Description

An Opal Sky Sets Over Bolshevik Gully: An Illustrated Memoir of Life in Coober Pedy, 1958-1980

“My Multicultural Australia Story” is a transmedia celebration of Australian multicultural identity. Co-ordinated through new Australian digital publisher Opal Sky Media, it consists of ebooks, films and other multimedia content exploring just what it means to be “Australian”, especially in the views of Australia’s large (and increasing) migrant / immigrant populations.

For context: how does being Czech-Australian differ from being, say, Indian-Australian, and within the latter, what are the individual characteristics that define a Hindu-Australian identity in comparison and contrast to those that define a Sikh-Australian identity? How does the lived experience of being in Australia over time (sometimes decades spanning generations) differ between diverse multicultural populations with intersectional points of identity construction? Such questions as these bring to an Australian multicultural context the issues facing ethnographic and auto-ethnographic researchers in the West, and, notably, even China.

While parent discipline ethnographic studies of cultural identity as lived experience have sought to address the topic of a national identity construction in terms of social construct theory, “My Multicultural Australia Story” focuses specifically on auto-ethnographic accounts, less Academic studies than personally narrativized transmedia digital publications based on (and even anthologizing) accessible first-hand memoirs, documents, personal movies, photographs and music (often archival in nature) created by migrant / immigrant Australians (of successive generations) and their families. On the principle of show, don’t tell: the first transmedia installments in the “My Multicultural Australia Story” series are offered as examples of such content in a transmedia format:

Vol. 1, #1: “An Opal Sky Sets Over Bolshevik Gully” | illustrated e-book (PDF) ISBN# forthcoming
A first-hand memoir by a Czech first generation “New Australia” who first arrived in Australia by boat after several years in post-WW2 refugee camps in war-ravaged Germany, and sought to strike his fortune as an opal miner in the South Australian outback town of Coober Pedy, the opal mining capital of the world.
[Available for free download at the Opal Sky Media publisher website.]

Vol.1. #2: “The Men from Bolshevik Gully” | YouTube video presentation
A detailed, experimental home video of the reunion between the Czech “New Australian” author of Vol.1, #1, now in his early 80s, and his estranged son as they jointly travel to their former family home town of Coober Pedy, bonding once again as they re-live the experiences of a shared past and notice how the town has changed over time.
[Available for video-on-demand viewing at Opal Sky Media’s tie-in account at YouTube.com]

Vol. #1, #3: “Jiri: Child of the Lebensraum” | YouTube video presentation (forthcoming)
Anthologized interview extracts with Vol .1, #1 author Czech-Australian Jiri Cettl as conducted by his son over several years (2012-2015) and exploring his experiences of life in post-World War Two refugee camps in Australia as a “New Australian” and how that affected him. A profile of identity as a name listed on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Survivors database,
[Forthcoming for viewing at Opal Sky Media’s YouTube account]

This first transmedia volume thus tells the story of a Czech-Australian immigrant in three parts, each utilizing differing media and related content conventions: the first part of the story is a digital book, the second part is a movie (edited from original home movie footage) and the third part is an assembled overview and home living space observational video. All parts examine Australian culture as the lived experience of the author in the exploration of his identity as (Czech-)Australian as centered on place and place memory. It is the first such multi-part transmedia volume in a newly launched ongoing auto-ethnographic transmedia series / imprint, the first of its kind in Australian digital publishing.

Indeed, submission to this “My Multicultural Australia Story” series is open to any Australian of migrant / immigrant heritage who documents their lived experience of Australian identity (on their own terms) in single or multiple media: as ebook manuscript, home video (including mobile phone edited), photographic anthology and/or other forms. So too, Opal Sky Media offers its transmedia network and digital publishing services to contributor work publication and international distribution requirements. For further information, or for submission details, please visit the Opal Sky Media website, the coordinating central hub for the “My Multicultural Australia Story” series.