Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy - Tapa dura

Traumascapes is a deeply-felt and wonderfully intelligent exploration of international sites where traumas of great magnitude have occurred. Its subjects include the Moscow theatre where hundreds were held hostage by terrorists in 2003; the field in Pennsylvania, USA, where a plane hijacked in the 9/11 attacks crashed; the 2002 Bali bombing; and, various sites in Bosnia, and the scenic ruins of the Port Arthur colonial penal settlement in Tasmania.

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.