Recent Perceptions of Rural Australia in Italian and Italian Australian Narrative

Abstract

Italian settlement in rural and outback areas of Australia during the late 1800s and early 1900s has remained a largely unsung saga while most Italians migrating to Australia after 1947 ultimately settled in urban areas. Few narrative writers have written about non-urban Australia in substantially social realist terms. More recently, this trend had taken a post-modern perspective in a few Italian Australian and Italian writers who depict the Australian outback as providing a solution to the protagonists' life quest and promote a discourse on nature as a dynamic, positive and vital element that contrasts with man's static negativism.