WHEN you come from a rocky land, you have to be versatile. And so Greeks have proved to be, says historian Dr Nicholas Doumanis, who is part of a team recording the stories of the generation of Greeks who arrived in Australia after World War II.
The University of NSW project, called the Greek Australian Archive, is documenting the lives of about 100 post-war arrivals, their tales of success and adversity, and produce an online collection for the State Library of NSW.
To Nicholas, an associate professor of history, this is important because the community "doesn't really have a central repository".
"If someone wants to study their history, there isn't much to go on," he said. "So it's possible their histories will disappear or we'll be stuck with caricatures like Con the Fruiterer."
Another aim of the study, he told The Senior, is to "fully appreciate through extensive study what it was like to come here in the '50s and '60s, and how their cultural baggage helped them integrate into this country".
Nicholas said the success of the Greek-Australian migrant experience can be partly explained by geography.
"If you know anything about Greece, it's a pile of rocks. You're required to be versatile. And Greeks were already used to emigrating seasonally," said Nicholas, whose parents came from the Aegean island of Kos.
"In most parts of Greece, people didn't just do farm work. They had to do lots of other work besides, including commercial stuff. So versatility was one thing.
"Also remember that every part of Greece is close to the sea. This means sea transport allowed them to move to places like Smyrna and Constantinople in Turkey for work during the winter:"
Nicholas said that for post-war Greeks of his parents' generation the usual idea was to come to Australia for 10 years, build up capital and go home.
He said 95% came from villages and were "very old-fashioned". On arrival, most clustered in the working class suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne - places like the now-upmarket Redfern, Paddington and Carlton - and took the first factory jobs they could get.
"Some went to shops run by earlier generations of Greek migrants who had established cafes, fish and chip shops and so on but most worked in factories." he said.
"What they found is that they could save a lot of money by bunking up together - houses with would be full of Greek families in different rooms. Then they would buy property, usually in the same suburb or wherever Greeks congregated.
Nicholas said the next stop was to get into a small business.
"So a disproportionate number became shopkeepers. The niche that they helped to fill was the corner shop. And that held until the '70s. But as soon as they got a sense that supermarkets with we're taking over, they sold to the Vietnamese.
"Again, it's a versatility thing. Also, they had institutions to help them. Being migrants, they knew where to get information and congregated with other Greeks to find it. So they used those networks."
"It's that kind of stuff that we're trying to tease out in our work."
Nicholas said it's important to understand that most Greek arrivals "didn't plan to integrate because they intended to go home. But once they decided to stay, they chose to become Australian - on their own terms."
As part of this, and compared with most migrant groups, Greeks were prolific at creating associations with their attendant balls, picnics and more, he said.
"These associations have all but gone now - it was a fleeting thing - but for that generation they did their role; they created an environment that made them comfortable and made it "Greek enough".
He said that In Greek culture, education is strongly emphasised, the results being seen in the rapid rise of so many in just two generations.
"Most of us were really pushed through the education system. We were told, 'You don't want to do what I do for a job - you can do better.'
"So we were pushed towards white-collar professions. The other big thing was Gough Whitlam and free tertiary education. That floated everybody."
Nicholas says the Greeks succeeded renegotiating what Australian culture offered. "They brought their own Old World traditions and reworked them to fit into the new landscape."
Religious services and weddings were hugely important occasions, while Greek classes were a way for the young to stay connected with their roots, though not all of the young welcomed the enforced extracurricular activity.
"It was awful," he said with a chuckle. "You'd go to classes all day and then you'd go to more. But I was lucky. My dad didn't push me so I only went for a year. A lot of kids went for six years. And on Saturdays too!"
Sport also bound the community together, he said, "but mostly soccer and definitely not cricket, which our parents' generation could not make out at all!"
Of course, not all the tales gathered so far are happy ones, Nicholas said. Included among them are tragic stories of women in Greece who were betrothed to men in Australia. "And the women would arrive, but the men would look nothing like their photographs."
ON HOMES
As well as stories, the archive will include on online exhibition of artefacts and memorabilia such as letters, photographs, films, diaries and postcards.
Associate Professor George Kouvaros, an expert in material culture, is looking at how post-war Greek identities were formed through objects and the way they set up their homes.
"For example, there's what we call a xennas, which is a formal room for guests," he said. "It's got all this furniture we were never allowed to sit on. And often people would keep plastic on the couch, so nobody could sit on it."
Other items such as doilies or the tendency to concrete their gardens, and even the way they stood in photographs will speak subtle volumes about this era, he said.
Nicholas told The Senior that concrete was popular among first-generation Greek homeowners because they "hate the mess caused by leaves".
"There's something about Greeks and trees that I have to look into," he said with a laugh. "It's all to do with gutters and keeping things neat. Having a garden you can control was important to them; concrete helped.
"That generation had a lot of things in common they didn't like. For example, terraces. They got out of them as soon as they could so they could have a backyard and a grove of some kind to plant a lemon tree in.
"Also, the idea of moving back into a terrace in an old neighbourhood they had abandoned horrified them. It was like going backward in life."
Nicholas, George and Dr Efrosini Deligianni will complete the archival collection and online exhibition in 2022.