The Greeks of Australia

Although Australia remained largely unknown to Greeks, from 1829 to 1974 approximately 300,000 immigrated and settled in. The early period of settlement (1829-80) was highlighted by the arrival of displaced Greek patriots convicted for piracy by the British naval court in Malta, curious seafarers, fortune seekers and adventurers tempted by the gold rush. During these early days the sporadic migration comprised predominately 450 Greek male sailors serving on British vessels, fugitives, fortune hunters, unsuccessful islander traders and unskilled or unemployed persons from the Greek islands interested in the possibilities in a new land. From Sydney and Perth, where they landed initially, many moved on to other areas; the fortune seekers headed to the goldfields, the travelers roamed across the country, and some migrants settled in rural New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria. Greek gold-miners, from the Ionian Islands, a British protectorate (1815-64), began to arrive in large numbers after 1850 to amass wealth and return to Greece, with the intention of investing in the flourishing Greek shipping industry of the time. Most of them settled in NSW and Victoria, particularly in Ballarat and Bendigo. Some of them even participated in the armed Eureka Stockade rebellion in 1854, in which miners protested against the unbearable working conditions and capital taxes imposed on them by the British colonial rule. Among the Eureka stockade participants was the Ithacan Andreas Lekatsas who had arrived in Australia in 1851.

The pioneers, mostly bachelors, were illiterate wanderers who endured hardships in mining camps and worked under strenuous conditions as peddlers in the urban centres, porters on the wharves and unskilled labour clearing vineyards and farms. Some of them decided to settle. They married local girls, primarily Irish, and became small farmers and graziers, while others moved towards the north of the continent where they were engaged in the sugar cane plantations. Some shortened their names in an effort to gain acceptance from the broader Australian community and were assimilated. They lived far apart from each other, employed in seasonal work or unhealthy jobs, which many Australians found too demeaning to perform. They often had to travel long distances to find work. In country areas they lived in improvised houses, which were usually made of tin and hessian cloth, and were often cruelly exploited by their employers. The only exceptions were the gold hunters of Tambaroora in Ν S W who, in 1860, established their own housing settlement called 'Greektown' near the town's edge. However, when the gold deposits ran out these settlers dispersed across the vast continent.

The earliest Greek Cypriot immigrants were also attracted by the gold rushes of the 1850s in Australia. For example, Antonios Meringas emigrated in about 1840 from Cyprus at the age of twelve, initially to Great Britain and by 1857 to Victoria while George Kalenidis successfully settled in the mining city of Ballarat in 1880, thus encouraging further Cypriot migration. The massive exodus of Cypriots from their homeland continued throughout the twentieth century for political and economic reasons. Being under British rule, Greek Cypriots had been constantly agitating for enosis (union) with Greece. Cyprus was offered to Greece in 1915 as an inducement to enter the war on the side of the allies, however Greece was not willing to risk its fortunes on the battlefield and declined the offer. Greece's refusal to annex the island led large numbers of Cypriots to seek refuge in Greece, the USA and Australia with the hope of repatriating once there was a change of administration. For example, by 1881 the Australian Census already recorded ten Greek Cypriot settlers, by 1911 their number increased to thirty, while by 1928, pioneer Cypriot settlers established the local Greek community of Home Hill in Queensland consecrating the church of St Stephen and a Greek language school. When in early 1933 the first Cypriot communities were established in Melbourne and Sydney the number of Greek Cypriots was more than 500.

Greek immigration to Australia until 1965 was male dominated. For example, the Victorian Census of 1871 recorded 127 males and only nineteen females born in Greece. Ironically, the first recorded lists of non-convict Greek settlers to migrate to Australia included more women. Aikaterini Plessas, an attractive lady from Epirus arrived in 1835, accompanying her husband Major James Henry Crummer, who was appointed that year commander of the British garrison in Sydney. John and Maria Bartides and their son Petros landed in Fremantle in March 1830 as servants to James Somers Rae, while the first free will Greek immigrant, sailor loannis Peters, from the island of Samos arrived in Sydney in about 1838 and became a gold-miner. Four years later, Georgios Tramountanas arrived in Port Adelaide and was employed as the first mate on a coastal vessel, while Nicolaos Emelos, Georgios Doikos and Andreas Lekatsas landed in Melbourne by 1851. Greek settlers were dispersed after 1858 throughout Queensland, by 1862 in Tasmania and by early 1872 in Western Australia (WA). Some pioneers emerged as influential personalities and their role increased migration from their own region. For example, Ithacan Georgios Morfesis who came to Melbourne in 1849 opened his food store and set the foundations for the migration of hundreds of his fellow countrymen in the years that followed. Similarly, in Sydney in 1878 the Kytherian Athanasios Komninos opened the first Greek general store and in 1896 became a founding member of the Greek Orthodox Community of Sydney (GOCS).

Until 1890, Greeks were emigrating to Australia in larger numbers than to America. It was only in 1891, that, for the first time, more than a thousand immigrants arrived in America, while from then on, the influx increased steadily and became epidemic during the period 1901-9, when more than 165000 Greeks settled in the USA. From the beginning of the 1880s Greeks commenced to settle in substantial numbers in Australia. By 1900, their number grew to about 1200, especially because of chain immigration of families from the islands of Kythera, Ithaca and Kastellorizo. Other important sources of emigration were the islands of Samos, Lemnos, Lesbos, Crete, Lefkada, Kefalinia and the Dodekanese. The pioneer immigrants were predominately from 25 Ionian and Aegean islands, with fewer settlers from the mainland and the Greek lands under Ottoman rule. During the inter-war period and especially by 1924, due to the restrictions on migrant intake imposed in the USA and the political and demographic situation created in Greece following the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922), a mass exodus began from mainland Greece. The number of Greek settlers in Australia drastically increased with new waves of refugees from Asia Minor, Macedonia and the Peloponnese to reach over 15,000 by 1940. Many of these immigrants came from the large trading centres of Constantinople, Smyrna, Alexandria and Cairo.

Article to be continued next month

	Excerpts and Photography from The Greeks in Australia by Anastasios Tamis
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The Greeks of Southern California, The Pioneers 1900-1942, DVD (NTSC, All Zones)	The Greeks of Southern California, The Promise of Tomorrow 1940-1960 DVD (NTSC, All Zones)