Playwright and comedian Vidya Rajan didn't grow up in Australia – so when she was asked to pitch her ideas for a stage adaptation of Looking for Alibrandi, she approached the task with the appropriate amount of irreverence.
"I didn't grow up with Alibrandi … I don't have the same relationship [to it] that some people have," Rajan says.
"In some ways, I think that was good, because there was a lot of pressure associated with it. I didn't even realise how much it meant to people."
Rajan is an Indian Tamil first-generation Australian, who grew up in Kuwait and moved to Perth in 2004, when she was 14 years old.
When she told people she was working on the stage adaptation, they would react in "extreme and nostalgic" ways, she says.
"[I realised] it's very, very important, and it's very widespread — so don't f*** it up.".
Following a run at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre in July, Rajan's adaptation, directed by Stephen Nicolazzo, opened at Sydney's Belvoir this week, bringing the coming-of-age story to a new generation.
Published 30 years ago this month, Melina Marchetta's classic young adult novel is one of Australia's most-loved books, cemented by an award-winning film adaptation in 2000, starring Pia Miranda and Greta Scacchi, and also penned by Marchetta.
It tells the story of Josephine (Josie) Alibrandi, a Sydney teenager, scholarship student and daughter of a single mother, who is torn between her cultural heritage and her urge to fit in with her mostly white peers at a private Catholic girls' school.
Over the course of the novel, she experiences casual racism and profound loss, as well as first love, while also meeting her father for the first time, and untangling a murky family history.
The book spoke especially to migrant children, and more generally to anyone searching for a sense of belonging.
Rajan's perspective as a first-generation migrant allowed her to write the play in a way that would resonate with migrant communities who came to Australia more recently.
"Even if it's 2023, some communities are experiencing the same things that Josie is," she says.
Her own understanding of the way some migrants move seamlessly between languages — gained from listening to her mum talk to her aunt — even made it possible for her to "instinctively" work out which dialogue should be spoken in either English or Italian.
When the cast read the script, they told her that her choices were "pitch perfect".
"That was a weird cross-cultural solidarity … I was really zeroing in on the way that women talk to each other, and women in a domestic space talk to each other," Rajan says.
The playwright
Rajan pulled the narrative forward in time to the mid-90s, as John Howard came to power, bringing with him an era of conservative, neoliberal politics, including a focus on the plight of middle-class "battlers".
"I've emphasised a little more of the class stuff, which I think got really ushered in in the Howard era," she says.
When she studied law at the University of Western Australia, Rajan encountered people who she describes as having grown up with "the right to rule". She tuned into their perceived sense of entitlement to bring to life characters like Josie's crush, private boys' school captain John Barton, and her school rival, Ivy.
"I was from [a] public school, but when I got there [to university], everyone knew each other. They're all from these private schools: very white, [with] a level of wealth I did not realise was a thing," Rajan says.
"The way that people grew up accessing power was just mind-boggling to me."
When she first read the novel, Rajan was in her 20s, staying at a hostel in Newcastle for the National Young Writers' Festival. She found herself drawn most to Christina, who became pregnant with Josie when she was still a teenager.
Rajan says: "Being somebody who has become an adult and works and has to do things, I was like, 'Wait, she was raising a child all throughout this time, when I'm ordering Lord of the Fries?'"
Rajan and director Stephen Nicolazzo wanted to update the narrative to incorporate ideas around intergenerational trauma, and to flesh out what Christina and her mother Katia were doing during Josie's final year at school, with Christina in particular grappling with her sense of self as her daughter turns 18.
Josie's journey too has evolved, becoming less about her being "emancipated" — to use the language of the novel — and going on to study law at a prestigious university, and more about becoming a part of her community.
"In the book and the film, Josie's is a very individualist coming-of-age story where, at the end of it, she's like, 'I'm free and I can be whatever I want to be,'" Rajan explains.
"I wanted to turn it more into: freedom lies in being able to hold the pain of the people around you — your mum and your grandma; and being able to break that cycle of history."
The author
Melina Marchetta started writing Looking for Alibrandi when she was 19 years old and living at home with her parents, after she had travelled to Italy for the first time.
"I was always told that if I went to Italy, I would step off the plane and I would think, 'Oh my God, this is where I belong in the world,' after feeling as if I belonged in two worlds all my life," Marchetta says.
"I did not feel that at all."
Still, she was inspired by the stories of her relatives, who spoke about how it felt to watch members of their family head off to a new life in Australia.
She says: "When I came back home, I remember saying to my mum: 'I want to write a story.'"
Marchetta also wanted to write the novel to write herself into Australian literature, having never seen herself in the books she was reading.
"It was like I didn't exist; it was like my world didn't exist. When that happens, you just don't feel as if you're important in your society," she says.
Now, as the novel celebrates 30 years in print, Marchetta again lives in her childhood home, with her mum and daughter – a move instigated by home renovations, then the pandemic.
"It's strange to be in the same space as you were when you first wrote the book. I think I was meant to be here on its 30th anniversary," she says.
At the same time as the book turns 30 – a new edition is released this month – the stage adaptation opens in Sydney, where Marchetta will be bringing along her mother and daughter at the end of October.
"I just love the fact that my mum and me and my daughter are watching a story about three generations," says Marchetta.
She appreciates the way Rajan focused on all three women in her adaptation.
"At 17, these women had very different lives to each other, in very different eras," she says.
"I think of Katia, who came [to Australia] around the time of the war and was probably sent out here on her own at 17, just not knowing the world. Then you've got Christina at 17, who's having a baby and feeling very isolated. And then you've got Josie at 17, who's really profited from everything those two women have sacrificed."
What makes Looking for Alibrandi so timeless, says Marchetta, is the way it speaks to a feeling of otherness that all three Alibrandi women experience – whether that otherness is cultural, or in terms of other identities, or just a feeling of not fitting in.
"There's always part of us that is trying to work out what our place is — whether it's within a family, or whether it is within a school, or whether it is within a society," says Marchetta.
People from different migrant backgrounds still tell Marchetta that reading the book felt like it gave them permission to write about their own culture in a similar way.
"I really love the place that Alibrandi has claimed in other people feeling that they can write their story," she says.
But there's still a long way to go in terms of representation of minority groups in the arts, as Marchetta told ABC TV's Art Works earlier this year: "I feel as if there are stories still to be told. They're the stories that we need to pass down, and they can't be forgotten."
The actor
Looking for Alibrandi star Pia Miranda knows what it means to see yourself represented for the first time.
Reading the book for the first time in her mid-20s was "the first time I'd ever really felt connected to something," the actor says.
She borrowed a copy of the book from Kick Gurry (who landed the role of Josie's first boyfriend, Jacob), to read ahead of her audition.
"I've still got Kick's copy somewhere … When I read the book, I really fell in love with it," she says.
"I just had this instinct that I was meant to play it [Josie]."
Miranda identified with many elements in the story: like Josie, she went to a strict Catholic girls' high school, where she was a debater; the descriptions of Nonna Katia's air-conditioned "good room", covered in plastic, struck a nostalgic chord.
Much of the novel is concerned with Josie's experience between two cultures – struggling to fit into the Anglo-centric private school world, while at the same time feeling disconnected from the traditions of her Italian grandmother.
It was another thing Miranda could relate to: her father is Italian, while her mother's side of the family is Anglo Australian.
"All my friends were blonde and white and surfed, and I was half-Italian … I definitely felt that weird struggle inside me," she says.
"There's very subtle examples in the book of feeling like you just look a bit different. And I definitely always felt like that, but I hadn't really seen it or heard it articulated in a book until then. I was discovering things about myself by reading Looking for Alibrandi."
One of the remarkable features of the movie is the way it moves seamlessly between English and Italian, mirroring the way migrant families speak in real life.
The Italian language elements were not easy for Miranda.
"I can't really speak it because my father came out [to Australia] in the 50s. He faced such racism and such abuse for being Italian that he was scared to teach me Italian," she explains.
"I think it's very easy to forget how Italians were treated, even when I was growing up in the 80s."
Now, Miranda says, Australia has largely moved on from vilifying Italian migrants, although racial prejudices remain – targeting people from different migrant backgrounds.
She believes that anyone who has experienced migration to Australia can find something that speaks to them in Looking for Alibrandi.
"It's a migrant story that transcends being Italian. And a lot of the people that have spoken to me over the years [and said] that it means a lot to them are from different backgrounds, whether it be people from Muslim or Asian backgrounds," says Miranda.
Miranda attributes the longevity of Looking for Alibrandi to Marchetta's writing — its humour, depth of emotion, and the way it articulates the inner lives of young people – as well as how it represented people who may not have seen themselves in a novel or on screen before.
"For a lot of people, Alibrandi was the first time that they saw their own experience reflected back on screen … For people to, for the very first time, just see themselves back and laugh at stuff, because they've experienced it, was such an incredible thing," she says.
The fan
Sydney comedian Concetta Caristo remembers how it felt to see herself represented in both the book and film Looking for Alibrandi.
Like Josie, she is a third-generation Italian Australian who attended a Catholic girls' high school in Sydney. She recognised the inner Sydney streets Marchetta described in the novel, and her family also held an annual Tomato Day – where they would get together to make passata.
The film version of Looking for Alibrandi opens with Tomato Day, immediately offering a view of the cultural traditions of Alibrandi's family. When Josie leaves early to go to the beach with her friends – much to her mother and Nonna's disappointment – the tension between both parts of her life is immediately underscored.
"I don't think I'd had something [before] where I was like, 'I know exactly what they're talking about,'" Caristo says.
"I still remember feeling that little thing of being different …. [thinking], I'm not fully Italian but I'm not fully Aussie like my friends."
An example: she was the only one in kindergarten eating salami sandwiches, while other kids had Nutella.
Then one day her teacher put out fruits and vegetables and asked the class to name them. Caristo raised her hand, and confidently pointed to one, labelling it "finocchio".
"I just remember the looks of everyone being like, 'huh', like I'd just spoken alien. And she [the teacher] was like, 'Oh no, it's fennel.'
"Then I went home: 'Mum, we call this finocchio, it's not called finocchio.' And she was like, 'It's the Italian word for fennel. That's just what we say.'"
Now Caristo is known for her stand-up about the Italian Australian experience – the exact kinds of experiences she first saw represented in Looking for Alibrandi.
"[My jokes] come from a place that is deeply earnest. It's who I am. It's the people around me. I have such love and can joke about it because I adore it," she says.
It's the coming-of-age story at the heart of Looking for Alibrandi that helps it stand the test of time, Caristo says.
"It's a book about finding yourself and navigating your culture and your family and your past and your future … Ultimately, she [Josie] has that acceptance and that growth. That's something I want to be doing for the rest of my life."
Looking for Alibrandi runs until November 6 at Belvoir St Theatre.
