A Certain Light: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Hopeby Cynthia Banham
Allen & Unwin
Cynthia Banham is an interesting person who grew up in Sydney and became a solicitor before moving to Canberra, where she met her husband Michael, as the Foreign Affairs and Defence Correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald.
This was her life before the plane she was travelling in crashed in a paddy field in Indonesia and she pulled herself out of the burning wreckage with a broken back and burnt arms and legs (and a flesh-eating infection from the water). It was only Royal Perth Hospital’s Fiona Wood’s experience with the Bali bombing burns victims that saved Cynthia’s life and it would be a decade before she would be able to write about the accident that changed her life forever.
The only way she could write about the plane crash was to make it part of a bigger project about her family’s history and she set about travelling to Europe and America to retrace history, question relatives and search for documents. Despite her physical difficulties, she persevered to write about her mother Loredana, her grandfather Alfredo’s story as a prisoner of war and his sister Amelia’s story as a war survivor as a way to work through her own trauma.
The lives of all three had been interrupted by events and experiences outside their control, in ways that meant they could no longer have the futures they desired and felt destined for. Banham says “I found a place for myself among my family stories, an unexpected solace in the continuum of time.”
This is more than an admirable story of overcoming adversity. It connects lives over three generations of one family that have suffered the loss of identity and dignity. Tying them all together is an incredibly brave person who has lost everything and rebuilt a life (that it so productive it puts the rest of us to shame) with the support of her family.
Lezly Herbert
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