Heimlich Unheimlich

Part poem, part story, a mixture of image and text with a dash of autofiction, Heimlich Unheimlich probes the concepts of home and belonging. The context is the aftermath of the Second World War and the intertwining stories of the childhoods of two women both named after different types of cloth. Hessian is a German girl born towards the end of the Second World War, whose father fought in the German army. She migrates with her family to Australia when she is still a child where she suffers some discrimination because she is German. She eventually becomes an artist. Muslin is born into a Jewish family in England after the war. She is a violinist who subsequently becomes a poet and migrates to Australia as an adult. Her family, who live in the shadow of the holocaust and are unforgiving of Nazi Germany, are preoccupied with preserving a Jewish ethnicity. Both Hessian and Muslin are shaped by, but also rebel against, the cultural environments in which they grow up.

Heimlich Unheimlich suggests strong links between Muslin and Hessian, despite their contrasting, even conflicting, childhoods. It explores, through photographic collages, the inter-generational aftereffects of the Second World War and the shadow it cast of personal and collective trauma. The work has considerable relevance to contemporary Australia and global issues concerning war, migration, displacement and ethnic identity.