Launch speech for Portraits of Women by Dina Tourvas, self published 2023, was launched by Anna Couani at The Greek Community Club in Lakemba as part of the Greek Festival of Sydney on 13 March 2024.

Thanks to Dina for inviting me to launch this fabulous book, Portraits of Women. This book is a representation of various women in the visual sense of being portraits but also a representation of their lives and works. And it’s a representation of Dina’s feminist take on the world: to a large extent, it’s a representation of Dina’s immediate world. The book has a personal feel and if I might quote from my own piece of writing in the book – the map of the world is felt from the inside. Another way of saying, the personal is political. I love the way Dina has included self-portraits from two different periods of her life. The portrait of Dina senior on the cover is especially moving.

Dina has been involved in a number of her own feminist projects over the last 50 years, mostly focused on women and their circumstances and the rights of women. This book is the product of one of those projects. It covers many years of work, locating her subjects and painting these 71 portraits of feminists, of Greek-Australians and Greek women who Dina sees as significant, either in her own personal sphere, like her family and friends and the women from the Association of Greek Women in Australia or like the first 15 entries in the book – women who are significant historical figures like Sappho, Virginia Woolf and Frida Kahlo to mention a few. I like the fact that Dina has created a portrait of Sappho when there isn’t much evidence of her appearance. Dina’s Sappho looks so like a lovely young woman you might meet on the street today. It’s very fresh.

There are so many fabulous portraits in the book and it’s exciting for those of us whom Dina painted, to see yourself accompanied by contemporaries you admire like Effie Alexakis and Athena Touriki along with beloved friends, in my case, Antigone Kefala and Yota Krili. And to be included alongside such titans of history as Marie Curie and Rosa Luxembourg.

As well as the portraits, Dina has included a short text with each portrait explaining how and why she chose each subject. That, in itself, paints a wonderful social portrait of our life and times, describing the activities and contributions that so many Greek Australian women have made since the 1950’s; how they’ve been pivotal in various educational institutions and other arenas fighting for the recognition and inclusion of women and of migrants. Not to mention their own personal achievements in many aspects of the arts – theatre, literature, music and the visual arts. Also in academia, business and the legal profession. This book encompasses such a wide range of people and it’s a wonderful insight into the way Greek Australians have penetrated all aspects of Australian society.

In addition, statements or work by the women who are the subjects accompany many of the portraits. So that adds another dimension to the book – it becomes like an anthology of the textual and visual work of feminists, Greeks and Greek Australians, many people occupying two of those categories. It’s an idiosyncratic collection of women, bound together by Dina’s own orientation and interests as a feminist and a visual artist and that’s something that makes it fascinating. If it had been an academic text or a book published by a major press, the book would have been less varied, maybe would have only included people who were famous, might have been focused on a single period of history. As it is, the book is a delight to dip into. You can read small sections in both English and Greek, check out the paintings, look at the work people have submitted, read their personal histories and connections to Dina. Ultimately, the book is greater than the sum of its parts.

A while ago, I was given a small book self-published by a Sydney woman artist, Sarah Gibson. It’s called Ninety Plus and is a series of portraits that Sarah made of women artists who survived into their 90’s. It’s a lovely richly coloured object of prints of works made with oil pastels. It’s very special, a jewel, and something you’d never find in a bookshop. So this is another great aspect of this book, Portraits of Women – like Sarah’s book, it hasn’t been through the obstacle course of the publishing world, searching for a gatekeeper to give it the imprimatur or for some person in marketing to see it’s potential as a commodity with some angle that might help in its promotion. Dina has taken on this huge job herself, not only doing the paintings but doing lots of work writing and translating the texts.

Self-publication is a significant achievement, a feminist enterprise in itself – to be able to develop a project on your own terms, assemble all the material, marshal the participants, collect all their contributions, organise the layout and the print production and to bring it to the world with substantial production values. Amazing. Of course, as she acknowledges, she has been helped and supported by her partner George Michelakakis, her daughter Anna Zounis and friend Manolis Plantzos. And many of us are familiar with the contributions to Greek cultural life in Sydney that George and Manolis have made over many decades. Frixos Ioannides is responsible for the beautiful design and layout of the book. So this is a nice reversal of the usual state of affairs where the women are doing the work behind the scenes for a male practitioner.

Given all that, that the book has come to fruition, it now needs an audience and that is us readers, initially. It’s appropriate that this book is being launched during the Greek Festival of Sydney in The Greek Community Club in Lakemba but it would be wonderful if we could push it a bit further into the community and the public sphere. The book is a treasure!

 – Anna Couani

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Portraits of Women was self published 2023 and can be ordered from the The Bilingual Bookshop. The portraits illustrated in the book were in an an exhibition of paintings at The Shop Gallery in 2021

Anna Couani is a Sydney writer and visual artist who runs The Shop Gallery in Glebe with her husband Hilik Mirankar. She was a secondary art teacher for many years, including 20 years teaching Art in Intensive English Centres. She also taught English as a Second Language for 10 years. Her most recent publication is a book of poetry called local.

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Dina Tourvas was born on the island of Ikaria, Greece. She migrated to Australia in 1958 and studied Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts . She obtained a teaching degree and taught art in Sydney secondary schools. Her artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows and hosted in various private art galleries. She published a bilingual English Greek narrative called Sky Sucks and forthcoming is a collection of short stories called Pebbles. Dina divides her time between Sydney and her native island Ikaria.