Maniaty, Tony

Tony Maniaty was born to a Greek father and an Anglo-Australian mother. His early life was spent in and around the family's corner stores. During his Cold War childhood in Queensland, Tony travelled overseas and became a writer. From 1967 he worked as a radio and television journalist for ABC News, Radio Australia, SBS Australia, Visnews, the BBC World Service and Monitoradio in the United States. He has published two acclaimed novels, The Children Must Dance (1984), based on his experiences in East Timor during the Indonesian invasion, and Smyrna (1989, short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award), and the memoirs, All Over the Shop (1993), and Shooting Balibo (2009). He holds a Masters Degree in Media and was a senior lecturer in international journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney. *Tony's father was born in Smyrna, Asia Minor, from where he became a refugee at the age of two after the sacking of Smyrna by the Turks in 1922, fleeing to Greece with his family. He immigrated to Australia at the age of 15, eventually marrying an Australian woman and setting up a series of corner shops in Queensland. The novel Smyrna, by Τοny Maniaty, contains autobiographical elements and it is about the narrator's search for his father's origins, and by extension his own origins, in Asia Minor and in Greece.