Reviewed by SHERIDAN GRISWOLD
Correspondent

Culture is ... Australian Stories Across Cultures: An Anthology is an unusual collection of poems, essays, drama and short stories. There are 52 selections in this volume by 45 different authors. The editor is one of the many migrants to Australia. Anne-Marie Smith grew up in France, but has lived in Australia the last 23 years. She worked in the Cameroons, Zambia and Papua New Guinea (PNG). Her doctorate was on "PNG English".

Though the collection encompasses migrants into Australia from all over the world, it also embraces the writings of indigenous Australians whose cultures go back 40,000 years, as it is a product of the Multicultural Writers Association of Australia.

This wonderful selection of cultural stories and poems, memoirs and thoughts begins with an Australian poem, by Mulparinni-Doris Kartinyeri, called "Dreaming", reminding us of the early life of the continent when "the land was ours to roam, we lived our lives, we learnt to share, we were willing to share this land of ours ..."

The surprising variety of short items, each one better than the last, includes writing of at least 30 nationalities by people originally from outside Australia. The president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, John von Doussa, has written an introduction affirming the importance of hearing all the voices to foster cross-cultural respect and "encourage a sense of belonging among all Australian citizens". He points out that the racial discriminatory white policies were dropped in the 1970s, along with its assimilationist tendencies and now is welcome. "This willingness to understand the experiences of others, to become familiar with the unfamiliar, and to recognise the common threads of humanity that run through all our stories is a vital precondition of a fair and compassionate country".

The first selection is by Bel Vidal, giving us the tragic story of Alberto Domingo, who died in the 11 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City, where he worked as a bag handler for Qantas (airline), outlining his extraordinary life before that job. He was known as "Pocho" and ran a Spanish language station on SBS for 13 years and was also known for a programme called Folklore, Tangos y Rosas. Radio Ethnic Australia was launched in 1975 as a lifeline to non-Anglophone migrants, "The ignored and silent millions, mostly workers who bent their backs in tough jobs to keep the nation running". It began with a budget of $49,000 and went on the air in seven languages in Sydney, eight in Melbourne, getting many unpaid volunteers who spoke community languages. Among those was Pocho. "It is a credit to this society that it allowed him to feel Australian without having to give up his cultural identity and the use of his mother tongue" (page 12).

There are poems from diverse cultures from around the world and wildly different stories, riotously so, making a fascinating mix. Bruce Pascoe wrote Honeypot-Two Shots Two Pots and Miss Hermansberg is about a gallery in Port Headlands where a show of Aboriginal paintings is being mounted. The characters in it are wittily presented, for example Honeypot: "She's wearing an old windcheater with arms too long so that the cuffs roll over her hands and she has to keep flicking them back. The grace of the movement is astonishing. When she picks up the pool cue and addresses the white ball men's jaws drop. Well they are miners from the Western Desert even though they're philosophically opposed to black people. Well, it is Australia. But Christ she's beautiful" (page 37).

Margaret Betts wrote Proud Flesh, the story of her Polish Jewish grandmother who married into wealth in Warsaw and then the gradual departures of various family friends escaping discrimination against Jews. Grandfather keeps talking of departure, but nothing is done until finally the letter of invitation comes and soon grandmother and daughters are on the platform of Warsaw station bidding the mother farewell. In Melbourne, "that proud bloom, had been uprooted and transplanted, but the graft was only partially successful. Her stem became stiff and woody inside, while her daughters grew and thrived. She stood in shops, blank-faced behind her daughters in the dark cardigan and too-long skirt. They ... enquired in soft tentative voices about blueberries. The Italian laughed. No blueberries ... grandmother closed her eyes. Why did they laugh? She feared their bold eyes and strong white teeth, the gleaming silver crucifixes in their coiled chest hair. When she opened her eyes, the pale hand of her youngest daughter was resting inside the brown, thick-knuckled fist of an Italian. Grandmother studied his leather apron while Ruschia and this man exchanged currency. Ruschia had given silver and received dun-coloured coins in exchange. Grandmother, tongue-less in this new world, was alive to the symbolism of this. She'd spun a net of fears around her daughters. The mesh was fine, strong, invisible. Yet the youngest, my mother, Ruschia, slipped through" (page 60).

Gloria Corliss, a Goori girl, wrote of My Identity. Her father who came from Queensland was dispossessed, but he taught her songs and dances from the corroborees of his childhood  while they sat around laughing and clapping to encourage him. Her mother had lost all her culture because she was separated from her mother at 11 in western Queensland and forced to work on a cattle station until she married her father. Then, fortunately, their grandmother Ngthali came to live with them and passed on her knowledge of her culture and her love of the bush. Ngthali had been a little girl when her parents were massacred. Outback station owners took her in and taught her to cook, to clean and to read and write. Gloria writes about how this skimpy knowledge of their culture remained important to her throughout her life and she imparts it to her children: respect for family, for the aged, respect for each other, compassion and to have a go - "there is no such word as can't". 'Aboriginal traditional culture typified by hunting and gathering habit, song cycles, dance and ceremonies underpinned by age old law still, and always will hold a fascination.'

Besides poems, stories and memoirs, there is also radio play by Heather Nimmo that is 25 pages long. She is from Western Australia and has written more than twenty radio plays.

She now teaches drama at Flinders University in Adelaide. This drama is called Awa the Crow Road and features the voices of seven Australians, each of whom speaks English with a vastly different mode and accent.

Central to the collection is the question: "What is culture?" This is tackled by Mahsa Anderson in a seminal story This thing called culture. She is a Baha'i whose family was forced to flee Iran when she was 12. She is now a psychologist and has worked in marginalized communities in Australia. Her memoir is startling for what it reveals. To learn English made her feel even more different. She bonded with other ESL children. She married young and it did not last. At an Aboriginal community in Western Australia she began to find herself.

These are only samples of what is available in this rich collection. With 26 languages and cultures in Botswana, even various dialects of Botswana English, one wonders when such a collection will appear here. e-mail sheridangriswold@yahoo.com