The Bilingual Cockatoo

This book is a study of biographies and autobiographies of Italian Australians. It looks at full-length life-writing texts, including accounts of the Italian Australian experience of war-time internment, success stories, narratives of trauma and grievance and life narratives as a form of ethnography. There is a variable zoom focus, ranging from a whole chapter devoted to a single text, to surveys of a dozen or more texts in each of four chapters. A final overview maps out a chronology and typology of Italian Australian life writing relating it to immigrant life writing generally. Given its topic, the book has a tightly integrated double analytical focus. On the one hand, it studies the textual strategies deployed by the writers, and, on the other hand, it explores the experiential dimensions highlighted by the texts.