The View from Down Under: Perspectives on the Literary Achievements of Hellenism in Australia and the Attitude of Greece

Abstract

The literary production of the Greeks in Australia reveals a history of almost one hundred years, a wide range of genres, diverse rhemes, styles and linguistic structures, as well as a significant quantity and varying levels of quality, in both Greek-and English-language works with the latter increasing steadily. Although this literature forms a corpus which can be evaluated on its own merit, it is not an independent lirerary body in irself because of the two languages in which it finds expression and the two linguistically different readerships it addresses. The determining crirerion of its national identity and the best contender, among other criteria, seems to be language. Regarding Greece's attitude towards the literary achievements of Ausrralia's Greeks and of the Greek writers of the diaspora in general, this paper reaches the conclusion chat Greece is characterized by a lack of familiarization with the lirerary works of the diaspora Greeks and indifference concerning the inclusion of this Greek-language literature into Modern Greek literature hand in hand with the works produced in Greece itself.