This is an auspicious time to reissue a book by a Cypriot-Australian in a bilingual edition. Awareness of Cyprus in Australia, and of Australia in Cyprus, is at unprecedented levels following the spectacular performance in the 2006 Australian Open Tennis Championship of both Marcos Baghdatis and his colourful crowd of supporters from the Cypriot subset of the Melbourne Greek community. Bilingual (even trilingual) editions are the hallmark of Owl Publishing, but this fifteenth volume in its ‘Writing the Greek Diaspora’ series represents a new departure in its inclusion of high-resolution artwork: section four of the collection comprises sixteen photomontages, mostly statuesque combinations of objects and body parts.

The photomonteur and poet Peter Lyssiotis has been experimenting with the conflation of words and images since the early 1980s, and has specialised in limited-edition livres d’ artiste since 1992. One of these, A Gardener at Midnight: Travels in the Holy Land (2004), currently features in the well-publicised exhibition ‘Lost and Found: The Adventures of Two Artists in the State Library of Victoria’. A deluxe elephant folio in a limited edition of ten copies, the book recasts the journey described in a nineteenth-century travelogue held by the State Library as a journey across Iraq in the wake of Operation ‘Shock and Awe’.