"How heavily does the past weigh on the present? To what degree is a child’s future defined by her parents’ memories and yearnings? By her teacher’s experiences? Or by the fact that she is female raised in a family environment which palpably places primacy on the male? These are the issues which young Stamatia must resolve – a resolution that involves a probing process which begins in Sydney and continues in rural Greece, once her family returns to her parents’ country of birth, and climaxes in fiery Athens. The past is a tangible, if mutable, presence forever accompanying Effie Carr’s heroine: Stamatia studies it, memorises it, dissects it, reassembles it, lives it, and on occasion rejects it. This is the past of her immediate circle as well as that of Greece both as imagined by immigrant Greeks and as officially promulgated by the guardians of all things Hellenic. And, indeed, the past of her own childhood in Australia. It is in her personal vitalisation of all these pasts, and particularly within their interstices, that Stamatia can cleave her own world in the uncertain context of Greece’s inflammable capital. She attains her personal freedom where the burden of memory and the realities of the present collide, and so adds her chapter to the continuous past and present which we all live."

- Dr Stavros Paspalas, Acting Director of The Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, The University of Sydney