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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\u2019s ambassador to the country of her birth.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 and the first woman \u2014 to hold the post.<\/p>\n
Her memoir, Australian Ambassador<\/a><\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n It opens in Athens on 20 February 2014, near the end of her posting. The ambassador\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cGreece 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 \u2014 it is existential,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n For Bloomfield the crisis was also personal. She was representing Australia in the country where she was born and grew up.<\/p>\n \u201cMy dual heritage \u2014 Greek by birth, Australian by choice, or perhaps by fate \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Her earlier career had already taken her through some of the world\u2019s more difficult political environments \u2014 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\u2019s Victoria State Office in Melbourne.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n She does not treat her path as unique.<\/p>\n \u201cI am deeply aware that my story is but one among thousands: children of migrants who have become an integral part of Australia\u2019s story, who have carried the best of both worlds, who have grown into new roles and grasped new possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n The circle closed when the girl who left Thessaloniki at 12 returned as Australia\u2019s ambassador. The point of the story is not choosing one home over the other. It is finding a place in both.<\/p>\n Source:<\/strong> \u201cReturning home as ambassador,\u201d Kathimerini<\/em> \/ eKathimerini.com, 3 September 2026.
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https:\/\/www.ekathimerini.com\/culture\/1314156\/returning-home-as-ambassador\/<\/a><\/p>\n