Peter Skrzynecki is best known in contemporary Australian literature for his poetry, fiction, and edited collections of multicultural writing. His main concern is with immigration and the displacements caused by the changes of place and culture, together with a close interest in the natural environment. Skrzynecki was born on 6 April 1945 in Germany, shortly before the end of World War II. His Polish-born adoptive father, Feliks Skrzynecki, who had been in forced labor in Germany, in 1948 married Skrzynecki's mother, Kornelia Woloszczuk, a young Ukrainian woman working in Germany when war broke out. The family left Europe and, as part of the Australian postwar immigration program, arrived in Sydney in November 1949. Initially, they lived in migrant camps at Bathurst and then at the Parkes Migrant Centre, a former Air Force training base in central-western New South Wales.

In 1951 the family moved to Sydney to the working-class suburb of Regents Park...