The aim of my paper is to analyse the relationship between migrants and the urban context of arrival. Considering Sydney as one of the most evident examples of multicultural aggregation, I would like to show how the integration into the new society passes through the right not only to live that space, but also to represent it and to sign it.

The margins where migrants are located—that are both imposed and chosen—become a perspective, a standpoint from which to begin to know and to construct a new and personal reality. In a way it is a passage from the oral to the writing stage, that is a consciousness and willingness to be part of the new society/culture/nation.

In the texts I analyse, the migrant authors not only write about Sydney, but they also—and above all—write Sydney: they do not just describe the new streets and buildings, but they show how migrants have modified them. The expressive form they choose thus becomes a form of localisation: the desire to narrate their own condition represents a means to free themselves from the limits and spaces in which Australian society has inserted them.

In these texts, writing becomes a visual art to unsettle Sydney’s urban landscape in order to settle (in) a ‘new’ Sydney, which does not simply include migrants, but is the result of their presence.