(2/2) Over time, we became really good friends, but he was so consumed with work that I thought that nothing was ever going to happen. So after a year, I decided to go to uni. The week I got accepted, I told him, ‘I'm going to Mitchell College in Bathurst.’ But...
We had expectations of Canberra being a pretty city by a lake, but when we were taken to Civic in the centre of town, there was nothing much there, and we all said, ‘Where is Canberra?’ I was one of 150 German carpenters and joiners chosen to come out to Australia to...
One day, when I was 12 years old, I had just finished making lunch when suddenly we heard bombs falling in our suburb. Outside, we saw houses being destroyed around us and people being killed so everyone just started running. I lost my family in the chaos, but I ran...
When I was just a baby, my dad left Italy to go and build accommodation huts for the Snowy Mountains Scheme. It was winter when he arrived, and the men had to stay in tents in the snow at first, although later they stayed in the accommodation they built. Three years...
My mother was very beautiful. Her job was to attract miners to the bar she worked in, and to get them to buy drinks. She also used to drink with them, and this resulted in three pregnancies, each one year apart, all with the same man – my dad, a French engineer in the...
My father met my mum at a party when she was 16 and he was 27. He had come from Lebanon on a scholarship to study Engineering in Communist Russia in the 1980s. They dated for a couple of years, got married, and conceived me. Then he had to return to Lebanon to pay...
