Creative artists, musicians and storytellers from migrant and refugee backgrounds in Australia and in other multicultural countries throughout the world explore their own ambivalence in relation to identity and belonging years after permanent settlement in their new home, and surprisingly, even writers and artists from subsequent generations. Smaro Kamboureli, a bilingual Canadian poet and literary critic of Greek heritage, refers to the literary phenomenon of biculturality as ‘a struggle between languages’ since the writer who experiences such a division is ‘the bastard child of the coming together of two selves of two geographies of two languages’. Antigone Kefala specifically shows this struggle in her paramythi Alexia: A Tale for Advanced Children, a semi-autobiographical, figurative story with varied narrative perspectives. Specifically, her tale shows how learning a new language is a linguistic and conceptual challenge as well as an ideological struggle between communal and individual ways of being for non-English speaking migrant writers.

Alexia reads as a socio-ethnographic comment on the challenges faced by migrants. The writer plays on words when raising the spectre of controversial historical events. Technically, she employs a style of writing that appropriates various oral traditions, including the oral stories she listened to in her formative years in Romania and the storytelling traditions used by other cultural groups she encountered in her travels to Oceania. She begins her historia (story) by parodying Indigenous folklore stories, ‘Once upon a time’, yet not so long ago, in a large island [called ‘Te Kore Roa’] in ‘the South Pacific, south west of Pago Pago’, but her translation of the etymological meaning of this place, as ‘The Wide Spread Nothing’, recalls Australia's colonial history with its claim upon Indigenous land based on the idea of terra nullius, which literally means land of ‘nothingness’. Kefala's reference to this Pacific Island, but especially its politically charged association, shifts the narrative beyond depicting a specific place to encompass the pervasive world reach of the colonial mentality with its varied racist, sexist and orientalist manifestations. The description of this place as having been ‘discovered many centuries earlier, by accident, while an explorer was pur-suing a giant octopus’, shows the entanglement between folklore myths and the rationalization of histories.