Mireille Juchau

Memory, storytelling and time.

And I think in doing that, she really interrogates an Australian kind of reserve.

And I think her having come from another culture at 15 when she moved to Australia gave her a unique perspective on the way that we kind of do flatten out.

We don't go deeply into emotion.

We can be very kind of glib or remain on the surface about things.

And I guess by choosing her subjects, as she has done,

subjects that have an intense depth to them.

She gets to kind of scratch the surface and go beyond the kind of cliches around what it is to be a Holocaust survivor.

I mean, in another of her essays where she explores a criminal case that involved another Holocaust survivor, she shows how this idea of the traumatised survivor was kind of galvanised by different people in the justice system and

to kind of make this woman either guilty or innocent.

She was a victim of her early life in which she was hidden in a potato pit with her mother during the Holocaust as a child, or she was reenacting that trauma of her childhood in hiding one of her grandchildren in a sealed room in her house.

So Maria shows us how these narratives can get deployed to kind of incriminate someone or to see them as a victim.

But at every turn, these people resist being labelled in a particular way.

And that's exhilarating to see that.

It's a real blend of – that's why it's sort of unclassifiable.

There's definitely journalism and reportage in there.

I know in one of the stories the names were changed to protect the people because it was the subject of a criminal case that's never been entirely resolved.

But in several other stories, I think the names are as, you know, they're factual stories about those people.

But she blends reportage with speculation, philosophy, personal observation.

So it diverts from the purely factual and becomes something quite literary and much more abstract at times, but also much more kind of subjective, I guess, than straight reportage is.