AustLit

'For many years after we arrived in Australia, the most important connection to our former home in Cyprus was my mother's photo album. as one would expect, most of the images in the album are of my mother's family: her parents, siblings, aunts and uncles. Every now and then, a page is devoted to my father's relatives. There is nothing wrong in admitting that these figures are supporting players; their role is to fill in the background, rather than to play a determining part in the story. Guided by my mother's prompts, I used these images to draw together some of the threads that made up our family history, at a time when my knowledge of this history had been foreshortened by the dislocation of starting over. Here is a photo of a handsome uncle who went to London to study chemistry but married too young and did not finish his degree. Next to him is his serious looking older brother, who was both a high-ranking officer in the colonial police force and a clandestine member of EOKA during the time of the troubles. Nearby is a portrait of my mother's cousin dressed in her neatly ironed high school uniform. She is standing next to a side-table on which rests a vase filled with freshly picked cyclamens. The photograph was taken just before the operation intended to correct a vision problem that left her partially blind. Looking directly at the camera with a mixture of pride and youthful embarrassment, her eyes betray no hint of this fate.' (Publication abstract)