My grandmothers lived with traumatised men. They were violently displaced from the 1922 genocide in Anatolia (Pontos, The Black Sea). My father was born during the Nazi invasion of Greece in 1942 in the small village of Pella. He grew up with his father's trauma of the displacement, dispossession of their land and the murder of his grandparents. My mother lived with her family's trauma and their dispossession.
My parents fled to Australia in the 1960s to escape the great famine (Η ΜΕΓΑΛΗ ΠΕΙΝΑ) post-WWII Europe. They came to Australia during the White Australia Policy.
My sister was the firstborn in a strict Greek-speaking Pontian household in the inner west of Sydney and fought sexist, racist attitudes and was the bravest person I knew who questioned and stood up for her rights and others on an island stolen by British Imperialists. A long line of powerful women who endured the pain of this legacy. I see this in the eyes of those who have experienced displacement, diaspora, genocide under colonial power structures.
Scratch an Aussie and you see intergenerational trauma almost everywhere.
