Displaced women: Eastern european post-war narratives in australia

This special issue of Life Writing is the result of a workshop I convened in April 2013 at the Centre for European Studies, Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra in partnership with the ANU Gender Institute. The workshop was held to encourage discussion on the representation of displacement in life narratives of Eastern European women who migrated to Australia after the Second World War. The focus on this particular area of life writing was encouraged by a number of factors. Significant underrepresentation of writers of Eastern European origin among acknowledged Australian minority writers was the major reason for setting up the network of scholars working in this field. Given language barriers, the very limited reach of writing restricted to private spheres or writers language communities, and the fact that only a small volume of their contribution is reflected in collections in English, such an exclusion does not seem surprising. The second reason for focusing on Eastern European life narratives in Australia was the perceived unpopularity of Eastern European topics and the alleged banality of post-war migrations stories, associated merely with nostalgia and a recycling of familiar themes. This lack of critical interest is confirmed by the fact that a number of collections of work by Australian writers of Eastern European background published overseas have never even entered the Australian market (e.g. Mycak 2000). Thus, our aim was to present a diversity of forms and themes in these texts, to draw attention to their transnational character, and to challenge continuing misconceptions about womens migrant writing in Australia.