AustLit

'Nanna's story about being abandoned by her father begins simply. In the late 1930s, great-grandfather left his Glenelg house to buy a packet of cigarettes. He wasn't seen again until 1942 in Sydney Harbour, fresh off a ship from North Africa with a captain's rank and a new name. She then shows me a photograph of him standing alongside a troopship in port, and another on reconnaissance dated a year earlier, both photographs with his alias pencilled on the back. The photographs aren't particularly interesting or even mysterious; he looks just like any other man who went to war - that old-school part in the hair, that Don Draper nonchalance. What's interesting is Nanna's reaction to what these photographs represent.' (Publication abstract)