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

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.