From Leeds to London, Paris to Tallinn, Brisbane to Melbourne, Adelaide, and Hobart, via Europe again, Louis Green's family memoir captures the dislocation felt by many Australian immigrants, whose identity develops haphazardly, woven from faded fragments of cultures left behind and the uncertainties of a land that only grudgingly welcomes them. Encompassing the arc of the twentieth century, it tells the story of his mother and the three men who had a claim to being his father, an Englishman, an Italian, and an Estonian. Flung, by the second world war from Tallinn to Brisbane, he and his mother arrived in an Australia which, during the post-war period, was beginning to develop its own, distinctive, cultural voice. By chance his search for his Italian roots resulted in a career as an academic, teaching Italian Renaissance history, and, with an historian's eye, he offers, in the latter part, his personal account of the perplexities and controversies of Australian university life, during the nineteen sixties and seventies: the effects of the Orr case on the University of Tasmania, the Ern Malley Affair, and the crisis of the Vietnam War.
