Islands of Multilingual Literature: Community Magazines and Australia’s Many Languages

Australian literary studies has for some decades recognised the significance and contribution of multicultural writers to the national literary landscape; however, it has shown less interest in the multilingual nature of much of this writing. This article brings into focus a number of Australian magazines in which multilingual literature has been promoted, from the 1920s Brisbane publication The Muses Magazine, to the 1990s multicultural, multilingual women’s magazine Ambitious Friends, which featured creative work in Arabic, Lao, Spanish and Vietnamese. Further illustrations, specific to Vietnamese Australian writing, will be provided from Integration: The Magazine for Vietnamese and Multicultural Issues, published in Bankstown from 1993 to 2003. Underpinning this discussion of multilingual magazines is the argument that writing and reading across languages can move readers to new perspectives on culture, identity and language itself.