In 1987 Dutch Australian author Lolo Houbein published her book Wrong Face in the Mirror. Among other topics, this book deals with the author’s emigration to Australia in the 1950s as a twenty-four-year-old. Houbein describes the challenges of adapting to life in Australia as a Dutch migrant, including the struggle to learn English and the feeling of being an outsider.
The book’s blurb reads:
“With a vision of life under palm trees, Lolo Houbein left the Holland of her war-troubled childhood to live in Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea and Australia. Her spiritual journeying has been guided by intuition as she searches for an ancestry so scattered and elusive that fact and imagination mingle in the telling. Belief in the relatedness of all human beings has led to her meeting people of many races, including the Dalai Lama.”
Houbein received the Dirk Hartog Literary Award in 1988 for Wrong Face in the Mirror. To date this is the only book to have received this award.
In 1988 the book was translated into Dutch as Vreemdeling in de spiegel. Autobiografie van een Nederlandse emigrante. In 1990 UQ Press republished it under the title Wrong Face in the Mirror: An Autobiography of Race and Identity.
Wrong Face in the Mirror is available at the National Library of Australia, or find it at your local library.
