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Looking for Alibrandi: Historical Context

Historical Context

Essay on Looking for Alibrandi by Alice Pung

When I first read Melina Marchetta’s much-loved book, Looking for Alibrandi, I was around the same age as Josephine Alibrandi. It was the first Australian book I discovered that did not ‘try hard’ to depict youth, class or ethnicity. When you are a young adult, you innately have what Hemingway considers crucial for every serious writer: a built-in bovine-excrement detector, to put it euphemistically. You know how to recognise an earnest voice, and sift it from disingenuous voices that might be more technically sophisticated.

Source: Reading Australia

WWII internment of Italians in Australia remembered on 75th anniversary of war's end
Article by Tom Major from ABC North Qld [15 Aug 2020]. Ingham local David Robino was just four years old when his Italian-born father Solotore Robino, who had been naturalised as a British subject for 24 years, was arrested at dawn and taken south to be interned.

"They came during the night or early morning, I was probably fast asleep when they took him, but there was a lot of crying after," he said.

From LitCharts, a summary & analysis chapter by chapter
Includes the themes present throughout the summary & analysis of each chapter.
Looking for Alibrandi: Summary & analysis
Josephine is really two different people at the beginning and the end of the book. In the beginning, Josephine is overdramatic, poised to react to her Italian background and her illegitimacy. At the end of the book, Josephine began to achieve emancipation. She has learnt that she has blown her problems out of proportion, that not everyone is about to execute her for being Italian and illegitimate. Josephine’s interaction with the other characters has brought this about. She faced quite a number of challenges in her final year.

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