AustLit

'How can we tell the story of places where families with limited means came and went and made a living of sorts, places that act as meeting points between the old and the new, the long established and the newly arrived, where each generation is given the opportunity to understand itself as different from a previous generation and, hence, able to break away? How can we describe the emotions that characterise these places, emotions that contain just enough volition to push a person out into the world in search of something better? How can we convey the manner in which these places remain behind, providing shelter when the noise of all that they had made possible becomes too confusing, or the feeling of strangeness experienced when we return to these familiar places and discover that everything we thought we understood about their nature was simply a product of our wants and needs? How can we turn this unsettling realisation into a story, not just for ourselves, but also for the people who brought us to these places, people that we loved and spurned and whose lives are bound to ours in ways too complex for us to understand?' (Introduction)

'‘The novella has a fundamental relation to secrecy’, write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. ‘Not with a secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable.’ A little later in A Thousand Plateaus, they clarify what they mean by linking ‘the form of the secret’ to a moment of perceptual disturbance: ‘You enter a room and perceive something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not yet been done. Or you know what is in the process of happening is happening for the last time, it’s already over with.’ From this scenario, it’s easy to extrapolate that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the novella is principled on a particular experience of time, one that is marked by a feeling of belatedness – of finding ourselves in the position of having to ask, ‘What happened? Whatever could have happened?’' (Introduction)

'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)