The Australian writer’s 1984 novel, The Island, is a hypnotic work of fiction about the border between life and art.
MADELEINE WATTS*
This essay originally appeared as the introduction to The Island (Transit Books).
The first time I heard about Antigone Kefala was when I was in my second year of university. She was described to me by an older writer as “a preeminent poet from Sydney.” At the time, I was majoring in English at the University of Sydney, but Kefala’s work had never been assigned, and most of the writers I associated with Sydney were long dead. I remember going to the bookstore just off campus that afternoon and browsing the shelves, but I couldn’t find anything by Antigone Kefala, and quickly gave up the search.
This is not an uncommon story. Antigone Kefala was a writer who spent much of her literary career flying under the radar. In 2010, the same year that I first heard about her, Kefala wrote in her journal about being left out of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. She was, understandably, upset that certain writers—she among them—had been “totally effaced.” The anthology included work by early British settlers, excerpts of 19th-century drudgery, and Kefala’s contemporaries, like David Malouf, Shirley Hazzard, and Gerald Murnane. In an interview with the literary journal HEAT around the same time, Kefala said, “I have been so far out of any critical line in Australia in terms of writing. Apart from one or two people, no one has approached the work as a serious intellectual activity.” For a long time, it seemed like the only story to tell about Antigone Kefala was a ghost story: her persistent absence from any mainstream literary recognition, in Australia, and elsewhere.
Antigone Kefala was born in the Romanian city of Brăila in 1931, a city on the Danube close to the modern-day Moldovan border. Kefala’s parents were Greek by heritage, but her family had lived in Romania for three generations by the time their daughter was born. After World War II, as a wave of political unrest swept through Romania, the family fled. Kefala arrived in 1947, at age 16, in Greece, a country that was on the brink of civil war. The family lived in refugee camps set up by the International Refugee Organization, and set about applying to emigrate. Rejected by Australia because of an X-ray that showed a small shadow on her mother’s lung, the family instead left for New Zealand in 1951. Later, Kefala described the shock of the green dampness of New Zealand, the difficulty of communicating in English, and the feeling of first being unwanted, “made to feel that our faces, our gestures, belonged to this outside category with which the locals did not want to become involved.”
In 1960 Kefala moved, for the last time, to Sydney. The Sydney she arrived in that year was very different from the city I grew up in. This was the era of the White Australia policy, which had only just been relaxed to allow migration from continental Europe but continued to bar nearly everybody else. Women were still not allowed to drink in pubs. The tramways were being pulled up and expressways being built, ushering in a future of traffic jams and dodgy buses that made getting around when I was a teenager a misery. Indigenous Australians remained unrecognized in the constitution and unable to vote, and Indigenous children were still being forcibly and routinely removed from their families, a group of children known now as the Stolen Generations.
It was also the first hint of an aperture opening between Australia and the rest of the world. Kefala sailed into Sydney Harbor on a summer morning, full of light and heat and movement, its most seductive time of year. She described those first days in Sydney as something like a homecoming. “My past in Romania, in Greece, came back as a meaningful experience in a landscape that had similar resonances,” she wrote. “The landscape was already feeling familiar, allowing me to survive.” Survival, in many ways, equaled writing. It was only once she arrived in Sydney that Kefala became a writer.
After spending long days teaching English to other migrants, Kefala would go to the Mitchell Library and spend her evenings writing before catching the bus home. Her first language was Romanian; she learned French at school, and she became fluent in Greek as a teenager. Only in her 20s, in New Zealand, did she learn English, her fourth language. But when she began to write seriously, Kefala wrote in English. “I feel you have to live in a language to be able to write in it,” Kefala said in a 1994 interview. “I couldn’t write in Romanian or Greek or French because they were languages that I had somehow passed through. English was the language I was actually living in.” But it was many years before Kefala made headway with publishers. She gradually began to suspect, from the editorial comments that did come back, that there was something about the issues that preoccupied her, and something about her language, which didn’t quite “fit.”
The Alien, Kefala’s first volume of poetry, was released in 1973 by Makar Press, a small publisher that had sprung out of a student magazine at the University of Queensland. Although it was her first big break, her style was so different from what amounted to the (admittedly tiny) poetry mainstream in 1970s Australia that there were internal debates among the editors about whether it should be published at all.
To an outsider, it might seem peculiar the way that Australia’s literary establishment expends time arbitrating how “Australian” or “un-Australian” a work of art is deemed to be. The US and the UK are united as the Anglophone centers of the world—around which all the other Englishes orbit, and against which the rest of us attempt to stake our territory.
Kefala’s work was always fighting to find critical recognition within the boundaries of that small territory, and frequently wound up on its edges. So many contemporaneous reviews and interviews belabored questions of identity, migration, and “multiculturalism,” and questioned where Kefala “fit” in the Australian literary landscape, without really ever talking about Kefala and her work itself.
When I did finally track down an Antigone Kefala book, it was many years after I’d left Sydney and moved to New York. In America, I found that being Australian had become a part of my identity in a way it hadn’t been at home, simply because it was now the adjective I heard most frequently used to describe myself. I was beginning to write seriously, and trying to figure out where I might fit in a national tradition. I read more Australian literature in my first years in America than I ever had before.
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That was the quest I was on when I found The Island, on an infrequent trip home in 2018—out of print, in the Australian section of Sappho Books on Glebe Point Road, siloed off from the other fiction. I read it quickly, in the unsettling and familiar humidity of the guest room that had once been my childhood bedroom. After that, I made my way through everything I could get—Kefala’s poetry, her Sydney Journals and Late Journals, and the novellas collected in Summer Visit.
The Island, originally published in 1984, was one of Kefala’s first works of prose. A review in The Sydney Morning Herald used what would become familiar adjectives to describe Kefala’s work: haunting, cool, dense, impressionistic. Another review, in Outrider, described The Island as having a “European sensibility.” All of these descriptors were true, and yet none of it got at the complexity that made The Island so resonant and so beautiful.
The Island isn’t confessional, but its autobiographical underpinnings are clear. Its protagonist, Melina, is a young university student living sometime in the mid-20th century, a migrant by way of Romania and Greece, and coming now into her independence. The plot is light, not really the point; the writing is most interested in the process of “becoming,” trying to find a new kind of form in which the experience of being alive will crystallize. Kefala’s writing is always processing the present through the past, her protagonist’s experience of the present necessarily strung through and in reference to Greece, Romania, New Zealand, because how could it not be? This movement between an intensely imagined nostalgic past and the hyperreality of the present is what constitutes the hypnotic quality of The Island.
When The Island was published, Australian literature was dominated by the big, blustery novels of mostly male writers like Peter Carey and Tim Winton. Writers were beginning to reckon with the genocidal reality of Australia’s colonial history, and the books that got the most attention were the ones that lent themselves best to being included on high school curricula. Something like The Island was radically different. On that humid afternoon when I first read The Island I was struck by the self-contained language, the intensely visual quality of the prose, the fluidity with which Kefala moves between memories and Melina’s present day, as if the border between the two were indistinct. It reminded me of other novels I had taken to calling “thin works of 20th-century womanhood” that I was reading around that same time, books by Marina Tsvetaeva, Clarice Lispector, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Christa Wolf. Each of these books struck me with the sense that I had discovered a long-lost great aunt I closely resembled.
When I reread Kefala now, it’s precisely that quality of transnationality I find most poignant. I too have become somebody whose experience of the present tense is colored by my relationship to the many places I have lived in: I bicycle through Berlin behind a girl in Doc Martens and she merges with my sister in Melbourne; I drive across the Central Tablelands of New South Wales babbling to my husband about how everything reminds me of Southern California; the claustrophobia I feel in New York after an August storm reminds me that my body still expects the “cool change” of a Sydney February. This is what it is like to live along the edges, in the in-between spaces, of different countries, cultures, languages.
During the 2000s Kefala’s work began to be published by Sydney’s Giramondo Publishing, the champion of Australian authors who have experienced late-career revivals in America, including Gerald Murnane and Alexis Wright. When Kefala died in 2022, I learned of her passing from a eulogy sent out by Giramondo. Only a few weeks earlier, she had received the Patrick White Literary Award, given to a writer whose life’s work has made a significant contribution to Australian literature without being adequately recognized. Now, three years later, The Island gets a new lease on life. I only wish it had come sooner. There are still far too few of us who whisper Kefala’s name among ourselves, as a “preeminent poet from Sydney.”
The copy of The Island sitting beside me as I write is the same one that I bought in 2018. A sticker inside attests that it was originally bought at the Feminist Bookshop in Lilyfield in 1984. It smells like Sydney. By which I mean it smells like my mother’s makeup-stained sewing box in the mildewy cupboard, like the yellow photo albums lined up in my grandparents’ bookshelves below the VHS tapes; it smells like the humidity of that childhood bedroom. It smells as though the elements of Sydney—saltwater, southerly winds, rotting fig and jacaranda blossoms, eucalyptus leaves baking on sandstone soil, roast lamb, Vegemite toast, passion fruit vines, magpies and cockatoos and lorikeets—all of it—had been absorbed by the glue and ink and paper. Because at the end of the day, it was Sydney that defined Antigone Kefala’s work, and it was there she came to rest after decades of wandering. My copy has traveled three different continents, and two of the world’s oceans, to sit here on my desk. But when I fan the pages from right to left, this book is the closest to home I could possibly be.
*Madeleine Watts is a writer of novels, stories, and essays. She is most recently the author of Elegy, Southwest.
To Koskino 