Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/329964
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 15 JUNE 2014 THIS WEEK 29 ADRIAN GRIMA ON Tuesday June 17 at 18:00, the prize-winning Maltese-Austral- ian author Lou Drofenik will give a talk in English about her new novel, Bushfire Summer, in the Faculty of Arts Library, Old Humanities Building. Entrance is free and everyone is welcome to attend. This event is being organised by the Department of Maltese in the Faculty of Arts. Lou Drofenik's new novel Bushfire Summer, based on personal experience during the 2009 Black Saturday bush fires, is a story of courage, loss and the realisation that miracles can and do happen. Bushfire Summer sweeps the reader into a summer etched in the Aus- tralian psyche. This novel is a celebration of people in rural communities, their generosity of spirit and their undeniable acts of heroism when disaster strikes. The story takes place during the 2009 bushfires. Just before the fires, Drofenik was research- ing the stories of Maltese chil- dren who were sent to Western Australia after the war, never thinking a novel would come out of it. "My intention was to write a paper about this little-known historical event. I suppose be- ing personally involved in such a catastrophic issue put things in perspective and a shift hap- pened in my thinking. I saw how the small rural community where I live reacted to the fires, how our relationships to each other and to the land changed overnight. So this novel became a story of relationships. The characters in this book all have a past history but they share a commonality – a great love for their land and a willing- ness to help each other." The author's premise has al- ways been that we do not own this land but that this land owns us; we are only its caretakers. "This was not an easy book to write. I wrote this book in Slov- enia and as you can imagine it was quite a cathartic experience for me. In fact I don't think I could have written it in Austral- ia, I had to be away to be able to look back at those terrible days and be able to write lucidly." A Maltese child migrant sent to Australia One of the characters in this story is Garth Evans, a former Maltese child migrant sent to Australia. According to Law- rence E. Attard's book The Safe- ty Valve: A History of Maltese Emigration from 1946 (1997) the notion of child migration from Malta started in the early 1930s. This request was re- buffed by Canberra as a result of the racial prejudice against the Maltese at that time. When Australia and Malta signed the Assisted Passage Scheme in 1948 Maltese children had the same rights as British children to migrate. In 1950 the Maltese govern- ment and the Catholic hierarchy in Australia signed the Child Settlement Agreement which would open the doors for Mal- tese children to go to institu- tions in Western Australia run by the Christian Brothers. Here they were to receive an educa- tion and be prepared for life. By the mid 1960s up to ten thousand children were sent to Australia, three hundred and ten of these were Maltese. The stories of these child migrants were never told. In the early 1990s Margaret Humphreys, an English social worker, uncov- ered a web of deceit surround- ing these children which shook the British and Australian pub- lic. In 2013 the then Guillard Government set up a Royal Commission into Child Abuse in public institutions. The hear- ings of this Royal Commission (which is still sitting at present) have uncovered systematic sex- ual, physical and psychological abuse which has caused im- mense harm to children who were in institutional care. The 2009 bushfires and a Maltese child migrant in Australia