Gillian Bouras was born in
Melbourne in 1945. Both her parents and her grandfather were school teachers. Her childhood was spent moving in several towns in Australia
Victoria, including
Nhill and
Beechworth, and Melbourne. Gillian Bouras studied for her Bachelor of Arts at the
University of Melbourne, and from 1967 to 1980 she worked as a secondary school teacher of English. In 1981 Mrs Bouras completed her Master of Education thesis at the same university on the life of her grandfather:
School teacher in Victoria: The biography of Arthur John Hicks. She married George Bouras, a Greek emigrant to Australia, in 1969. In 1980 Gillian went with her husband and her two sons to the
Peloponnese area of Greece, initially for a six-month holiday, but the family stayed. She had her third son in Greece, and eventually became a Greek citizen. In 1996, her younger sister Jacqui committed suicide, after decades of mental illness. Bouras' book,
No Time for Dances, explores her sister's life in an attempt to understand her suicide. Gillian Bouras wrote: "I keep trying to close a mental door, or to put a very firm lid on these questions, for there are no answers, and writing them down is one way of attempting closure." Gillian Bouras now lives in the Peloponnese, Greece, but she maintains her ties with Australia. ==Career==