Anna Broinowski
Author, filmmaker and academic, Anna Broinowski’s new book, Datsun Angel, is a rollicking memoir based on her travels as a hitchhiker through outback Australia in the 1980s. Here, she talks about her life, loves, and learning.
Tell us about your early years.
My childhood was peripatetic. I was born in Tokyo and went to nine schools in Burma [now Myanmar], Iran, the Philippines, Canberra and Japan. I liked humanities subjects and loved theatre – I still remember being Rat 4 in a play about a pumpkin on the icy roof of my British kindergarten in Tehran, playing Eliza Doolittle in in middle school in Manila, narrating in my rough-as-guts public high school in Canberra, and playing a mosquito in an ancient Kyogen play in the American School in Japan, where I graduated. But I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to be the Australian prime minister. I had a big ego as a kid.
