Book review: How to be Australian by Ashley Kalagian Blunt

Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s memoir How to be Australian charts her emigration from Canada to Australia with her new husband, beginning in 2011 and ending in 2016. Through the process of learning their new surroundings in Sydney, navigating cultural quirks, and appreciating the wildlife and landscape, Blunt is startlingly honest about her struggles with anxiety, and the difficulties faced in the first few years of a new marriage.

This book seamlessly walks the line between fun and light-hearted (see: unravelling the mysteries of the flat white), and earnestly self-aware (her discoveries of Australia’s treatment of refugees and history of largely unacknowledged colonial atrocities), and doesn’t skip a beat in weaving from one to the other. This balance makes the book easily readable, but not at all flippant or heedless in its assessment of modern Australia as a nation with much work to do in healing and growing. Her blend of patient cultural and personal problem-solving, and sober self-awareness make this novel an interesting and thoughtful read.

This review was first published in The Big Issue ed. 616, 17 July 2020.