Parting Reflections on the 'Asian' Subset
As a parting gift (and providing further evidence of her dedication and knowledge) Anne Chittleborough highlights the following selection from the publications added to the Australian Literary Responses to 'Asia' subset during 2007:
Titles featuring South Asia:
- Lucky Baby Yak, a picture book by Max Maxfield and Helen Manos about Tibetan nomads
- Irish-born singer-songwriter Damien Leith's One More Time, set in the mountains of Nepal
- Adib Khan's novel Spiral Road in which the character Masud Alam, having lived in Australia for 30 of his past 53 years, returns to Bangladesh to say goodbye to his dying father and to reconnect with his family
- and
- Two autobiographical works for adults, Lincoln Hall's remarkable account of his experiences in Dead Lucky: Life after Death on Mount Everest and Garry Weare's A Long Walk in the Himalaya. A Trek from the Ganges to Kashmir
Australian literary reflections of 'Asia' include writings by the 'Asian' diaspora in Australia as they view their heritage and homelands, and as they perceive themselves to be viewed by Australians. This year has seen the publication of:
- The bi-lingual Seri Lao: An Anthology of Lao-Australian Refugee Writings, a forum for Lao-Australian voices to be read aloud, with personal stories of migration, history and affirmation of the importance of Lao culture
- Pauline Nguyen's Secrets of the Red Lantern, the story of her family's refugee flight to Australia and a source of recipes for classic Vietnamese dishes
- Ouyang Yu, in Bias: Offensively Chinese/Australian, includes a chapter on recent mainland Chinese writing on Australia
- Jose Wendell Capili's 'Southeast Asian Diaspora Writers in Australia and the Consequence of Community-Based Initiatives' in his From the Editors: Migrant Communities and Emerging Australian Literature in which he notes the difficulty of finding an audience for community-based Southeast Asian writers in Australia
- Ngoc-Tuan Hoang's 'My Long Journey with New and Emerging Vietnamese-Australian Writers' telling of his setting up of the journal Tap Hop and its later development into Viet – the first professional Vietnamese-language literary journal in Australia – and Tien Ve, the Vietnamese on-line journal
- and
- Another internet venture Peril: Asian Australian Journal, a journal that aims to 'build a critical mass of Asian-Australian art and cultural concerns'
And finally, Anne notes, '2007 publications are remarkable for the number of works published for children and young adults. Books for young people for 2005-2007 are double those of the preceding three years (2002-2004). One might hope that the barriers between east and west are in fact being broken down in younger generations'.