It must be said that because of the way in which the task of selecting works was approached there is much which is missing from these pages. According to the editors’ prologue, they saw their primary task as the selection of authors rather than the selection of works, and in selecting authors their criteria were that these ‘should have had works published in book form’ and ‘that their works should have attracted favourable criticism’ from authoritative critics in Australia or abroad! This has led to the exclusion of works of undeniable quality by writers who cannot fulfil these criteria. Works by writers such as Chris Papachristos, Dimitris Tzoumakas, and Peter Lyssiotis to name but a few.

It would I think have been preferable if the selection had been made on the basis of the perceived quality of individual works rather than on such criteria, but given the criteria, the selected authors comprise a representative sample of the range and quality that exists in Greek-Australian literature. The sample includes first and second-generation Greek- Australians as well as authors who write in Greek, authors who write in English, and authors who write in both languages (though only Aristides Paradissis has work in both English and Greek included in the anthology). The criteria used by the editors, and presumably considerations of space etc. have also played some part in the decision-making process, have allowed them to include a total of thirteen authors, most of them contemporary – the only exceptions being Alekos Doukas and Costas Malaxos-Alexander, who are also the only authors who migrated to Australia prior to World War II. Taken collectively the career of the selected authors spans a relatively short period, 1950 to the present day, but the works presented show a fairly broad diversity of styles and attitudes.

The anthology is arranged chronologically by author, the key date being the year in which each author published his/her first book in Australia, and opens with ‘The Promised Land’, an excerpt from Alekos Doukas’s posthumously published autobiographical novel Under Foreign Skies (1963). This excerpt was chosen, I suspect, for the sentiment it expresses rather than for its quality, this being after all a bicentennial offering. Although Doukas is not a particularly impressive writer, the excerpt is interesting in that it describes a response on the part of the protagonist to his new country of residence which is unusually positive – despite the widespread unemployment and poverty he encounters (it is set in 1927). The imagery suggests adoption. Greece is ‘the mother that gave birth to him and brought him up’, and he remembers how she had appeared to him as his ship rounded Cape Sideron of Crete:

she had stood upright on the rocks of the Cape, had taken her black scarf from her venerable head and had waved her last farewell:

‘Go, my son, with my blessing. I can do no more for you. Go and meet your other disinherited brothers. Persecution and treachery have forced me to deny my children.’

Australia on the other hand is represented by Stratis’s landlady Mrs Mitchell, an elderly widow of Scottish descent, who tries to comfort him one night by telling of the hardships she has lived through and is in her turn comforted:

and the young man put his arm around the desolate old woman and gently pushed her white-haired head until it rested on his chest.

That’s why Australia is no longer a foreign land for Stratis Mourizos from Mytilene of Lesbos. That night, on the verandah in Carlton, Stratis took priceless Australia with reverent hands and hid her deeply, very deeply in his soul.

Thus Stratis adopts a new mother, and is in tum adopted by her – adoption is not a one-sided affair.

‘The Promised Land’ by Doukas seems to me a particularly apt introduction to the anthology – an initial statement which, because of the editors’ decision to favour works by the selected writers which are concerned with ‘Australian-based themes in keeping with the celebratory character of the anthology’, is taken up, expanded, made more complex, more ambivalent perhaps, as the attitudes of each author to the experience of adopting a country is, however tangentially, revealed.

The anthology presents all texts in both Greek and English, but not the introduction, which is only in English. To the newcomer to Greek-Australian literature it is not easy to tell in every case which is the language of the original text, since this is only clear where a work is followed by the name of the translator, but where a work has been translated by the ‘resident’ translators, Mary Mylonas and John Vasilakakos, no acknowledgment follows. Nor are Philip Grundy’s translations of some of Dimitris Tsaloumas’s poems acknowledged.

The quality of the English translations is on the whole good (many of them are joint efforts by the translator and the author and can therefore be regarded as having been endorsed by the author), but some of the poems in traditional rhymed verse, which of course pose special problems to a translator, more often than not insurmountable, do suffer badly, and there are occasional lapses such as Mary Mylonas’s rendition of the admittedly difficult but pleasingly concise and rhythmic phrase ‘All’ afise ki atta evrike’ as ‘He found things different from what he left them’.

On the whole this should prove an enlightening and interesting anthology to anybody who wishes to dip into Greek-Australian literature, and the introduction by Con Castan is both thought-provoking and exhaustive, and further enhances this book’s value as an initiation into a new branch of Australian literature. For those wishing to explore further there is also a very useful bibliography. It is a shame however that such a worthwhile and ambitious volume should be marred by more typographical errors than can easily be forgiven, but perhaps in this I am biased since my translation of Dimitris Tsaloumas’s ‘Investigator’s Report’ seems to have accumulated more than its fair share!