Walking in the Melbourne CBD in late February, it might seem as if a piece of Greece has been teleported to Australian shores. Beautiful food, dances and music fill every corner of Lonsdale Street as Australia’s largest Greek festival, Antipodes Festival, takes over the area, temporarily silencing the issues the community faces.
Greeks began coming to Australia in the early ‘60s, when the White Australia Policy wasn’t yet considered racist, and any immigrant without a perfect Australian accent wasn’t welcomed. Hostility made the new immigrants hold tight onto each other. They dwelled in the same suburbs, did business together. They hired each other for work.
Father Theophilos Dellaportas was invited to Australia in 2018 to serve as a priest in St. Gregorios Orthodox Church in Bentleigh. He has lived in Greece his whole life, and he tells upstart the Greek culture in Australia is “stuck in the ‘60s”. He thinks younger Greeks follow the “superficial traditions” like dancing and souvlaki, but doing so doesn’t provide them with understanding “of the problems of life”.
The RMIT United Society of Hellenes (RUSH) is one of many student-led Greek communities uniting youth. It organises picnics, night parties and lectures.
Even though he was born in Australia, Panos Stamatopoulos, president of RUSH, has visited Greece many times and thinks the culture Greeks have in Australia is different.
“Because we’re three generations away, we’re living in a diluted version of the ‘50s to ‘80s Greek culture,” he tells upstart.
Some immigrants can get stuck in their home country state at the time of their departure. Time flows in their motherland, and people there change, but immigrants preserve the old culture and traditions, like they’re a time capsule. This has been described as the ‘time warp’ or ‘the time capsule’ effect.
Now, Australia is one of the biggest hubs for immigrants from all over the world, and children of people who came from Greece, devastated by civil war 70 years ago, can now call themselves Australians without anyone doubting that. But some prefer not to.
Andreas Papadopoulos, secretary of RUSH, tells upstart that when the Greek community was newly formed in Australia, Greeks were holding closer together. These days, he feels, community connections are weaker, as well as the connection to the motherland.
“I would say to people I’m Greek. But when you look at people that were born and raised in Greece, they are, I would say, not the same as people born in Australia, but are Greek.”
The time capsule effect can also mean that many don’t have a strong sense of reality of life in Greece today.
Going on a vacation in Greece is a common thing among Greeks in Australia, but Father Theophilos thinks no Australian Greek would like to live in Greece permanently. He says Greeks in Melbourne think of their homeland as a wonderful country where they can do everything, but in fact they don’t understand the chaotic environment there. They have “an ideal understanding of Greece”.
“[I know] a couple of people that went [to Greece] last year thinking ‘I’m going to stay in Greece forever’,” he recalls. “And they returned because they said ‘it’s not so easy’.” He notices the diaspora usually loves the motherland more than the people who live there.
“Why? Because the diaspora is not facing the problems of the motherland,” he says.
He says living in Greece these days is “difficult”. The economy, corruption and social injustice are things that don’t concern the diaspora directly, therefore, their views of the motherland are shrouded in a haze of rose-coloured nostalgia.
By the corruption perceptions index, Greece is ranked 59th out of the 180 countries and is one of the worst in Europe. GDP per capita is around US$25,000, while in Australia it’s AUD$64,400. By the quality of life index, Australia is ranked 11th, while Greece is at 46th.
Stamatopoulos characterises the last 200 years of Greek history, since it gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire, as “shooting ourselves in the foot”.
In the 20th century, Greece fought two world wars, was occupied by the Axis, then went through a civil war, where the monarchy fought communists, and a military junta, “Regime of Colonels”.
From 2008 to 2018, Greece was facing a severe debt crisis. Now, the statistics show the situation there is improving, but in comparison to Australia, moving there would be a significant downgrade, at least from an economic perspective.
Because of the lack of direct connection to the motherland, for some, modern attempts to preserve Greek culture lack meaning. Without a direct connection to the motherland, the community is very active in art. Dances, songs, and food are essential for any diaspora to preserve memories of the homeland. But Father Theophilos thinks it doesn’t provide meaning. Stamatopoulos calls it “performative”.
“They’re trying to be something that they’re not, almost like clout, for lack of a better word,” he says.
He thinks it’s the consequence of losing the connection.
“I suppose when the first generation came here, the culture wasn’t really a thing that they’re trying to connect to as such,” he says. “It was a part of themselves. It wasn’t really separate from their personal identity.”
But this disconnection isn’t an exclusively Greek thing. Many other immigrant communities also struggle to find a new identity. Father Mikhail Protopopov, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church in Dandenong, came to Australia in 1949 from a displaced persons camp in post-war Europe. He recalls how 40 years ago, a few years before the fall of the Soviet Union, the diaspora in Australia was thinking that soon their schools and churches would be closed.
“In the church school, where there used to be 200 pupils, there were only 30,” he tells upstart. “And we thought, ‘well, this year is fine, another year or two, probably, and then we would have to close it’.”
But the USSR fell, and many new immigrants came to Australia. Now, Father Mikhail hopes that once “the stupidity on the international scene settles”, there will be more people coming to try to live in Australia.
“Russia is our home, we live here with a good stepmother, a kind stepmother, a loving stepmother, but our mother is back there,” he says. “And this feeling remains not only in my family, but in many others as well.”
Nowadays, people can easily immigrate from Greece, but they prefer Europe over Australia. From 2011 to 2021, only 5,983 Greeks immigrated to Australia, while in the UK, the number of Greeks went from 28,000 in 2008 to 73,000 in 2021.
Two thousand years ago, Greeks were also making colonies and were immigrating to other places, such as Crimea, Sicily or Pontus. Father Theophilos thinks the existence of the diaspora depends on whether the motherland supports it. The homeland needs to feed back the colony with tradition, information and people for a diaspora to live.
Stamatopoulos’ mother’s family comes from Pontus, a land where Türkiye is now. For centuries, Pontian Greeks lived under the Ottoman Empire. There they were Greeks, and when they came to mainland Greece, they were called Turks. He recalls the Pontian song ‘Patrida M’ Araevo Se’, which says: “In Greece, I’m a foreigner. And in foreign countries, I’m Greek.”
Article: Aleksandr Prikhodko is a second-year Media & Communications (Journalism major) student at La Trobe University. You can follow him on Twitter: @aleksprih
Cover Photo: Australia Day 2014 by Chris Phutully found HERE and used under Creative Commons License.
