Twenty-Seven Memoirs by Immigrants to Australia

SOCIAL HISTORY Twenty-seven memoirs by immigrants to Australia Kent MacCarter and Ali Lemer, eds. Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home. South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2013. 288 pp. AU $24.95. ISBN 978-0-98730-853-5The latest figures from the Australian Government's Department of Immigration and Border Protection show that 27 percent of Australia's resident population was born overseas. Unsurprisingly, emigrants from the United Kingdom and New Zealand top the charts, but the overall proportion of migrants from Asia and Africa is increasing as those from other parts of the world decrease.The edited collection Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home reflects this unique facet of the Australian cultural landscape. Joyful Strains collects 27 memoirs by immigrants to Australia. book's editors-Kent Mac- Carter, poet and editor of the Cordite Poetry Review, and Ali Lemer, travel writer and editor for Thomas Cook, Lonely Planet, and more-are themselves immigrants to Australia, both from the United States. However, their introduction to the collection is short- less than two pages-and their biographies are absent from the back of the book where all the author biographies appear. MacCarter and Lemer seem content to let the individual authors speak for themselves. It's a good thing, as well, since too much focus on Mac- Carter and Lemer would have biased the book's analysis of the immigrant experience toward the experience of a particular subset of immigrant: the American immigrant to Australia, or the immigrant coming to Australia from another English-speaking, firstworld nation. Instead, the editors chose to diversify their analysis by selecting only one writer per nation of origin. Therefore, the collection contains memoirs by authors representing 27 nations, from the United States to Cambodia, the United Kingdom to Croatia, and New Zealand to Swaziland.These 27 monologues are filtered through the lens of a lengthy introduction by Arnold Zable, author of seven books and president of the Melbourne center of PEN International. Zable, who emigrated from New Zealand to Australia, has written a fitting introduction to the collection, especially since all profits from the sale of the book go to PEN Melbourne. This is a pretty amazing thing that is being done by the editors and the publisher, Affirm Press-a small, Melbourne-based publishing company with a special interest in publishing nonfiction books that have a positive impact on the community.There are, of course, individual memoirs that are more or less likely to achieve this goal of having a positive impact on the community. Canadian emigrant Danny Katz's contribution, The Crappiest Refugee, contains several side-splittingly funny moments, such as when he describes how Canadians have escaped the barbaric regime of Cirque du Soleil, who indoctrinate young people and teach them to balance on tightropes while dressed as freaky ladyboy whore-clowns (163). However, Katz's memoir is more useful as comic relief from some of the anthology's harder-hitting stories than it is at having a positive impact on the community. …

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