Claire Jansen is undertaking her PhD with a research scholarship at the University of Tasmania. She is based in the city of Hobart, which is somewhere between Melbourne and Antarctica on the map. Claire is writing her dissertation on the effect of Australia’s post WWII migration history on popular representations of Australia’s national identity. Her work crosses the fields of cultural, adaptation, film, literary and migration studies, and frequently touches on the themes of language, identity and belonging. She also tutors in Gender Studies and works part-time with the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre on their young writers’ program. As well as academic writing, Claire writes poetry and fiction. Some of her work can be read here: https://utas.academia.edu/ClaireJansen or here: http://claire-jansen.tumblr.com/
Australia
On (re)claiming my bilingualism (by Lauren Godfrey-Smith)
I’m writing this from my brother’s house in Melbourne, Australia, where outside the window in front of me are the same (or similar) Monet-esque winter skies, red 
tiled rooves, and native birdsongs that I remember from growing up in Tasmania. When I was a teenager, I left Canada and moved to Australia, and by the time I was in my early twenties, I had a stronger sense of Australian citizenship and identity than I’d ever had about being Canadian. Yet, my persistent Canadian accent and the almost daily question, “Where are you really from?” caused a kind of ‘identity dissonance’: In my heart, I was an Australian with a long family history and strong cultural heritage, but I was marked as a Canadian by the way that I spoke English.
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