Antigone Kefala, the best Australian writer you’ve never heard of, was born into a Greek family in Brăila, Romania in 1931. When the Soviets arrived, her family fled first to Greece, then New Zealand, then Sydney, where she lived until her recent death.
The Island, her first novel to be released internationally, follows a young refugee, Melina, as she moves between her new home’s “narrow colony” of past-obsessed exiles and the intellectuals at the university where she studies French and English literature. These worlds are not as far apart as they seem. For Melina’s family, their exile is not from an ethnic-nationalist homeland but cosmopolitan, pre-war Europe: they’ve lost Greta Garbo as much as Grandmother Sofia.
Ultimately, displacement is more temporal than spatial. Melina feels herself to be a “perpetual anachronism”, caught between a past where “all the exciting things happened before I was born” (exile, Baudelaire) and the cold green future of an Antipodean hillside.
First published in 1984, The Island anticipates some of the elements of diasporic literature as we now know it – ever-fading memories, religious pressures, an immigrant exclave – but Melina and her friends are always insistently specific, refusing to become allegories for the 20th century refugee experience.
- The Island by Antigone Kefala (intro. Madeline Watts) is available from Transit Books, details.
