When Jenny Bloomfield went back to Greece in 2011, she was no longer the 12-year-old girl who had left Thessaloniki with her family three decades earlier. She returned as Australia’s ambassador to the country of her birth.
Born Polyxeni, the first child of Pavlos and Penelope, she arrived in Melbourne with her parents and three siblings in 1981. After a 29-year career as an Australian diplomat and public servant, she became the first Greek Australian — and the first woman — to hold the post.
Her memoir, Australian Ambassador, published this summer by Carlow Books, tells that story. At a little more than 300 pages, and illustrated with photographs from her personal and diplomatic archives, the book looks at migration, identity, belonging and public service through the life of a woman asked to represent one homeland in another.
It opens in Athens on 20 February 2014, near the end of her posting. The ambassador’s residence is preparing to host G20 ambassadors. Outside, Greece is still in the grip of a crisis that has remade its economy, politics and society.
“Greece is in crisis. The kind that reshapes nations. Austerity has hollowed out the middle class, unemployment has soared and the streets of Athens still bear the scars of protest. Diplomacy, in these moments, is not ceremonial — it is existential,” she writes.
For Bloomfield the crisis was also personal. She was representing Australia in the country where she was born and grew up.
“My dual heritage — Greek by birth, Australian by choice, or perhaps by fate — has never felt more visible. I am both host and envoy, insider and outsider. The daughter of migrants, now representing the country that welcomed us, in the land that shaped me.”
Her posting spanned successive Greek governments: George Papandreou, Lucas Papademos, Panagiotis Pikrammenos and Antonis Samaras. She left Athens shortly before SYRIZA took power in January 2015.
That dual knowledge made her useful at a delicate moment in the relationship between the two countries. It also forced her to face basic questions of identity: who she was, where she was from, and where she belonged.
Her earlier career had already taken her through some of the world’s more difficult political environments — Iran, Argentina, Japan, Taiwan and Eastern Europe. She also held senior posts at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra and ran the department’s Victoria State Office in Melbourne.
A private story runs beside the official one. Bloomfield writes about diplomatic life with her husband, James, and their four children: the strain of postings abroad, family life, and moving between cultures. The book is dedicated to James, who died of illness in 2016.
She does not treat her path as unique.
“I am deeply aware that my story is but one among thousands: children of migrants who have become an integral part of Australia’s story, who have carried the best of both worlds, who have grown into new roles and grasped new possibilities.”
The circle closed when the girl who left Thessaloniki at 12 returned as Australia’s ambassador. The point of the story is not choosing one home over the other. It is finding a place in both.
Source: “Returning home as ambassador,” Kathimerini / eKathimerini.com, 3 September 2026.
https://www.ekathimerini.com/culture/1314156/returning-home-as-ambassador/
