Cynthia Banham is the author of three non-fiction books. Liberal Democracies and the Torture of their Citizens was based on her PhD. A Certain Light: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Hope, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Her most recent book is Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance, published by Upswell.

Previously, she spent a decade working as a journalist in the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery in Canberra, where she was foreign affairs and defence correspondent.

Before that, in the 1990s, she worked as a solicitor at Allens (as it is now known) and Hunt & Hunt. She is currently working on a historical novel.

Describe yourself in three words.

Empathetic, disciplined, self-critical.

Books and films – what are your favourites?

Perhaps the most formative book for me was Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), which I read in high school.

I rarely read books twice, so using that criterion as a guide next comes An Equal Music (Vikram Seth), Possession (A S Byatt), The Riders (Tim Winton), and Beloved (Toni Morrison).

Some writers, I’ll read anything they write. Among them: Natalia Ginzberg, Elsa Morante, Tessa Hadley, Sarah Hall, Lucy Caldwell, Helen Garner, Charlotte McConaghy.

I’ve taken up so much space with books that I’ve left little for films. I’m going to go embarrassing here. Girls Just Want to Have Fun. I must have watched that movie 20 times at least when I was a teenager. I harboured a secret desire to be a dancer.

When are you happiest?

Writing at my desk, in the garden by our frog pond, in my kayak on Jervis Bay, at a Sydney Swans game at the SCG with my husband and son.

What has been your most formative experience?

A trip to Trieste, my mother’s birthplace, my first overseas trip, when I was 19. Until then, I knew what my mother had brought with her from Italy (when she emigrated at 9). But for the first time I saw what my mother left behind.

You were a brilliant law student – why did you decide to abandon the law as a career?

I was definitely not a brilliant law student. I was a better lawyer than I was a law student. The thing that attracted me to the law was always the idea of the law as the friend of the vulnerable, the less powerful.

Throughout my Arts/Law degree, I volunteered every Friday night at Redfern Legal Centre. Then I finished College of Law and found myself working first in dust diseases, then construction law. Perhaps I lacked the patience to stick with legal practice until I found a better outlet for my original impulse. But by then I had decided that the only way I could be happy was in a career in writing.

In journalism I could satisfy both that idealistic view I had of the law and the need to write full-time. I did this first here, at the Justinian – a career highlight – and later in covering the Attorney General’s round for the Sydney Morning Herald in Canberra. This is where I found myself on 9/11.

Soon, I was covering the civil liberties implications of the new anti-terrorism laws. This path eventually led me to completing a PhD under the supervision of Professor Hilary Charlesworth – a second career highlight – at the ANU on liberal democracies’ responses to the use of torture in the war on terror.

I never really abandoned that career in the law – it just took on different forms.

Later, as a journalist, you were in a life-changing airplane accident in Indonesia. How has your perception of what happened to you changed over the last 20 years?

At first, I felt singled out, like I was being punished. I believed that for something so bad to happen to me, when I was doing what journalists in my position did every other day of the week, meant I must have deserved it.

Up until that moment, I had believed that if I worked hard, if I was grateful for all that I had in life, including my health (I was a runner in my 20s and 30s, and practised gratitude every time I did a run) and tried my best to be a decent person, then life would keep working out for me. When that didn’t happen, I felt like I must have deserved it.

The crash was almost 20 years ago, and now I realise it was really silly of me to think that if I never took my good fortune for granted, I would get to keep it.

I understand that all we can do is make the most of the time we have here – and the best of whatever situation we find ourselves in.

Your injuries precipitated a change of career from journalist to academic and writer. Can you tell us about the challenges that were involved? 

The challenges were in the writing.

As a lawyer, I learned to write in a certain way. I had to upend this for a career in newspapers – rid myself of the legalese, learn the pyramid news structure.

To my surprise, when I joined academia, I found that the more straightforward mode of writing I’d learnt in journalism was frowned upon by some in universities.

So I learnt a new formula – a new way of writing (more obtuse sentences, longer, silly-sounding words).

Then, as a creative writer, I again had to unlearn that academic writing style (abhorrent to the editors and publishers whose doors I’m knocking on now) and learn to write more freely, to rediscover my ‘I’, allow my imagination and my style to roam, the more uninhibited the better.

In hopping about in my career this, in some ways, has been the greatest lesson. How each profession has a communication style often designed to keep others out, where to gain entry, you sort of have to crack the code.

You’ve written Liberal Democracies and the Torture of their Citizens and about your family in A Certain Light. Mother Shadow is your third book – why did you want to tell the story of your Italian great-grandmother?

In the beginning, I wanted to write another family history memoir. I enjoyed writing “A Certain Light”, where I explored the story of my Italian grandfather’s WW2 experiences as a slave labourer in Berlin. I wove his story, and my mother’s immigration story, with some of my own. Writing about my grandfather’s traumatic experiences helped me to feel less alone as I processed my own. So “Mother Shadow” began really as me exploring my mother’s maternal side of the family to see if there were any stories there I could write about.

Very quickly, I uncovered a family secret. My mother’s grandmother was not an orphan as I’d always been told, but a foundling, abandoned to the foundling home in Bologna in 1898 by her unwed mother. This, of course, was a source of shame back in the day. I became obsessed with discovering the identity of this woman, unknown to anyone in my family (Italian law prevents, for 100 years, the discovery of the name of a mother who relinquished her child ). Why had she given her daughter up?

Without knowing anything about her circumstances, I found myself judging this woman. I was embarrassed by this. I soon realised that my response to uncovering this secret in my maternal line was tied up with my own sometimes crippling sense of inadequacy as a mother with disability. I was a woman with two prosthetic legs. Was I up to the task of bringing up a child? Would I not be letting him down? Would society not judge me for it?

Tell us about the voyage of discovery that this involved.

Researching “Mother Shadow “was an excellent opportunity to live out my dream to go and live in Italy for an extended period, to live in my mother’s city, Trieste, to study the language while I was there. Soon after discovering that my great-grandmother was a foundling, I hired a researcher in Italy, the daughter of a friend who was serendipitously studying at the University of Bologna. She tracked down the archives of the foundling home, set up interviews for me in Bologna, and – eventually – helped me uncover the mother’s identity.

In the course of all that, I made some very confronting discoveries about the mother and the possible reason she gave away her daughter. There were moments when I wished I had never embarked on the journey. But there were treasured moments too. Like the day we travelled to the town where my great-grandmother was born, and inspected the book in which the mother’s name was recorded. The name was recorded by a priest in “The Book of Secret Baptisms”, where the names of illegitimate babies were kept. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

And its effects on you.

I am a different person having finished writing “Mother Shadow”, from the one I was when I began. There is a quote from Rilke’s “First Elegy” that I came across while writing “Mother Shadow”. It is about the dead, and their relationship to the living. In the end, Rilke writes, it is not the dead who need us, but the other way around. He asks:

we for whom grief is so often
the source of our spirit’s growth — : could we exist without
them?

It captured for me the essence of what I had come to understand in writing “Mother Shadow”. I had thought that, in restoring the story of this unknown woman to my family’s history, I was doing the dead in my family – the abandoned daughter who’d never known her mother, for example – some kind of service.

But in the end, it was me who needed the story of this mother who relinquished her daughter under (probably) terrible circumstances, to help me to see that my disability didn’t make me a lesser mother. That, in fact, many women, if not all, confront circumstances that prevent them from being the mother they want to be. And that what is needed is compassion, towards oneself and others.

What about the horticultural aspect of your life?

It really started with the 2019 bushfires. We had just moved to Sydney from Canberra and found ourselves living in a house with a perfectly manicured, and noticeably still and silent suburban garden. Motivated by climate anxiety, I decided to bring the garden back to life. We started by building a frog pond, and it expanded from there. We planted native plants, left the leaf matter on the ground, stopped using pesticides on the garden … all the little things you can do to bring insects (which are in dramatic decline) back into your garden. Soon, the frogs showed up, the blue-tongued lizards too, and life returned.

Along the way, I studied a TAFE Horticulture Certificate, where I realised that the kind of practices taught in a basic horticulture certificate are one reason suburban gardens are so lifeless. I also started a biology degree. As a 17-year-old, if I didn’t study law, I was going to study zoology. It’s a bit of a sliding doors moment.

What is your next project?

Historical fiction. I’m taking a break from memoir, where it’s too easy to upset relatives. Last year I published my first short story, and my next goal is to publish a novel.

What is in your refrigerator?

I try to never run out of coconut water or blueberries.   

What media do you consume?

I support the Guardian, subscribe to the Economist and the New Yorker, read the headlines of the Atlantic and the New York Times.

If you were a foodstuff, what would you be?

Capricciosa pizza. It’s all in the name.

When you shut your eyes and think of the word “law”, what comes to mind?

Right now, Helen Garner. I’ve just finished reading “House of Grief”, a book that had been on my shelf for years, but I’d been hesitant to read it before now, because of the distressing subject. I love how Garner takes on the law, demystifies the legal process, in search of the human. I love her humility, combined with her extraordinary talent as a writer (and her remarkable powers of observation). When I read Garner, I feel nostalgic for the law. I also simultaneously want to write and to quit writing because her brilliance is so intimidating.

Mother Shadow, A Meditation of Maternal Inheritance, published by Upswell