| Summary: | From Exodus to the American Dream, from Terra Nullius to the Yellow Peril
to multicultural harmony, migration has provided a rich source of myth throughout
human history. It engenders dreams, fears and memories in both migrant and resident
populations; giving rise to hope for a new start and a bright future, feelings of exile and
alienation, nostalgia for lost homelands, dreams of belonging and entitlement, fears of
invasion, dispossession and cultural extinction. It has inspired artists and writers from
the time of the Ancient Testament to the contemporary age of globalisation and mass
migration and it has exercised the minds of politicians from Greek and Roman times to
our era of detention centres and temporary visas. This reading of Asian-Australian
picture books will focus on immigrants’ perception of the ‘new worlds’ of America and
Australia. The Peasant Prince, a picture-book version of Li Cunxin’s best-selling
autobiography Mao’s Last Dancer, sets up tensions between individual ambition and
belonging, illustrated by contrasts between the Chinese story ‘The Frog in the Well’ and
the Western fairy-tale of Cinderella, to which Li Cunxin’s own trajectory from poor
peasant boy in a Chinese village to international ballet star is explicitly related. Shaun
Tan’s The Lost Thing and The Arrival trace the journey from alienation to belonging by
means of fantasy worlds encompassing both utopic and dystopic visions. By way of a
conclusion, the paper considers the nature of myth as evoked and dramatised in these
texts, contrasting the idea of myth as eternal truth with Roland Barthes’ insistence that
myth is a mechanism which transforms history into nature.
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