Year: 1911

Additional information: In 1990 I discovered letters, a postcard album and embroidery made in Cuba in 1907 (Fig. 2) by my maternal grandmother Julia Elias Menayer, and a diary (Fig. 1) written in 1911 on her arrival in Melbourne from Cuba and subsequent passage to Dunedin. Her family, from El Mina, Tripoli, migrated to Cuba in 1887 and then on to Melbourne and New Zealand. My grandmother’s identity as a young teenager was fragmented between the overwhelming feelings of displacement and love of Cuba, her homeland and emergent identity being formed somewhere else.