1988: Settlement story

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Tags: alumni, books, winter-2012

Barry Levy, Graduate Diploma in Education

Barry Levy

Barry Levy has recently published his third book in seven years while continuing to work for the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre as a publications editor.

His latest book, Shades of Exodus (Interactive Publications) is a fictional view on migration from a South African perspective, though its themes are intended to be universal.

Mr Levy himself worked in South Africa as a newspaper journalist from 1974, before emigrating to Australia 10 years later.

He said he had always planned to return to South Africa once Apartheid ended, but, by that time, his two children and Australian-born wife, Gael, were happily settled in Brisbane.

“Thousands of South Africans have been arriving in Australia, particularly since 1994, many of them coming to live in Queensland,” he said.

“My latest book is a soul-searching portrait of South Africans who have emigrated to Australia, a country where a fair few arrive considering themselves ‘above the bunch’, only to find they have to start, more or less, from square one again.

“It encapsulates universal dilemmas common to all migrants: identity, loss, the search for meaning, and revolves around the true story of a South African family who were the victims of a vicious and violent crime in Australia while trying to flee the violence of South Africa.”

Shades of Exodus

The “true story” he mentions is the brutal 1991 Gold Coast home invasion and murder of 19-year-old South African woman Michelle Cohn.

Ironically, Ms Cohn and her family had just arrived in Australia to escape escalating violence in South Africa.

Mr Levy is an award-winning journalist. He has won an Anning Barton Award for Outstanding Journalism (Central Queensland) for a series of freelance articles on child sex abuse, an Australian Human Rights Award for Journalism, and was also a Queensland State finalist for a Walkley Award for a series on homelessness.

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