Launch of Andrew Lachowicz’s “More Than A Journey”

Andrew Lachowicz’s novel More Than a Journey, published toward the end of 2015, had its Melbourne launch at the Old Shire Offices in Heidelberg on 14 May 2016.

Andrew Lachowicz, well known in Melbourne’s Ukrainian community, is a retired senior public servant and a former chairman of Dnister Ukrainian Credit Co-operative. In the late 1980s as an honorary research fellow of the Monash Ukrainian Studies program he conducted research on the Ukrainian Australian artist Michael Kmit. Lachowicz has now written a substantial – 582-page – work of fiction. The novel tells a life story similar in some respects to the biographies of many Ukrainian immigrants to Australia after the Second World War, but incorporating a much more exotic journey into Southeast Asia and into the lands of indigenous Australians.

“We expect an immigrant novel about Ukrainian life in Australia,” said Professor Marko Pavlyshyn, launching the book. “There hasn’t been such a novel – not in English, not of such a serious length.

But no, the novel turns out to be […] about ‘more than’ that. It’s about the turbulence and uncertainty of our times, about the fragility of relationships – family bonds, friendships, the ties born of sexual desire, about the challenges of confronting the culturally new, interacting sincerely with people radically different from oneself, about managing the fine balance between loyalty to one’s inherited identity, carried in memory, custom and language, and embrace of the new place where one’s life now is.” The full text of Professor Pavlyshyn’s address may be downloaded here.

The cover of More Than a Journey uses a fragment from the painting “Cultures Observed” by Irene Lachowicz. A webpage is dedicated to the book, which may be purchased online.