Joshua.

67 Ian Britain, ed. Meanjin: On Translation. 64.4 (2005); David Brooks and Elizabeth McMahon, eds. Southerly: The Arts of Translation. 70.1 (2010).

68 Mascara Poetry Inc., “About Us,” Mascara Literary Review. 2020, online, Internet, 26 Feb. 2020. Available: http://mascarareview.com/about-us/.

69 HEAT, “About,” Giramondo Publishing. 2023, online, Internet, 31 Jan. 2024. Available: https://giramondopublishing.com/heat/about/.

70 HEAT.

71 Cordite Poetry Review, “About,” Cordite Poetry Review. 2024, online, Internet, 31 Jan. 2024. Available: http://cordite.org.au/about/.

72 Kat Muscat, ed., Dialect, vols. (Melbourne: Express Media, 2014).

73 Adam Thirwell, ed., vols. Multiples (London: Potobello Books, 2013).

74 Borderlands, “Borderlands 2023 Special Issue: The Voice to Parliament Referendum,” Borderlands. 2023, online, Internet, 2 Nov. 2023. Available: https://borderlands.cdu.edu.au/2023-special-issue-the-voice-to-parliament-referendum/.

75 Reconciliation Australia, “Support a Voice to Parliament,” Reconciliation Australia. 2023, online, Internet, 2 Nov. 2023. Available: https://www.reconciliation.org.au/reconciliation/support-a-voice-to-parliament/.

76 Borderlands.

77 Creative Australia, “Creative Australia,” Creative Australia. n.d., online, Internet, 8 Feb. 2024. Available: https://creative.gov.au/creative-australia/.

78 State Library of Queensland, “Indigenous Writing Fellowships and Editing Internships,” State Library Of Queensland. n.d., online, Internet, 23 Feb. 2024. Available: https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/get-involved/awards-and-fellowships/indigenous-writing-fellowships-and-editing-internships.