Scenes of reading: Australia-Canada-Australia

I found the idea of a 'scene of writing' very generative and tried to retrieve a few mises en scene in relation to my own obsessions over the past 45 years of teaching both in Australia and Canada. Reading some of the publications coming out of Robert Dixon's project (e.g. Dixon and Rooney) I speculated about how fascinating it would be to track Australian scenes of reading in relation to those writers who came to Australian literary texts with knowledge of languages other than English and with cultural contexts other than Anglo-Celtic ones. After the panel session I launched a kind of Festschrift for a writer who has embodied all this for forty years: Antigone Kefala. The book captures many scenes of reading her work in numerous languages and places across the world (Karalis and Nikas). I also started speculating about the recent work by Kim Scott and many others who have been working to salvage Aboriginal languages and that here too there is an important intervention into a prevailing mono-lingualism that still seems to be the default position in Australia. Paradoxically, the work of indigenous writers and critics may make it easier to argue for more attention to be paid to that intra-cosmopolitanism multilingualism comprising the many writers and artists who have always worked within Australia-sometimes in English or an English inflected differently as well as many many other languages (Chow).Let me draw your attention to two moments in Kim Scott's writing. The first occurs in an essay that comments on That Deadman Dance, published in Overland: Originally, that novel had the working title, Rose a Wail, a (poor) pun on a whale breaking from the ocean surface and the hint of an inarticulate cry of anguish. I wondered about the possibility of conveying a Noongar language sensibility as it emerged in English: would this mean a transformation of the language or an adjustment of the sensibility or, and probably most likely, both? The first word of the novel is an attempt by a Noongar character to render a Noongar word in English spelling; the novel concludes with the central character delivering a speech in Noongar. But even more than this sparse spattering across pages and pages of English, Noongar language influences the imagery, rhythm and characters of the novel. (59) Scott captures exactly what a multilingual writer is able to contribute to English writing in Australia. He also describes the encounter with Noongar country and language elsewhere as tantamount to being 'reshaped from the inside out' (Kayang and Me 257).The generalisations that follow will be outrageously simplistic but here goes. After 20 years of teaching in officially bilingual Canada, the anachronism of Australia's apparent mono-lingualism becomes even more stark. Of course it isn't actually monolingual but the attention paid to its multilingualism has been scant and has not been supported by funding bodies in a sustained manner. One thinks of ARC project assessment comments where researchers into literary multilingualism produced by Australian writers are asked to include expertise from speakers in countries of origin in order to validate their project. One thinks as well of the vulnerability of relevant archives, for example, one set up to actively seek out and collect the papers and books of those from non Anglo-Celtic Australian writers which silently abandoned this aspect of the project in spite of the funding set up to sustain it. So what did scenes of writing conceived within these parameters mean for encounters with Australian texts from the sixties onward? In some respects they comprised anxiously consulted models for assimilation. I agree completely with Lindsay Barrett's interpretation of Nino Culotta's We're A Weird Mob, the product of an Irish-Australian writer posing as an Italian immigrant. That it was such a best seller was undoubtedly due to the fact that it was exactly that-a normative blueprint for assimilation (Barrett). But let's fast forward to a text such as Christos Tsiolkas's Barracuda which captures ocker idioms with astonishing accuracy that include the nuances of ocker English inflected by varieties of other migrant dialects. …

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