SOUREN’S STORY: A VOICE RECOVERED FROM ARMENIA’S BITTER PAST

ABC News
09/2719972.htm
Oct 21 2009
Australia

Armenian genocide and Australia

In 1921, when he was six years old, Souren Antoyan was sent from
his occupied homeland of Armenia to spend the next eight years in an
Australian-run orphanage in Lebanon.

Souren Antoyan’s story is testimony to the enduring legacy of Armenia’s
bitter and unresolved 20th century history, and sheds new light on
the little-known role that Australia played in the international
relief effort that emerged in the wake of the Armenian genocide.

Producer Cara Rosehope travelled to Lebanon, where a chance meeting
with 93-year-old Souren Antoyan uncovered this antipodean connection
— in Souren’s own life but also within the wider play of history in
the period after World War One.