Reading by Brigita Ozolins

Dr Brigita Ozolins
Senior Lecturer, School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania

Eve Wicks has created an extraordinary testimony to the life of Lithuanian refugees who settled in Brisbane, Australia, post WWII in her beautifully crafted publication: In Sunshine and Shadow: Reflections on Lithuanian Immigrant Life. The book not only records the personal story of her family’s journey to Australia, but has captured the narratives of a tiny community who more broadly represent the large wave of Baltic refugees that were accepted into this country during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were displaced in Europe as a result of both Nazi and Soviet occupation in their homelands. In Sunshine and Shadow offers important insight into the little known, and often underacknowledged history of these people via the voices of the Lithuanians who found themselves in far-off Brisbane.

Written in both English and Lithuanian, the book brings together the carefully researched history of the impact of WWII on the Lithuanians with an archive of memories that belong to those who participated in Wicks’ extensive research. The archive documents a gradually fading history through sepia photographs, poetry, folk songs, and stories of escape from the homeland and arrival in Australia. These moments are punctuated by an achingly poignant collection of photographs taken by Wicks herself that in a sense are the very heart of the publication. These poetic images, embedded with a sense of yearning for a life that could never be, capture the lost dreams and hopes of the Lithuanians of Brisbane. But they also evoke the bigger picture of a Baltic diaspora that extends across the globe.