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...
When I was 10 months old, my parents bought tickets to escape Vietnam on an overcrowded fishing vessel with 363 people onboard. It was really scary for them because they had heard many stories of boats capsizing, and of pirates. They had got married just before the...
My father was a freedom fighter against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. When I was 3, he sent my mother and us kids to Pakistan to give us a better life. As a result, I grew up in Pakistan, but visited my father in Afghanistan every few months. In that time, he...
