13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

PUNTA-SAASTOMOINEN, Maija-Liisa

Cultural Interaction in Australian-Finnish Literature

The first Finns came to Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the gold mines attracting about 200 immigrants between 1851-1869. Australia’s developing economy offered jobs in coastal transport, mining, building and agriculture and by 1921 there were 1 358 first generation Finns in Australia, of whom only 131 were women. Between 1921-1939 about 2 000 Finns migrated to Australia, but in the 1950s immigration from Finland to Australia increased, owing to the subsidy provided by the Australian state. Encouraged by a reduction in travel costs, about 7 000 Finns immigrated to Australia between 1967-72. Today there are about 9 000 first generation and over 17 000 second generation Finns in Australia.

Immigration/emigration offers a natural opportunity to study cultural interaction and integration - and, at the same time, literature in a wider context. What is the identity of Finnish people? What is the meaning of their own literature for those living in Australia? What kind of life events, a biography, are we able to read through their stories and interviews? What kind of cultural interaction are we able to read in Australian-Finnish literature? The literature does not offer facts in this case, only fiction through which we can see how the writer analyses their own experiences.

The subject of my thesis is the texts of Australian-Finnish people. Most of them are biographical or memoirs, but there is also poetry, religious or war literature. I examine cultural interaction through the concepts of integration, identity, ethnicity and locality/globality/glocality. Immigrants are people who have crossed national and cultural borders. The process has been a long and intensive one, and has required skills in intercultural communication and the strength to find and accept a new identity.