Invisible Words: Cultivating Multilingual Australian Literature

Australia prides itself on its multicultural identity. This identity is increasingly explored in Australian literature. Yet these narratives are predominately constructed in English, and there is little support for cultivating multilingual writing and literary translation. Despite the lack of support, multilingual Australian literatures do exist, and have existed for centuries, dating back to Australia’s First Nations’ oral, multilingual storytelling traditions. The challenge is to not only document Australia’s multilingual literatures, but to nurture Australia’s literary translation tradition to cultivate a space for multilingual Australian literature within Australia’s literary canon. Prioritising monolingual English literature rejects the nation’s multilingualism, and thus ignores key perspectives through which to examine Australian society. This article firstly analyses multilingual Australian literatures from a historical perspective to examine why multilingual literature has not been actively cultivated as part of Australia’s literary canon. It then highlights key multilingual literary projects from 2010 to explore how multilingual Australian literatures are finding space within the sector and what barriers need to be overcome, and how they can be overcome, to truly foster a multilingual Australian literature that is representative of the nation’s history, landscape and voices.