Rock-star, comedian, "working class man": Popular memoir and celebrity migrant life writing in contemporary Australia

Life writing as world literature, or even Australian popular memoir as world literature, is as much about the world being in life writing as it may be about life writing being consumed and marketed across the world. As a settler colony, early Australian life writers produced vast amounts of autobiographical writing, though little of this was regarded as “literary” in the aspirational sense. More recently, the “transnational turn” in Australian literature has also tended to focus on literary fiction and the literary canon. As Ken Gelder asserts, this shift has been crucial in understanding how “As a literary trope, Australia is itself ‘just one code book among many,’ routinely criss-crossed by other literatures, localized in some instances and woven into transnational semantic networks in others.” In this chapter, we explore how, as autobiographical forms have assumed more and more significance in Australian literature in the twenty-first century, the migrant personal story has been a key mode through which contemporary Australian audiences encounter and navigate the global context of their own lives.