Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
In the title poem of Ouyang Yu's first collection, Moon Over Melbourne, a homesick Chinese poet compares the Australian moon to the moon celebrated by countless poets in his homeland. The moon is the same, and at the same time different. Like the ancient Chinese moon, it inspires poetry - and madness - but in Australia poetry is born of frustration and loss, of everything this foreign moon fails to be. The "bastard" moon over suburban Melbourne even looks Australian; "mooching" along in an "air-conditioned," "I-wouldn't-care-less" kind of mood, it mimics the country's indifference towards the newcomer and towards everything else: "you hang on you all right you no worries mate" (8-10). This is the moon the migrant longs to conquer. Both Australia and China are colonizers, claiming the moon as their own, but they colonize differently. While Australia is content to plant "the rag of a flag/ among your rocks" and then retreat into lazy indifference, China has tamed the moon, sinicized it and so, it would seem, claimed ownership of its symbolic territory. Lulled into a complacent sense of security, a "multicultural sleep," Australia makes no effort to defend this territory of the imagination that, in the night, can be repossessed by the lonely stranger:
ANZSRC / FoR Code
2005 LITERARY STUDIES
Publication Details
Ommundsen, W. 2005, 'Sleep no more: Ouyang Yu's wake-up call to multicultural Australia', in T. Khoo & K. Louie (eds), Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong.