Cirrus@Austlit

'Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a childhood, 1939–1948 was first published in 1995 in Germany, and in English translation in 1996. It purported to be a Holocaust memoir: the author wrote of his experiences as a six year old in concentration camps in Poland. Doubts were raised as to its authenticity, and eventually the memoir was revealed to be a ‘hoax’. Wilkomirski (whose actual name was Bruno Grosjean at birth) had been given up for adoption by his mother, who was poor and the victim of an accident that left her with brain injuries. I argue that the author of Fragments could not find a sense of identity or belonging as an adoptee, but did as a Holocaust survivor, and through a long and complex process he came to produce a narrative that explained his life as he saw it. I discuss the case in detail to build a picture of Wilkomirski as an adopted person rather than a literary hoaxer, and utilise the work of Betty Jean Lifton, who postulated that the damage done to him in childhood reverberated through the years into his adult life. A discussion of trauma (and trauma theories), as it relates to adopted persons and their life narratives, and the Divided Self theory adapted by Betty Jean Lifton and Jo Sparrow, are employed in providing a reading of Fragments as a troubled adoptee memoir, one that is embedded within the ‘false’ or ‘hoax’ memoir of Holocaust survival.' (Publication abstract)

'In the process of writing my memoir about living with my adoptive parents, I have had to reconstruct their lives through the objects and things that they left behind. Our communication as a family – I was an only child – was fractured, difficult, sometimes non-existent. They kept secrets and spoke little about certain key aspects of their lives so that I knew little about them; this became clear after the death of my adoptive mother in 2001, when I discovered letters, documents, and a series of other objects that not only filled in gaps about their lives, but also told new stories. The photograph has been referred to as a ‘melancholy object’ by both Barthes and Sontag, and discussed as such by Gibson, and there is a photo of my parents in the 1950s, laughing together on their motor-boat, for which this description resonates. It is both my favourite image of them and an impossible contradiction, as I knew them only long after that time, when things had become more difficult, the boat had gone, and with it, seemingly, their happiness. This paper will discuss the use of such objects in the writing of memoir, with reference to my own experience and that of other adoptees in writing memoir.'  (Publication abstract)

'This book is likely to anger many readers. Saltwater is about Cathy McLennan’s time as a barrister for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service on Palm Island and in Townsville in the 1990s. Aged twenty-two and faced with a heavy workload, she was confronted with heartbreaking cases of violence, trauma, and neglect. Other lawyers in the office came and went, but the Aboriginal field officers remained constant. Throughout, there are reminders that Palm Island is a beautiful place with forests and crystalline water, despite its being referred to as ‘the most violent place on earth outside a war zone’.'

(Introduction)