EDITOR’S NOTE: 

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.