The Spoor of Scattered Memories: Journeys, Landscapes and Identities in Australian Transcultural Life Writing

The trope of place in the delineation of the narrator's subjectivity has a special relevance in Australian literature and culture. Since the first attempts by settlers to accommodate themselves to such a 'different' environment, the land has been a protagonist in the (hi)stories of Australia, rather than simply a background feature. This idiosyncratic relationship to the land was supported further by the many other journeys that contributed to the formation of Australia as a nation. Indeed as Stephen Castles suggests, Australia has played a 'classic' role in the global migration phenomena, one which was followed by increase in 'returns home' for many Australians of first or successive generations in search of their roots, family histories and the memories of their past. As questions of belonging are associated with the relationship of the subject to, and his/her location within, the nation-space, quite often these journeys and their outcome restore Australia as a place, the land of one's birth/childhood, and become in fact an occasion for (Hooton 2). The journey to Australia represents that radical in one's life, the sufficient motive, strong enough to drive someone to write autobiography (Starobinski 78). Andrew Riemer's Inside Outside: Life Between Two Worlds (1992) and Arnold Zable's Jewels and Ashes (1991) exemplify differently how landscapes and the journeys through them are intrinsic to the subject's self-awareness and sense of identity. As in the explorer journal, a genre prevalent earlier in the history of Australia, the journey and the writing, the textualization of the land and the evolving of the subjects' lives are all intimately connected. The landscapes in these two auto/biographies (1) are perceived predominantly in connection to travelling to and traversing another space: they emerge from journeys of flight to Australia (Riemer), or from a brief trip 'home' to Poland from Australia (Zable), where the idea of 'home' does not necessarily imply having previously lived in the place about to be visited, but rather is developed from emotional and cultural bond to it, born from family mythologies and (hi)stories. In this article the idea of landscape encompasses both the idea of space and place. In both instances landscape is not merely static, but rather a dynamic concept, being part of the travel and movement that inevitably shape the lives of people belonging to transcultural milieus. As a cultural and social construct, landscape is also always open to transformations. It is, as Clifford would have it, an itinerary rather than a bounded site--a series of encounters and translations (11). Both auto/biographies in this article focus on the transformative dimension within the self-representational process and feature a progressive change in the narrator's subjectivity within the text. In Inside Outside Riemer evolves from a Jewish-Hungarian child born in prewar Europe into English-speaking Australian adult, who eventually questions his identity as exclusively belonging to any one country or language. In Jewels and Ashes, Arnold Zable, Australian-born child of Jewish Polish heritage, is portrayed as laden with a fractured jumble of memories originating in his parent's experience as Holocaust survivors, and as one who slowly transforms himself into someone whose identity finally feels nourished by and rounded through such inheritance. For both Riemer and Zable, self-awareness and self-transformation are accomplished through travelling. Travelling from one place to another, facing and somehow adapting to new locations, finding the words to describe these experiences, translating from and transforming one cultural space into another, learning about one but also unlearning about or (re) interpreting the other, are all processes implying movement and some sort of journey, physical and/or psychological. The self-representational processes and identity formations of these transcultural subjects are reflected in such dynamic movements, evolving and inscribing themselves as difference in changed locations and languages, predicated on movement and not bounded within a sense of space as static. …

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