Much poetry written in Australia still tends to be more influenced by an attachment to the West – a cultural space geographically further away than Indonesia or south-east Asia. This is true not just in the poetic Anglo-sphere but also in the experience of poets like πo who address the experience of southern European migrants, a group of migrants Fanoy argues is much more assimilated into Australian society than refugees fleeing Asia and the Middle-East. Fanoy more explicitly links the two with her poem ‘You know’:
Examined by the medical officers of the Immigration Department, we all acted “normal” sorry, nothing was ever noted down, not even my persistent heart murmur stopped my mother acting like a Pioneer we saw “How the West Was Won” before we left, and my mother said: “You know, you just keep on rowing the boat” and she did
Again, the allusions in this poem feel much more familiar to me than do the particulars of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. As an Anglo-poet born in Australia, poetry concerned with the experience of migration has been a staple of my education in local writing and yet rarely does it feel derivative. The migrant experience is ever-changing and Princes by night is welcome in its exploration of unfamiliar territory so close to home.
