Turkish-Australian transnational life writing with Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne

Guy Hansen: Good afternoon everyone. My name's Guy Hansen. I'm Director of Exhibitions here at the National Library of Australia. I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians on this land. And I give my respect to Elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We are coming to you today from Ngunnawal and Ngambri land on which the National Library of Australia is located. This afternoon's presentation, Turkish-Australian Transnational Life Writing is by Dr. Burcu Cevik-Compiegne, an honorary 2024 National Library of Australian Fellow. The Library's Fellowships programme supports researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collections through residencies of up to three months. The National Library of Australia Fellowships are made possible by generous philanthropic support.

Burcu is a lecturer at the ANU Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies and convener of the Turkish studies. Her research focuses on the social and cultural legacies of the First World War and politics and practises of remembrance of the war in post-imperial and post-colonial nations. Her research uncovers intercultural experiences of the war and its current memorialization amongst diasporas in Australia. Her current research explores Turkish diasporic life writing.

In her presentation today, Burcu will share her exploration of Turkish language sources in the National Library of Australia's collection to uncover different forms of life writing produced in Australia following the labour migration scheme between Turkey and Australia in 1967, and provide key insights into outward and inward-looking reflections and aspirations of Turkish-speaking communities that shaped contemporary Australia and that were shaped by Australian politics and everyday multiculturalism. And I think this is a really interesting paper and I think it complements the current exhibition we have on at the Library in our temporary exhibition gallery, which is Hopes and Fears: Australian Migration Stories. And there is some Turkish material in that exhibition and it's really great to see how this detailed research is making use of our collections, just like the exhibitions also bringing those resources to a broader public. So, I'd like to invite Dr. Burcu to come up and give her paper.

Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne: Thank you very much, Guy for the introduction, and thank you everyone for joining us today. I also would like to start by acknowledging that we are standing on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and I would like to pay my respects to the Elders, past, present, and emerging, as well as other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who might be here with us today or watching us online. So, I also would like to thank the National Library for providing me with this wonderful opportunity. As Guy said, I think this is a very interesting space for people to learn about Australia's history, particularly in this case, Australia's history of migration and multiculturalism.

Before I talk about my fellowship, actually, I also would like to thank in person the Fellowship team and copyright team for all their support, particularly Sharyn O'Bryan, Simone Lark, who might be here, Kelly Torrens, Hayley da Quinta, and Dawn Gillies. I hope I'm not forgetting anyone. It's been wonderful working here in the past few months, and you will be seeing a lot more of me as I will take you through this very early stages of work in progress.

So, my aim coming into this fellowship was to see through the Turkish language collections, various Turkish language sources that are kept in the collections at the Library to identify bits of life writing. Conventional forms of life writing such as autobiographies and memoirs are rarely produced by Turkish, especially early Turkish migrants in Australia. And this is not to say that they did not record their experiences, their individual stories and collective stories as well. So, newspapers are undoubtedly the richest sources that I have encountered in that they are packed with multiple forms of life stories. And these include creative writing, poetry, some short stories, interviews, public announcements, and even advertisements.

National Library has the most comprehensive Turkish language newspapers, newspaper collection in Australia. So, this is the entire list of the papers that are kept partly or entirely at the Library. So when I started, my aim was to go through this entire collection looking for specifically the bits of creative writing. But I found it quickly impossible to overlook the value of these papers as a whole and dismiss everything surrounding those little pieces. So, these fragmental bits of life writing tell many powerful stories together and as part of the whole. So, I started paying a little bit more attention to the whole, starting with the immediate context and the medium itself.

So, as I adopted this more granular approach to reading the sources, I had to limit the sample size. So, the ones that are in bold are the ones that I actually looked at. But even that, I couldn't go through the entire collection, all of the issues of those papers. So, I chose a random range of one, two or more years depending on the size of the material collected. And I also looked at books and a few of, so educational material as well. I try to focus also my attention to 1970s and 80s because I find this period particularly interesting for the reasons that I'm going to discuss in a minute.

So, the context of this research. I mean, prior to Turkish Labour Migration Scheme that was signed in 1967, there were only a few hundred Turkey-born residents in Australia, likely from also non-ethnic Turkish backgrounds, and a few thousand Cyprus-born ethnic Turks who had migrated to Australia on British passports in the post-war era. So, this bilateral agreement is often considered as one of the cornerstones that signalled the dismantling of White Australia Policy. Turkish migration, however, represented an expansion of the idea of white race rather than the obsolescence of the idea itself.

In 1971, the front page news in one of the community newspapers actually is the first one that was published in Australia called Türk Sesi, featured the Turkish Ambassador, Mehmet Baydur's words, "Turkish people are of the unmixed white race." So these were the words that he used to respond to the Japanese Ambassador Shizuo Saito's book who allegedly referred to Turks as non-white people who are being admitted to migrate to Australia. He continued, "The writings of Mr Saito will go no further than contradicting what Australian people think about Turkish people." Before the residence and employment of Turkish citizens in Australia was signed, there were debates about whether Turkish people were Asian and therefore not compatible with Australian society, or were they Southeast Europeans like Greeks and therefore more suitable.

The Labour MP Clyde Cameron, who later became the minister of labour and immigration under the Whitlam government, reassured the parliament that the Turks were not dark a skinned people who have nothing in common with the Australian people. Turkish migrants may not have been aware of this racial mapping prior to their arrival, but they were familiar with racial and civilizational discourses in which Turkey's place was always uncertain, but negotiable. As a Turkish Republic and their Ottoman predecessors envision the country as a fully fledged member of European consortiums and institutions of their time, they understood the vital importance of showcasing their whiteness and resisting any categorization otherwise.

In Europe, as in Australia, the yardsticks to measure one race's place in the civilizational ladder were multiple and we're selected strategically. So, one interesting article from Tercüman suggested that 'Görgü', which is the title of the piece, which I translated as 'civility', but also 'good manners'. This article suggested that civility was shared between Europe and Turkey. And indeed Europeans learned a great deal from the Ottomans about social propriety. While the author deplored what he described as the unholy combination of British snobbism with American vulgarity in Australia, he recommended further migration from Europe to resolve Australia's civility problem. The article emphatically situated Turkey not in the Middle East. It offered validation of Australia's racial anxieties while also positioning Turkish people as part of the solution, not the problem.

The collection offers many such insights into how early Turkish migrants negotiated their place in a white Australian transition. Their own anxieties of losing culture interacted with Australia's anxiety of losing its whiteness.

Turkish migrants also had a mitigated assessment of multiculturalism that supposedly supplanted white Australia. A long time after the term was adopted as part of the public policy discourses, in the 1980s, it was still not clear exactly what was meant by multiculturalism. Policy makers themselves did not have a unified vision or a definition of multiculturalism, which didn't help. Turkish migrants who were some of the main stakeholders were not even sure that it was something good or useful to them.

When prime minister of the time, Bob Hawke announced his national agenda for a multicultural Australia in 1989, although the agenda was not groundbreaking in any sense, a Turkish journalist celebrated the long overdue clarity of the largely misunderstood term, multiculturalism. It often had negative undertones that are noted in many articles and submissions, and I think it's because the multitude in multiculturalism often meant competition for this relatively new, relatively small and small community who was distrustful of their competitors as well as the authorities.

Welfare organisations complained about limited funds allocated to them. The editor of Kaynak Newspaper, for example, complained both in several articles and open letters to Stuart West. He was a minister for immigration and ethnic affairs under the Hawke government that the Turkish organisations were not allocated sufficient funding proportionally to their population. He further complained that 40 Turkish-speaking social workers in Melbourne were subordinated to supervisors who were allegedly hostile to Turkish people. SBS and its precursor Network 0-28 was regularly criticised for favouring only certain cultures, and generally the viewers were, Turkish viewers, were dissatisfied with the Turkish language offerings of the channel. One reader of Tercüman said that the channel and its Turkish viewers had mutually given up on each other.

How much an ethnic group benefited from multiculturalism depended on how well they were organised. Turkish organisations did not rate their community well in terms of organisational skills, educational and linguistic attainment compared to other often more established communities, which was not necessarily fair comparison. They also often blamed each other for being divided, particularly along their political lines. Multiculturalism was associated with being sidelined and cornered. In one opinion piece, multiculturalism was likened to a whirlpool that would suck their identity. They did not necessarily understand multiculturalism as living in a more hospitable society, but as running the risk of shedding one's identity and being left with none.

A Turkish language textbook for children, this is like high school, I think year nine, if I remember correctly, students. So, a reading featured a mother who advised her child, "Don't forget that you are living in a multicultural society, contribute to multiculturalism with your own culture. If you fail to do so, multiculturalism will destroy you and you'll end up without an identity like a leaf that is swept away by the wind."

Working parents often did not have the support of larger families and community and prohibitive prices of travel to Turkey meant that children born in Australia or growing up in Australia had very little opportunity to be immersed in Turkish language and culture. The onus was largely on the parents to transmit their language and culture to their children. One of the most recurrent and teams that was treated over and over again in local newspapers was children becoming estranged from their parents leaving home as soon as they turned 16 without any survival skills, counting exclusively on the youth allowance to escape parental authority.

In newspaper editorials, parents did receive a lot of sympathy for their hardship, but they also received a lot of contradictory parenting advice. And I mean a lot of it, often starting with statements that 'we're not here to blame the parents' before proceeding to do exactly that and pointing out all the parenting deficiencies that were held responsible for poor educational outcomes among the Turkish children and high rates, especially in the 1980s, although not as high as the national average of drug addiction and drug-related deaths. Parents were told that they were too harsh, too permissive, too old-fashioned in their ways that were pushing their children away. One commentator argued that Australia offered them opportunities that their homeland did not. Therefore, this country had a right to claim their children as their own.

A lot of parents considered their children's identity as a price to pay. Workers who came through the labour migration scheme did not expect to settle in Australia permanently. So, this is, I think, key to understanding these attitudes. Their aim was to save up enough money to secure themselves a small business or property in Turkey and return to more comfortable life back home. 1980s is an interesting period to observe because it's a time when it became clear that this had never been feasible and was becoming less and less so. In the 1980s, there was still a lot of attempts to return, but not many of them had encouraging outcomes for others to follow suit. This was a period when the earlier migrant families had to come to terms with the fact that this was the place where their children grow up and belonged.

A poem published in a newspaper in Melbourne and then collected in an anthology narrates the story of a parent. I'm not going to attempt to translate the poems because it's inherently difficult, but also I just would like to give you the gist of the story that I'm interested in. So, in this one, it's a story of a parent who was so concerned over protecting their earnings and possessions that they didn't realise that they let go off their children and values. And every time they opened their mouth, they were silenced by the material comfort that they would not find in their homeland. Another poem said that they got a house, a pocket full of money, but their little ones turned Aussies, and there is no instruction that will make them come around. "They don't understand our traditions," it says, and no love or respect left in the family and the household is in chaos.

So, newspapers were the most accessible spaces for people to let their stories out. And poetry was the most common form in which these stories were composed. They were simple, concise, and practical from a readability and layout point of view, and they were effective ways of recording experiences that were otherwise not considered worthy of publishing. Some of these poems spelled out specifically this intention of the authors. So, I took this example, but I've seen this in many others.

So, this is a poem submitted by a reader, tells us when they got here as a family, they were happy at first, but then their struggles started when his wife lost her job, their children got married, and then he had his work compensation, which is also a very common theme apparently due to permanent disability, and then everything went south. He says that he had by then learned a little bit of English, so he took to horse racing, greyhound racing lotto, and drinking. The link between learning English and all of these habits is interesting as well. So, at home there was constant fighting and everyone blamed him for it. So, he felt isolated and resentful, so he wrote this poem. He finishes this poem with this verse, "I wrote these so that everyone knows," which I said again, it's a very common way to end these poems.

So, the story itself is not exceptional, but although it's rarely told from the first person point of view, there is no attempt on behalf of the author to apologise or redeem themselves either. So, the poem does exactly what it says, that it's there for the story to be heard and to be on the record.

This sort of direct communication through these archives made me pay more attention to the medium in which these stories were disseminated. Community newspapers started being published as early as in 1971, only a few years after the government sponsored labour migration started in Australia in 1968. So, there were already tens of papers published in Melbourne and Sydney by the end of 1970s. Local newspapers were often run by community organisations whereby the organisation's leaders, board members also assumed editorial and administrative duties in the newspaper. So, in the 1980s, most of these organisations were involved in welfare service delivery through community employment program.

Newspapers were an extension of the service to the community and platforms where their advocacy work could be reported, documented, and gather support. They regularly reported on their in-person or phone meetings or correspondence with MPs, state and federal ministers and crossbenchers.

They had a major agenda-setting mission, which sometimes translated also into policy response. The issues that they brought up as their primary focus was often informed by a clear ideological and political stance that spanned across the entire political spectrum between those tens of papers that were out there. So, this is not to say that every single person who contributed to a paper adhered to its editorial line as these organisations were not hermetic to each other or isolated from the community. So, the writers and contributors moved across, between them and creating a complex network and a shared base of knowledge.

Government was also interested in non-English language papers as they saw them as outlets where government policy could be communicated effectively to the linguistically diverse communities. A research project that was commissioned by the government compared Yugoslav and Turkish newspaper consumption in the mid-1980s revealing a newspaper reading behaviour that was not quite what was expected. Among the sample, the most widely read Turkish newspaper turned out to be Tercüman by a very large margin. So, this was read by 82% of the participants compared to 30% or less for the other ones. So, the research indicated that local content was almost inexistent in the paper other than advertisement pages for local businesses. So, that could be misinterpreted as a disengagement from local affairs, but in fact, it shows the complementary and quite distinct roles assigned to local community papers and the transnational print press. And also there was a much wider range of sources for local affairs at their disposal.

So, I chose to focus on Tercüman as a case study, but there are other examples as well. I chose this one because it was the most widely read at the time. So, Tercüman was one of the most well-read papers in Turkey as well at the time. It also had offices in Germany where the content of the paper was adapted to the local context. Before it started being printed in Sydney, both the German and the Turkish editions were available. People often complained about how expensive it was, forcing the local distributors to give very detailed, and for me very useful, accounts of how much it cost and how the papers were circulated in Australia. So it helps me understand how this invaluable information about how the newspapers were circulated.

Tercüman CEO, Nafiz İllicak personally visited Australia in 1981 to do a market research to print the paper locally. So, this paper that you see was printed in Sydney in Peterson, and it was based on the German edition specifically tailored for the diaspora. The slogan of the paper was, as you see on the top right-hand corner, "Wherever there's a Turk, Tercüman is there." The content from Turkey was specifically relevant to expatriates, not exclusively, but those that were particularly relevant were highlighted. And content that was added in Germany often was left in. They only removed, I think German ads, things that were completely irrelevant here. And also anything that was in German language was removed to make room for local content, which was very limited indeed.

Some of the items, beyond the news items of course, were sourced in other parts of Europe and from the US where Tercüman also had reporters. When the hard copies reached Sydney, they were rearranged by literally cutting and pasting. And by the way, I thank Caren Florance who's not here today, but she helped me a lot for understanding the printing process, the technical aspects of printing industry at the time. So, these were cut and pasted. The local content was often typed and inserted in those places in those plates that were then. Offset printing technology had developed by then, and they would be easily printed daily, actually six days a week locally.

So, Australia was not a dead end of this chain of communication either, information from Australia, also travelled across the globe. For example, when Tercüman launched a campaign to collect and publish readers testimonies from the diasporas to put pressure on the Turkish government to lower the concession fees for overseas workers military service in Turkey, and you see the campaign starting there. There were several submissions from Australia that appeared in the paper.

These diasporic editions of Turkish daily newspapers did much more than reporting news from Turkey. But a more interesting discovery for me during this fellowship, something that I did not anticipate, is that the local community papers also circulated elsewhere in ways that I don't fully understand yet, but I'll find out one day. For example, a Sydney-based newspaper, Yeni Vatan published several poems by someone named, signed their poems by their name. Before joining a little biographic note that stated that the author was born and raised and still lived in the central Anatolian town of Niğde with no apparent connections to Australia, had been sending these poems to the Sydney-based newspaper to be published.

There may have been connections, maybe someone that the author knew, but there's strong evidence that the papers themselves also travelled outside of Australia. In the National Library collections, there's a book posthumously published by Ataol Behramoğlu that you see at the back cover on behalf of Ümran Baran. So, Ataol Behramoğlu for a bit of context, he was an established author and researcher in Turkey, and he was in the 1980s exiled in Europe. And Ümran Baran was a Sydney-based social worker, a respected community leader, and also an editor in Yorum Newspaper. The book is a collection of extracts from interview scripts, from a research project conducted by the Ecumenical Migration Centre in Melbourne. The preface states that 200 people from Turkish background were interviewed in 1985, but I haven't been able to locate either the transcripts or reports from this project.

So, in the preface written by Ataol Behramoğlu, he reminisces how Ümran Baran's name caught his eye as he read Yorum Newspaper, the Sydney-based community paper that was affiliated with the community organisation while he was in exile in Paris. So, how the paper got there, I don't know, but he used to read the paper and he used to appreciate his writing, and then he doesn't remember how they initially established contact, but he ended up visiting Sydney as Baran's guest a few years later.

But people's stories were also connected in interesting ways as the narratives testimonies collected in this book also show. Most Turkish migrants who came through the labour migration scheme did not intend to come to Australia as several stories you see, they talk about how they wanted to go to Germany where they had relatives and contacts. However, by the end of 1960s, Germany and other European countries had severely reduced their intake. So, when people turned up at the Turkish Employment Service to go to Germany, they were told that maybe Australia was a better option.

And I found some of these really interesting, and they're very representative as well, by the way. I mean, this is very common experience. Nobody had heard of Australia. For example, the third one, as you see, they say, well, he had to go to Istanbul to go to Germany if he wanted to go to Germany, but application, so Australia was processed in Ankara, so it was more practical, so he came here. So, it's a little bit confusing, but actually when you put in context, the fact that they did not intend to stay neither in Germany nor in Australia, that explains a little bit how the choices were made. One of them, as I say, there was no particular reason, said, "The girl asked if I would go to Australia instead, and why wouldn't I? I'm not attached to Germany as long as I can make a living," go anywhere. So, that's because the intention was to come back after a few years.

So, I wanted to just say that their expectations or aspirations and hopes in Australia had been largely shaped by the experience of Turkish migrants in Germany. And these connections continue to be maintained. And Turkish people in Germany were also curious and wanted to hear and learn from the experiences of people in Australia.

So, I will come back and close this loop, I promise, but I actually wanted to talk about two poems in particular. I found them interesting for other reasons, and they ended up connecting to these in ways that I didn't expect. So, I did not attempt again to translate these poems. These are probably even more difficult to translate because of their historical and cultural depth. So, these are written in a tradition that exists across a vast geography from Albania to China and composed and performed in many languages with a common repertoire of imagery, tropes, forms, and content. So, these two particular pieces are examples of epic heroic in this storytelling tradition, that privilege the creative use of tropes of hero and villain. These heroes and villains are sometimes historical or mythical characters, and sometimes contemporary to the time in which they're composed as both examples, you can see. The talent of the author comes from the convincing framing of the contemporary figure as the hero, the villain using these tropes available in the vast repertoire of this folk tradition.

So, the first poem was written around the state of Victoria elections in 1992, which saw Jeff Kennett elected premier of the state. So, in the poem, he features as the villain, of course, over Lord of Victoria. Ali Asker makes a powerful and convincing case of using these tropes as well. So, first of all, the power is an essential characteristic of the villain who's always a feudal landlord, nobleman, a sultan, and so on. The opening verses say that he decreed that unions and worker rights and enterprise agreements were unnecessary, and his excellency thinks that he's in some sort of lawless place. In the last stanza, the author realises that there is no escaping these enemies of justice, whether they be Mehmeds or Kennetts, they're all the same, these overlords. So, referring to also the past experience of injustice and connecting the political histories of, I guess, Turkey and Australia.

The second poem depicts Ned Kelly as the epic hero, emphasising his youthful and righteous anger against the nobleman who divided up the land between themselves and fattened up in luxury while people slaved away and lived in poverty. So, he's Irish subalternity and convict origins, which I mentioned as exiled. I guess there's not quite a suitable term for it in this tradition, makes Kelly the archetypal folk hero.

So, I don't have time to unpack everything in these, but this will be certainly something that I'll be thinking about and writing about in the near future. So, watch that space if you're interested. But what I wanted to say, what I didn't know, in a conversation with Ali Asker recently, he told me that the Ned Kelly poem originated from an article that he wrote for a paper in Germany. The paper had been solicited, this German-Turkish paper in Germany solicited an article from Asker about an Australian folk hero. The article received such a claim that Ned Kelly became known as Australian Inge Mehmet, and Inge Mehmet is a folk hero, Memed, My Hawk is the translation and Library collections also have it here. So, it's a four volume masterpiece by Yashar Kemal. He was the master of folk epic storytelling, but his innovation, I guess, was to translate it for novel format. So, the comparison was very encouraging, of course. And so that inspired Ali Asker to write the poem for poetry tradition using the patterns and tropes of these epic stories.

By the way, he doesn't write many poems in this way. If you look at this book, the collection of poems, there are very few of them who look like this. But the choices are interesting where Australian folk mythologies and contemporary struggles are combined with the seemingly timeless storytelling tradition is just an example of how diasporic spatialities and temporalities are constructed.

I'm just going to wrap up here by saying that the significance of the collections emerge from these connections. These are only a small part of the multilingual collections kept here at the National Library of Australia, and this is where they belong, if you ask me, because I mean they are produced by. Although they're produced by relatively small community and for that community primarily, their significance as part of multicultural archives of contemporary Australian history is evident. I don't think I should be even making this point, but if I may highlight another important takeaway from my research during this fellowship is the realisation of the significance beyond Australia.

So, I'd like to emphasise that it's important to understand the local and small doesn't mean parochial and niche. These sources were sites where diasporic spatial temporalities were not just imagined, but they were created through these practises of communication and creative processes as well. So, these sources are material evidence of a connected world that encourages us to interrogate what transnational truly means. So, challenging nations as bound spaces fixed in time and unified entities, maybe a good starting point, but I guess there's a lot more to unpack here and a lot of other things to be critically scrutinised and deconstructed. So, I'll be doing a lot more work on these collections, and I encourage other people to come and have a look as well. Thank you. Oh!

Guy Hansen: No, perfect.

Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne: Ok

Guy Hansen: Thank you very much, Burcu. I wonder if we have time for a few questions if people would like to ask some questions. And could you please wait for the microphone because we are streaming this event and recording this event.

Audience member 1: Thank you for that story. Is there any, what element of your story fits into that narrative? Is there an aspect you'd like to share?

Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne: Oh, that's a very difficult question because yes, so many. I think my story of migration is very different to the ones that I've been looking at. But I think it's hard for me to look at something and not see connections. I guess that my obsession comes from my own experience and change. How this adaptation, this change affects the way people look at their past as well. So, memory is also something that I didn't necessarily discuss today, but I always think about, so how stories of the past are narrated under that light. So, I think my personal experience although might be different, but I think kind of gives me that sensibility to, I don't know, those sort of narratives that I see in other people's writing. But thank you for asking that question.

Audience member 2: Thank you so much, Burcu. That was genuinely mind-blowing. Thank you very much for that. I was very much taken back by the idea of the diaspora modalities and temporalities and what you said at the end that the local in this case is transnational because we always think that the local has been very much localised, but you've proven through your [unclear] that it's very transnational. It was extending from Sydney, Melbourne to Germany to Turkey and back.

I was also thinking, and the material evidence of a connected world, that's really fascinating because we need more work done on that because we always think that we live in an insular world. But when we delve into some mediums, we find that it's more. To that, I was thinking of the medium of the newspaper itself, the local newspaper, because I come from the same region as you, from the Middle East, and the newspaper has always had the role of... It's a literary medium. It was always a place where poetry was published. I think of some of the most famous Arab novelists had their sequels published in newspapers before they became compiled into a novel, which was their bestsellers.

Do you see that as a way of, again, your idea of a local being transnational, that the diaspora brought that medium with them? The newspaper, it's not just about local news and politics, but it's more about a literary medium. And do you think, is there a place for your research to think about the constitution of diaspora in the sense that you said they were interested in each other across the board? Would you think of it that way? Thank you so much.

Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne: Yes, absolutely. Thank you. There's so much. In fact, well first of all, about the medium, yes, absolutely right. Some of the authors saw it as an entry point to a literary scene as well. So, we see actually a lot of the published poets at some point, or. They also published in newspapers. Either they started there or they continued on, but it was a place to test creative ideas, I guess. But some of the things that I've seen, it's also interesting how there are instances where I can see the editorial vetting process working. So, for example, there's this note written to someone who submitted. So, what I'm interested in is not so much the literary standards or quality of the work submitted is their genuine expression of emotions and experiences. But there's an instance in one of these papers say they didn't publish the poem, they offered criticism instead saying that, "Thank you for your submission, but your poem, you need to do more work on it." And I found that very interesting how there were also gatekeepers, so it was open, but at the same time, I guess they're still barriers to entry.

Yeah, so, I think your other question about diaspora, yes, so the connection between these different places. So, often I do transnational history. In transnational history, generally the trend is to challenge the nation as a contained unified entity and challenge that idea by showing all the messiness of actual real-life experiences and connections. But I think often the answer to, "Okay, so let's not take nation as the framework." So, what do we take? People turn towards alternative group identifications and so on. But no matter how small you get, my point is that it's still not unified, it's still not contained, it's still messy. And I think a better idea conceptually to deal with this mess is maybe not try to organise it. And I use terms like 'Turkish community', all these things actually don't hold up to scrutiny when you dig a little bit deeper. So, what do you mean by community? What do you mean by Turkish and what do you mean by this? And so on. So, yes, it's an interesting thought process. Yeah.

Guy Hansen: Burcu, I might ask a quick question.

Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne: Yes, absolutely.

Guy Hansen: I was interested, I'm thinking about various diasporas and the newspapers, and of course there's a feature of that in the exhibition where we show some of the rich newspaper collections, which are available in language. And I'm curious as to the political position of these sorts of newspapers and whether they were involved in putting strong positions about domestic politics in Turkey and also Australian politics. I saw a photograph of Bob Hawke there. So, yeah, just were they trying to mobilise this community either back in their homeland or in Australia in certain political positions?

Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne: Yes, absolutely. I mean, as I said, they first of all have this agenda-setting role. They say, they focus on certain number of issues in particular, and from that very clear political position. And they try to create consensus. They try to exert also influence on policy makers, both in Australia and in Turkey. And they try to do that by, I mean, the newspapers themselves, I guess they create the community in a way by doing that, by creating a space where they can constitute themselves as a lobby group more or less successfully depending on. And sometimes it's very narrowly focused on one or two issues. For example, one of the papers that I looked at, it was primarily concerned with Northern Cyprus. The editor is Northern Cyprus Turk. But I found a lot of other things as well in there. And it was still interesting how it relate to other issues outside of its single issue politics, if you like. Yeah. So, I don't know if I answered your question, but-

Guy Hansen: More to come.

Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne: Yes.

Guy Hansen: Any more questions today? One more question here. I think this will be the last question. Thank you. Microphone is on its way.

Audience member 3: Thank you very much. And thank you for your presentation, Burcu. I'm wondering about some of the class and gender and even generational age issues that you uncovered through the newspapers, partially through who gets to publish in the newspapers and what you kind of noticed about that as you were reading them. But also what we can learn about the sort of Turkish migrant experience in Australia through these documents and through these life experiences in terms of where they fit into the Australian class system, where Turkish women and men were finding themselves within Australian gender spaces. And is there any sort of shift in, in sort of. Yeah, I guess sort of family life and all of those things I'd love for you to talk a little bit about?

Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne: Well, that's a very good question. And one of the things that struck me was how, as I said, a lot of these community newspapers were affiliated or connected in some ways with community organisations who are involved in welfare, social work. And a lot of social workers tended to be women, and yet in the newspapers they're totally absent. Sometimes there's an interview with a female social worker and sometimes there is a message from a Turkish doctor, female doctor, and so on. So, I don't quite know or understand why they were not more involved in newspaper editing, publishing. But I know that in radios, for example, it might be different. Radio was another important medium actually, that I did not look at in this fellowship. So, I focused on the newspaper, so it might be misleading how present and how influential women were in that community groups. But yeah, so that was the first thing.

Women in all these opinion pieces, columns and those kinds of spaces, and even when they submit poetry, it's often about love, loss, those kinds of things and bulk of poetry that was submitted by men, I mean, I took a few examples of men writing about family, but often they wrote about politics. The poetry is also about politics. So, that was something that I didn't find. So, that was the first thing.

And so the class relations and so on, it very much depended on the political lines of the paper. Some of them are very class-conscious and others rejected the relevance of class as a structure. But I think ethnicity was a bigger issue for those particularly who did not admit the relevance of class even. But ethnicity then became very important. Yeah. So, there are those kinds of differences across different papers, so I can't, like I say a blanket statement about this, but I think the gender issue is more across the board. Yeah.

Guy Hansen: Thank you very much, Burcu.

Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegne: Thank you.

Guy Hansen: That was fascinating. And before we. Let's thank, Burcu, yeah. And just a few plugs for you. Our next fellowship lecture, Australia's Journey with the World Bank will be delivered by fellow, Dr Nicholas Ferns on 12:30 on Wednesday, the 27th of November. So come along for that. If you enjoy these talks, you can go to our website and you'll be able to find recordings of other recent talks from our fellows. And you can also find them on the Library's YouTube channel. So, thank you for attending, and please join me once again in thanking, Burcu for a fascinating presentation.