Five women's journey from Malta to Australia

Lou Zammit, 20, stood at the dock nervously waiting to board the ship that would transport her to a new horizon and better opportunities in Australia under the single women migrants' scheme.

Now, 43 years on, Lou Drofenik has published her first book titled Birds Of Passage, a fictional book, peppered with historical facts, on the lives of five women who migrated to Australia.

Described by critics as a "gripping book" and a "vibrant first novel", Birds Of Passage has been extremely well received following the launch in Australia last March and Ms Drofenik is hoping to launch her book in Malta in the coming months.

"It's very exciting to see my baby go to print - I keep touching it to make sure it's not all a dream. I have received wonderful encouraging e-mails and letters from readers who felt the book touched a chord in their lives," she said in an interview.

Birds Of Passage is a culmination of a 10-year research project for her PhD and, though the characters are fictional, Ms Drofenik has based her work on historical facts, shuttling between Malta and Australia every two years to conduct her research.

"Salman Rushdie said you have to cross a frontier to be able to look back and that's what I tried to do before writing my book," she enthused.

Ms Drofenik, who has four children and works as a technology teacher in a primary school, as well as lectures English at La Trobe University in Melbourne, was inspired to write Birds Of Passage because the voices of the women she interviewed for her doctoral dissertation kept ringing in her head.

"Everybody in Australia knows of Maltese women who migrated to Australia, yet they know nothing about them. I feel they have been silenced because they assimilated so well," she said.

"Migration is a very difficult process, especially since these women were coming from a closed Catholic culture to a country where feminist consciousness was arising - for some it was a liberation, for others a shock. In Australia they were confronted with moral choices they didn't have to face in Malta.

"However, Maltese women are very resilient and each woman in the book comes out triumphant in each human story."

Does Birds Of Passage reflect the experience she herself endured when she migrated as a single woman to Australia?

"An author cannot deny her experience in the story," she smiled.

The setting of the first two-thirds of the book is Malta and Gozo in the late 19th century as the story spans the stories of families through World War I and II through political upheavals and social changes.

Ms Drofenik interweaves the vexed issues of female servitude in a strongly male dominated world and tradition - the characters come to life with descriptive detail on their lives, fears, hopes, mature passion and girlish dreams.

The book, littered with Maltese words, also gives the reader a great deal of insight into the island's culture and history.

One interesting historical fact is the racism Maltese faced in Australia. She recounts the story of a Maltese man who was faced with a dictation test, held to keep undesirables away from the country, in Dutch.

The man protests: "Some of us, Sir, can write in two languages. We have a few who have studied Italian and even Latin. But Dutch? None of us have studied the language," he protested.

The professor's reply was simply: "All failed".

Ms Drofenik's descriptions in the book bring laughter and tears to the reader's eyes and her use of language has been described as "a sheer pleasure".

Birds Of Passage is a human story that does not shirk from pain but in which the human spirit triumphs.

The book should be available from bookshops in the coming months.

The author may be contacted by e-mail at loudrof@hotmail.com.