'The World Is Your People': The Time of the Peacock and the Evolution of an Australian Identity

To Doireann MacDermott I owe the pleasure of being introduced to Mena Abdullah and Ray Mathew's engaging collection of stories, The Time of the Peacock.1 She gave a sympathetic reading to the book at a session of the 1988 EACLALS conference in Nice, and due to my interest in the discourse of Muslim fiction in English, her paper prompted me to examine the text. My article here represents a sequel to Doireann MacDermott's informative discussion that appeared in the conference's proceedings.2