Hidden Darkness: An Exploration of the Experience of Lithuanian Immigrants to Australia

Abstract

This work of creative writing and the accompanying exegesis have their genesis in the silencing of a generation of Lithuanians, who were forcibly displaced to Australia during and after the Second World War. Their experiences of the occupation of their homeland, violence and displacement during the conflict were foundational to the trauma that they faced for the rest of their lives. The legacies of that violence and displacement were compounded by their reception in Australia. This creative study synthesises oral history with photography and composite prose to create an innovative multimodal book. It sought to use creative writing to overcome the darkness, discrimination, and silencing that the Lithuanian community endured for decades. The book finds an innovative and creative means to overcome the disenfranchisement and silence that Lithuanians experienced. It does so through an assemblage of their oral histories woven through the author’s expressive, reflective text, and as discrete poetic fragments. It finds a way for the author’s voice to be heard in a manner that integrates her Lithuanian cultural loss with the community’s enduring experiences of isolation. The Lithuanians’ voices are heard through their rich oral traditions in poetry and song, in the Lithuanian language and in English translation. This reflects a significant centuries-long cultural tradition in singing, and in poetry recital. Within Australia, this practice spoke to their loss and longing for homeland in a new, strange, and difficult country. The diversity of recollections enriches the narrative historically, culturally and conceptually. Together with the emotional intensity evoked through voice in poetic form, the book invokes new ways of engagement, connection and understanding for readers. A central aim of the work is to enable Lithuanian people to be seen with quiet dignity. This visibility is accomplished through historical photographs and newly created environmental photographic portraiture of the storytellers. The storytellers speak to the reader. The reader’s connection with the visual narrative and the place of the past in the present is enriched through images of household interiors and personal objects that have historical and cultural significance. Photographs of historically significant natural environments situate people’s lives in their sub-tropical Queensland context, drawing on the Lithuanians’ powerful cultural attachment to land and nature. Collectively the expressive prose, the people’s stories and the photographs evoke a poetic response and a Lithuanian cultural aesthetic. Additionally, the people’s loss and pain are expressed in the creative work through the voices in oral histories and photographs, and in historical archival sources which were photographed. Their trauma and the othering of them are addressed through a critical examination of the historical context, mid-twentieth century, in Lithuania and Australia.