Susan Varga is an Australian writer and philanthropist who was born in Hungary in 1943.
Biography
Susan Varga is one of the "most accomplished of Australia's second-generation, post-Holocaust autobiographers". Susan Varga is a Holocaust survivor who came to Australia at the age of five with her mother, stepfather and sister in 1948. Her biological father died in a Nazi Labour camp during the German occupation of Hungary in WWII. After the war her mother married a survivor who had lost his wife and two sons at Auschwitz. The family emigrated to Australia in 1949. Varga's stepfather was a successful businessman who started in the clothing business in Sydney. Married and divorced, Varga lives with her partner and writer Anne Coombs in the Southern Highlands of NSW. Varga has written fiction, non-fiction and articles for newspapers and magazines.
After World War II Varga's parents built a new life in their adopted country. They started a clothing business out of a factory which they named Becher. When their daughter chose to invest her inheritance in a foundation to help those who, like her own family, have been forced into asylum, she and her partner Anne Coombs named it Becher. Together with Anne Coombs and Helen McCue, Varga founded Rural Australians for Refugees in 2001. In 2020 there are branches across Australia supporting and advocating for refugees and people seeking asylum.
Activism
In 1974 Varga was one of a group of volunteers including Kay Ferrington, Joan Killorn, Betty Pybus and Edith Warburton who set up the Bonnie Women's Refuge at 260 Burns Road, Bonnyrigg in Sydney's South West. Nola Cooper, Christine Sykes and Diane Powell also played a crucial role. It was called Bonny's in line with the practice of naming women's refuges after women. The first women's refuge in New South Wales was called Elsie Refuge. Bonnie Support Services was launched in 2014 on the 40th anniversary of the setting up of the Bonnie Women's Refuge. Varga wrote a poem, "Refuge", for the occasion. It concludes with the words, "By Women, For Women".
Susan Varga, Dark Times, Griffith Review, article 2009
Susan Varga, Culture by Custom, Griffith Review, 2014
Susan Varga, Ann Coombs, Broome -Remote Frontier Town or the Future Shape of Australia?The Sydney Papers, article, 2001
Susan Varga, HappyFamilies, Fact or Fiction, The Sydney Papers, 1981-1999
Susan Varga,George Molnar; Politics and Passions of a Sydney Philospher, Varga wrote one of a collection of memoirs, edited by Carlotta McIntosh, , 2019
Susan Varga, When I think of Budapest, Live Encounters, Free On Line Magazine from Village Earth
Awards
Heddy and Me won the Fellowship of Australian Writers' Christina Stead Award for biography in 1994 and was shortlisted for the 1995 Nita B Kibble Literary Award. It has been translated into German and Hungarian. Headlong was shortlisted for the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award. Rupture, poetry, was commended in the 2016 Anne Elder Award.
