In her travel writing, Diane specialises in destinations that are exotic and off the beaten track. She has sailed to the Arctic and Antarctic, trekked in the Himalayas and the Andes, climbed volcanoes in Iceland, paddled a canoe on Zimbabwe’s Lake Kariba, eaten raw narwhal in an Inuit village in Greenland, taken part in a Buddhist puja in Sikkim, watched a cheetah kill in Kenya, attended voodoo ceremonies in Brazil and slept in a Blackfoot tepee in Alberta.
She has received numerous awards for her journalism and her first book, Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations, was acclaimed by Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, and by Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel. Diane’s first novel is Winter Journey.
Life at a glance
BORN
1939 in Krakow, Poland
EDUCATED
BA at Sydney University
MARRIED
Married to Michael Armstrong, with two children, Justine and Jonathan, and twin granddaughters, Sara and Maya
CAREER
Freelance journalist and travel writer
PREVIOUS WORKS
Over 3000 articles published worldwide
Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations
(Random House, 1998)
AWARDS AND HONOURS:
Journalism
1983 Government of Mexico’s Pluma de Plata, for best article written about Mexico
1986 Gold Award, Pacific Asia Tourist Association, for best article about the Asia-Pacific Region
1993 MBF Award (joint winner with Jennifer Cooke) for investigative article about Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
1997 Air New Zealand Award for Destination Journalism
1998 George Munster Award for Independent Journalism
Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations
1997 Grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council to write Mosaic
1998 Short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction
2000 Short-listed for the National Biography Award
2001 Listed as one of Amazon. com’s best memoirs of the year
The Voyage of Their Life
2000 Grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council to write The Voyage of Their Life
2002 Short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards
Top ten favourite books
The First Circle
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I can’t stop marvelling at this brilliantly constructed novel that reveals the darkness at the heart of the communist regime. I found it chilling and illuminating.
If This is a Man by Primo Levi
I’ve read numerous accounts written by Holocaust survivors, but this devastating memoir about the struggle to remain human in the midst of inhumanity is narrated in a spare, unemotional style that packs a huge emotional punch.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
I love the rich gallery of Dickens’s characters, his incomparable storytelling gift and the superb irony of the plot.
In My Father’s Court by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Singer’s acute powers of observation, understated style and revealing dialogue capture the essence of his quirky Jewish characters in unusual vignettes that linger in my mind.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A deceptively simple coming-of-age story that is powerful and profound. It says so much about family relationships, prejudice and mob mentality.
A Fortunate Life by A. B. Facey
There is something endearingly Australian about this memoir in which the author, the quintessential Aussie battler, tells the story of his unrelentingly hard life. I was moved by his cheerful nature, stoicism and lack of self-pity.
The Sea of Fertility series by Yukio Mishima
This tetralogy took my breath away with its poetic descriptions, delicate eroticism and insight into Japanese culture. It introduced me to the richness of Japanese literature.
The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary
It’s a long time since I read this beautiful book, but I can still remember how deeply affected I was by the writing and the idealistic hero who was obsessed by his longing to save the elephants.
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
These exquisitely written books, with their intriguing characters, intricate plot told from different points of view and exotic setting, entranced me so much that I called my daughter Justine after one of the characters.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
This is one of the most original books of its time. I love its exuberant inventiveness, black humour and trenchant satire, and I laugh each time I read it.
About the book
The inspiration
WHILE RESEARCHING AND WRITING her first book, Mosaic—a history of five generations of her own family—Diane Armstrong realised that her journey to Australia on the SS Derna was a story that she had to tell. ‘It struck me that we are a nation of boat people, because ever since the First Fleet, so many of us, or our forefathers, have come here by sea,’ she says. ‘More recently, with asylum seekers coming to our shores, it seemed that the story of the Derna, a post-war migrant hell-ship, was more relevant than ever.’
Diane describes herself as ‘basically a storyteller’. When she discovered that the Derna had carried over 500 passengers from 15 different countries, people who had come from concentration camps, Siberian gulags and Greek islands where war was raging, she knew that they would have incredible stories.
But how was she to find them after fifty years? ‘I’d set myself an impossible task,’ Diane says. ‘I didn’t know the names of the passengers, where to find them, or even if they were still alive.’ Her first breakthrough was obtaining the passenger list from the Australian National Archives, but this didn’t tell her where these people were living, or if they were still in Australia.
Studying the passenger list, she noticed that it listed their nationalities. By placing advertisements in ethnic newspapers and on ethnic radio programmes, she hoped that someone might recall something about the Derna. Her first target was an Estonian-language newspaper. On the day that she placed her notice, her phone rang. ‘You’re looking for passengers from the Derna,’ the woman at the other end said. ‘I’m the editor of this paper and I came out on the Derna with my whole family.’ Her next words were even more surprising:‘So did our secretary.’ These women gave Diane diaries, journals, photographs and a whole network of passengers. ‘I felt as though I’d won the lottery,’ says Diane.
Others also responded to the notices, and Diane interviewed 119 passengers and accounted for two hundred others. Among them were 61 orphans who had survived the Holocaust, an archbishop who established the first Russian Orthodox diocese in Australia and a Russian princess related to the Romanovs. A file Diane managed to obtain from ASIO revealed that among the passengers had been a German spy who had offered his services to Australian intelligence.
‘As a child I used to fantasise about being a detective and solving mysteries,’ Diane says. ‘My search for the passengers of the Derna turned that dream into reality.’
By the time Diane had completed her research, she had collected so much information that her problem was how to select the most interesting ones. ‘Every single person I spoke to had an amazing story, whether it was the Jewish man who had undergone medical experiments in Auschwitz, the Latvian family who became slave labourers on their relatives’ farm, or the Greek woman left to fend for herself and her babies in wartime. I came to admire the courage and spirit of all these people and could have written a book about each of them.’
‘I came to admire the courage and spirit of all these people and could have written a book about each of them’
Behind the scenes
Writing The Voyage of Their Life
‘I SPENT SEVERAL YEARS searching for the passengers on the Derna,’ says Diane Armstrong, ‘but it wasn’t until The Voyage of Their Life was published that some of them found me.’ She found that new stories and links ‘started co
ming out of the woodwork’—an experience she found exciting and frustrating. ‘If only I’d met them earlier!’
Soon after The Voyage of Their Life was published, she received a letter from a Melbourne reader. His wife had bought the book and left it on the kitchen table. That day, his father walked in, saw the photograph on the cover, pointed to one of the youths leaning against the rails and shouted ‘That’s me!’ But the story doesn’t end there. The next day his closest friend came over. Picking up the book, he said ‘There’s my dad in this photo!’ Although the two men had lived next door for 40 years, they hadn’t realised that they’d both arrived on the Derna.
While Diane was researching the voyage, several passengers mentioned two Jewish orphans—teenagers who had fallen in love on board and married soon after arriving in Australia. ‘The frustrating thing was that no one could remember their names, and much as I longed to record this romantic story, I couldn’t track them down,’ she recalls. After the book was published, the coordinator of the ‘Migration Matters’ programme at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum invited her to take part. That evening the coordinator called back. ‘When I told my daughter-in-law about your book, she said: “My parents met on that ship and married soon after they got here!”’ This was the couple Diane had been looking for. They had been so destitute on the voyage that when the youth wanted to buy his sweetheart a fan in Colombo, he had to borrow a few rupees from another passenger. They kept that fan all their lives and it’s displayed on their mantelpiece to this day.
Another woman told Diane that she’d been on a group tour of Spain when, over a glass of wine, the Australians present started reminiscing about the migrant ships on which they had sailed to Australia. ‘One man said that on his voyage the refrigeration had broken down and all the meat had to be thrown overboard so there was nothing to eat but spaghetti for weeks. Another recalled that on his ship the crew mutinied and the water was rationed, while a woman insisted that her ship was the worst of all because the engines kept breaking down, and the ship drifted for two weeks in the Indian Ocean. That’s when they realised that they had all sailed here on the Derna!’
Diane has received hundreds of letters from Australians expressing their admiration for the migrants who had to struggle so much to rebuild their lives. Others have said that after reading the story of the Derna they have been inspired to find out about their own journeys or those of their parents. ‘Knowing that my story has touched the lives of so many people who now want to research the voyage of their own lives has been one of the most rewarding aspects of writing this book.’
‘Knowing that my story has touched the lives of so many people who now want to research the voyage of their own lives has been one of the most rewarding aspects of writing this book.’
A critical eye
‘PROBABLY NO OTHER SHIP was more closely linked to its passengers than the Derna, a creaking rust bucket, which brought refugees from all walks of life in the years immediately following World War II. The Voyage of Their Life, an apt title definitely not intended in a flattering sense, concentrates on one such voyage,’ wrote Alan Gill, author of Orphans of the Empire, in the Sydney Morning Herald. Armstrong, he finds, ‘is a natural sleuth, who enjoys detailed research. Her writing is clear, incisive, yet imaginative…With assistance from Armstrong, one can smell the dank hold, hear the throb of the engines (when they work), and feel seasick as the vessel tosses in the rough sea.’ He adds, ‘Armstrong is at her best when writing about the young, single female passengers. We feel their pain at loved ones left behind, the fluttering of hearts at new shipboard romances and the humiliation of wearing dowdy, hand-me-down dresses…Some of these shipboard romances were to become permanent; an optimistic note which, together with the author’s compassionate style, permeates the book and makes for attractive reading.’
‘Armstrong weaves in these individual tales with great skill. They flow in and out of the narrative in rhythm with the ship’s slow movement from the old world to the new’—The Age
The Age was impressed by the standard of the writing—‘Armstrong weaves in these individual tales with great skill. They flow in and out of the narrative in rhythm with the ship’s slow movement from the old world to the new’—while Mary Rose Liverani in the Weekend Australian agreed that ‘Armstrong’s triumph in this history is to avoid judgment or argument…she allows readers to enter into the mindset of the refugees, to empathise with them’.
And the rave reviews continued: ‘The characters become familiar and absorbing…almost unbearably moving’, wrote poet and memoirist (and child of Holocaust survivors) Doris Brett in the Australian Book Review, while the Australian Jewish News thought that ‘[Diane Armstrong] has turned out an absorbing and very human work, laced with drama, love, hatreds and problems with almost Marx Brothers or Monty Python humour…A rewarding read.’
‘While it is a good read, The Voyage of Their Life is also an important historical document in that it gives humanity and dignity to the stories of dispossessed people arriving in post-war Australia’, said the Wentworth Courier, and the academic reviewers agreed:‘Diane Armstrong’s study of the Derna is an important contribution to post-war Australian history. Her careful research combined with her excellent writing skills make this book essential reading for anyone interested in the development of Australian society’ wrote Dr Suzanne Rutland for the Australian Historical Society Journal.
Read on
Have you read?
Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations (Random House Australia, 1988)
Starting in Krakow, Poland in 1890, and spanning more than one hundred years, five generations, and four continents, Mosaic is Diane Armstrong’s moving account of her remarkable, resilient family. When Daniel Baldinger divorces the wife he loves because she cannot bear children, he marries a much younger woman and, by 1913, has eleven children, including six sons. Armstrong follows the Baldinger children’s lives over decades, through the terrifying years of the Holocaust to the present. Based on oral histories and the diaries of more than a dozen men and women, Mosaic is an extraordinary story of a family and one woman’s journey to reclaim her heritage.
‘Diane Armstrong’s book is a source of delight to the reader. Written with fervour and talent, it will capture your attention and retain it to the last page.’—Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel
‘Mosaic flows like a novel, which once started, is hard to put down. It is a compelling family history of extraordinary people out against some of the most frightening events of our century. The depth of emotions evoked is stunning. I was thrilled and deeply moved.’—Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22
‘Compulsive reading, thanks in no small part to Armstrong’s ability to bring each character to life.’—The Bulletin
‘A stirring and powerful tapestry into which she has masterfully interwoven the story of her family with the enormity of the Holocaust, commuting fluently between the individual and the historical, the particular and the universal.’—Australian Jewish News
‘It is no small achievement and it bristles with life…Mosaic is a work of many levels. But ultimately it succeeds because most of its characters demonstrate how the human spirit can soar way, way above adversity.’ —Sydney Morning Herald
‘A most remarkable book about one family’s experience…a rich and compelling history…Just as A. B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life and Sally Morgan’s My Place have become part of the national literary heritage, so too has Mosaic earned its place in our social dialogue as part of our cultural tapestry.’ —Daily Telegraph
‘Her rich account of lives good and bad, love, joy, bravery, greed, and bitterness is a testament to the human spirit. Armstrong’s stories will bring smiles and tears.’ —Marie-Claire
‘A haunting Holocaust history that deserves shelf space alongside Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Diane Armstrong’s work is a monumental accomplishment—both accessible enough and powerful enough to linger in our consciousness long after we have turned the last page.�
�—Barnes & Noble
‘A vivid, heartwarming, family memoir. The plot and her characters move along in a fast-paced, tightly-woven narrative.’ —Publishers Weekly
‘its characters demonstrate how the human spirit can soar way, way above adversity.’ —Sydney Morning Herald
Find out more
VISIT
The Immigration Museum
Old Customs House
400 Flinders Street,
Melbourne
Ph. (03) 9927 2700
http://immigration.museum.vic.gov.au/
Sydney Jewish Museum
The Holocaust and Australian Jewish history
148 Darlinghurst Road,
Darlinghurst NSW
Ph. (02) 9360 7999
www.sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au
ON THE WEB
www.naa.gov.au
National Archives of Australia—a searchable database of the documents held by this important organisation
www.dianearmstrong.com
The author’s website, which also includes photographs by her husband, Michael Armstrong
www.holocaust.com.au
Australian Memories of the Holocaust: as well as fascinating first person accounts, this site includes comprehensive lists of resource materials for further study of the topic.
READ
The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
Eleni by Nicholas Gage
The Voyage of Their Life Page 55