Australian Immigration Stories

The rich array of voices that contribute to Australian life includes many first- and second-generation writers from all parts of the world. This means that for Australian readers, a book can be a way to travel the world, and it can be a way to stay right at home. While it’s great to fly off in the imagination to exotic locations, real or imagined, it can be just as valuable to feel, in reading, a connection to the place you come from. A book can provoke both the sense of recognition—I know that place! I know that feeling!—while also making us see with new eyes.  

Reading immigrant writing is one way to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”. It is also a way to fuel the imagination: there are many different ways of seeing the world, and it’s easy for that to get lost when we stay within the realm we know best.   

Cafe Scheherazade by Arnold Zable

Also available as an eBook

For many writers, their own experience is the wellspring of inspiration, and these writers produce work—whether of fiction, poetry or memoir—that reflects their life stories. Arnold Zable, a Melbourne writer of Polish-Jewish descent, published Cafe Scheherezade in 2003. The book is now considered an Australian classic. It tells a diasporic story that encompasses both displacement and belonging, as well as community formation. It is a book that blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction: what matters is the richness of storytelling, as Scheherazade, the legendary narrator of the stories collected in One Thousand and One Nights, would tell you. YPRL’s collection includes many works by Zable.

The Boat by Nam Le

In The Boat, Nam Le’s narrates the story of a group of refugees fleeing Vietnam by boat—but the book is much more than this. Le allows his imagination into many parts of the world: whether its coastal Victoria, New York, Cartagena, Hiroshima or Tehran, he allows interest in human experience of all kinds to drive his storytelling. Meanwhile, his 2024 book 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem addresses his identity directly, while also speaking to the way that living with the expectations of an identity is inherently limiting. The notion of a “Vietnamese poem”, as opposed to a poem is unfolded in many ways. 

The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Maxine Beneba Clarke is a force within Australian letters, writing across fiction, poetry and memoir, as well as producing multiple children’s books. Born in Sydney, Clarke is a writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. In her memoir The Hate Race she addresses her experiences of racism growing up in Australia. Her stories reflect the many stories of the African diaspora, while her poetry is direct in address and responsive to immediate world events. Her book of poetry, How Decent Folks Behave, is the most recent of four collections and was written during her time as the Poet Laureate of The Saturday Paper.  

Close to home: selected writings by Alice Pung

Also available as an eBook

Alice Pung has been writing memoirs, novels and essays for nearly 20 years. Pung’s writing is notable as much for its evocation of Footscray and Melbourne’s western suburbs in the 2010s as it is for exploration of her family background: as the daughter of ethnic Teochew Chinese parents who fled Cambodia, she writes with family knowledge of the Khmer Rouge, and with a daughter’s understanding of the ways her own life is different from that of her parents because of what they went through in order for her to be born in different circumstances. In Close to Home, Pung’s reminds us that the immigrant to Australia is at home here, and that immigrant stories are Australian stories, richer for their diversity and particularity. 

Explore the Homeland Stories here.