Traumascapes
The power and fate of places transformed by tragedy
Traumascapes is a deeply-felt and wonderfully intelligent exploration of international sites where traumas of great magnitude have occurred.
Awards
Shortlisted for the 2006 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards' Prize for a First Book of History.
Opinion
"Traumascapes is a breathtaking work of synthesis, a mosaic of ideas and conjecture, of instinct and insight. Tumarkin doesn't offer many answers, but her finely phrased questions might fuel us for decades to come."
Chris Boyd, Australian Financial Review, 27/8/05
"Tumarkin's writing is immediately engaging: personal, energetic and muscular."
"The descriptions of the kitschy, oddly out-of-place memorabilia left by families to mark these sites. . .are powerful and moving."
"many of this book's echoes, like Sarajevo's scars, will stay with me for a long time to come"
Charlotte Wood, The Age, 23/7/05
About this Title
'Traumascapes are a distinctive category of places transformed physically and psychically by suffering, part of a scar tissue that stretches across the world.'
Maria Tumarkin grew up in the old Soviet Union, and emigrated to Australia as a teenager. In 2004, she embarked on an international odyssey to investigate and write about major sites of violence and suffering. Traumascapes is a powerful meditation on the places she visited: Bali, Berlin, Manhattan, Moscow, Port Arthur, Sarajevo, and the field in Pennsylvania where the fourth plane involved in the attacks of September 11 2001 crashed.
In a time when terror and tragedy flourish these locations exhibit a compelling power, drawing pilgrims and tourists from around the world who want to understand the meaning of the traumatic events that unfolded there. In traumascapes, life goes on but the past is still unfinished business.
About the Author
Maria Tumarkin was born in 1974 in the former Soviet Union in a Russian Jewish family, which settled in Kharkiv - the second largest city in Ukraine. From the age of seven, she attended a literary club at the Palace of Pioneers, acquiring a habit of judging people solely by the number of books they had read. In 1989, at the time of Gorbachev's reforms, a large number of Soviet Jews were able to leave their country, and Maria's family immigrated to Australia.
In 1992, less than two years after arriving in Australia, Maria bluffed her way into a Melbourne Journalism course. She was 17, could barely speak English and did not even finish Year 11. She said she was 23, avoided all questions about schooling, looked determined and, miraculously, got in. A few years later she enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study history and cultural studies and ended up completing an interdisciplinary Ph.D thesis on sites of trauma. Her work on trauma and lived geography has since been published in major academic and popular journals and presented on radio and at international conferences.
For the past year, she has travelled the world doing research for her book on the fate and power of traumascapes.
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