THE ROLE OF NETWORKS IN AUSTRALIAN MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE

　　Immediately following the Second World War, the Australian government instituted a revolutionary immigration policy that would forevermore change the nature of Australian society. In the seven-year period from 1947 to 1954, 170,700 refugeesmigrated to Australia from war-torn Europe under the auspices of United Nations International Refugee Organization resettlement. This was the first time the government had been involved in bringing large, significant numbers of non-British immigrants into Australia. I have set up a research project to study the literature and literary culture of this particular group of Australians; that is, to study writers who came to Australia as so-called "Displaced Persons" immediately after the War. The project has involved empirical work: I compiled data-bases, contacted well over seven hundred community organizations across Australia, liaised with some seventy key individuals and found close to three hundred writers. I audio-recorded structured, formal interviews with fifty seven authors. My aim now is to begin to theorize how this literary culture functioned (and continues to function) as an identifiable and self-contained literary system within Australia. Within each ethnic community there is a network--there is a structure--by which literary texts are produced, distributed and consumed. For the individual writer, the network supplies an audience/market-place, infrastructural and moral support, and the means of publication. That is, the network supplies the means of authorship and the infrastructures responsible for productivity. For the community, the network provides a viable and dynamic literary culture that answers the psychological needs of members to maintain their original language and cultural formations. Until now Australian multicultural literature has been assessed largely in the study of individual writers and their works. My interest is in the material base of multicultural writing and reading--the agents and infrastructure that determine the creation, production, circulation and reception of literary texts. While the findings of this research project will shed light upon a hitherto little known but important group of Australian writers, documenting their experiences will bespeak wider issues of textual production that afflict a culturally diverse and postcolonial Australia.