ONE
GREEK-AUSTRALIANS: IN THEIR OWN IMAGE
Alexakis’ photographs of Greek-Australians were the ignition point of her partnership with historian Leonard Janiszewski. In 1982 the pair began a detailed investigation of the historical and contemporary Greek-Australian presence, both within Australia and internationally. Bringing together contemporary and historical images with oral histories and archival research, their labours have now evolved into one of the largest, most diverse collections of its kind in Australia – ‘In Their Own Image: Greek-Australians’ National Project Archives.
Representing diversity is important for Alexakis. During the 1980s her camera became a tool to challenge stereotypes, misconceptions and inadequacies of both the contemporary and historical perception of Greek-Australians. She entered people’s homes, their places of work and leisure, to document their lives and lived experiences across Australia and Greece. Her work is strongly influenced by a well-established tradition of black-and-white social documentary photography, in particular the works of American photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hine, W. Eugene Smith and Robert Frank. Alexakis’ work mines an extensive sociocultural consciousness of the transnational, migrant-settler experience and her work continues to resonate with such an attitude to this day.
Bill Florence (Vasilios Florias) being welcomed to Australia
Melbourne, VIC, 1922
Bill arrived in Melbourne as a 14-year-old and sent this photo to his family on Ithaca. He married Joya (née Raftopoulos) after her arrival in Australia in 1949 and they had three children: George, Anastasia and James. Bill worked in a number of Greek cafés as a waiter or cook before buying his own catering enterprise, Quality Luncheon Service, in Melbourne in 1939.
“My future mother-in-law saw me in Greece. She said, ‘If my son wants to get married, this is the girl’. She wrote to Bill, then I sent a photo. He sent money out for me – so he brought me to Australia … I was about 23 … not knowing anybody … Bill was 42, he had no hair. I said, ‘I don’t care, as long as he has brains’ … My father had been in Romania for 20 years and I knew that when you leave your country, it’s not easy.”
“Dad would work very long hours [in the shop] … He was a slave to work … He never went back to Greece.”
Joyia:
Anastasia:
Effie Haldezos, Paragon Café
Hay, NSW, 1986
I recently rediscovered this photograph of Effie Haldezos feeding her baby. The photo we had published in Greek Cafés & Milk Bars of Australia (Halstead Press, 2016/22) was of Effie getting her older children ready for school. This image of feeding the baby makes me very emotional. I am having a different reaction to it 35 years later. I had somehow dismissed it earlier. It says much about the role of these early Greek women in Australia – the isolation, the responsibilities, and the general difficulties that she would have experienced.
In 2016 I drove with Leonard through Hay, where we stopped briefly and walked through the cemetery. We were very saddened to see that Effie had passed away in 2000, at a young age. That there were fresh flowers placed on her site is a testament that she is much loved and missed.
Alexakis:
Peter and Jack Veneris, Blue Bird Café
Lockhart, NSW, 2002
Peter and Jack’s parents, Panayioti and KyriaKoola (née Mavromati) Veneris were from Kythera. In 1919 they purchased the Paragon Café in Lockhart from another Greek family – the Kastsoulis family – and ran the café with the help of KyriaKoola’s brother, Anthony. In 1933 they acquired the Blue Bird Café across the road from the Paragon. The family ran the Blue Bird for almost 70 years, including 50 of those years with Peter and Jack at its helm. The brothers eventually sold the business in 2000.
“The café was the heartthrob of the town … We had a civic reception when we sold the shop – it was our home, our livelihood, it was our everything.”
Peter (left):
Ted and Janet Payzis
Newcastle, NSW, 1986
Ted (Telemachos) Payzis’ father, Spiros, came to Newcastle from Ithaca around 1885. In 1912 he returned, married Kalliope Maratos, and then resettled in Australia where Ted was born in 1923.
"No disadvantages in a mixed marriage whatsoever; I feel more at home with an Australian [British-Australian] lady. I was married to a Greek from Athens … it only lasted three years.”
“I married Ted in 1964 … my sister married a Greek also … His family [Ted’s] didn’t accept me – still haven’t. We have a son, Jason. He was christened in the Greek Orthodox Church … One of the things I do like about the Greeks is the way they respect their dead.”
Something I was very conscious of when documenting people was my intent to personalise the individual, so I often photographed them in their own space, exposing their private world. In the 1980s the photographic depiction of people of non-English-speaking backgrounds in their homes was not common.
Ted:
Janet:
Alexakis:
Christos Tsiolkas
Melbourne, VIC, 1997
Christos was born in Melbourne in 1965. His father arrived in Australia in 1955, and his mother in 1963. They were married in 1964. Christos is the elder of their two sons, and today one of Australia’s most successful and awarded writers.
“For a long time I didn’t want to be Greek, I didn’t want to be a wog. I wanted to be exactly like the ‘skips’ [British-Australians] ... My parents were terrified that I was going into directions they could not control ... There wasn’t a shared vocabulary ... so if you got into arguments about sexual politics, for instance, you didn’t have a language to communicate that in … It was really difficult to sit down with Mum and Dad and talk about their fears of the world I was in ... Their fantasy was the migrant success story – that I would be a doctor, marry really well, and father a few children ... The fact that they had a gay son has meant that they have had to let go of those fantasies ... My father has accepted, Mum is full of regrets ... But, they are also really proud of us [my brother and myself] ... At no point have we rejected them or denied the importance of the family relationship to us.”
Christos:
Kay Pavlou
Sydney, NSW, 1998
Kay Pavlou (Kyriakoula Maria Pavlou) was born in Adelaide in 1960.
“That was a hard time in my teens and my twenties. I love my parents, still love them. I felt very confused, because, on the one hand, I loved them, but on the other, I was fighting them. In a lot of ways, I bore much malice towards them. I hated them for locking us up ... not understanding that we needed ... freedom ... I felt angry about growing up Greek in Australia ... being an angry young girl made me less of a victim ... a lot of feminism was involved in that ... in my early twenties when I started to make films, I started to look at the fact that there were certain things about being Greek that I actually liked. This created a process of picking and choosing the aspects I wanted to claim as my own, and others which I would decide were not how I wanted to live my life ... Even now, at 38, I’m still asking myself those questions about what is it of value of my first culture that I can claim and what are the aspects I find demeaning to me as a human being ... identity like culture is a transient and evolving notion ... I’m aware of the sacrifices they [my parents] made ... Yes, they did work hard ... at the same time I want to invent myself.”
Kay:
Spartacus and Norma Tsiamis with their baby daughter Karina
Alice Springs, NT, 1987
“I like it here, a bit quiet. Been back to Greece, don’t really miss Greece … my parents are dead, my brother is here … The first 3 to 4 years some racism, now doesn’t bother me at all … My father was in jail 20 years – a political prisoner – because he was involved in the resistance. My mother was provoked by them [Greek authorities] all the time. She had to work hard to support us. I had a hard time as a boy. Saw no future in Greece – if your family’s name was crossed, you had no chance … Older son [Kostas] … my culture means nothing to him.”
The connection between First Nations Australians and early Greeks goes back many decades. What is poignant for me is that Spartacus also felt marginalised by other Greeks due to the political position of his family. Sadly, he has since passed away, but I was recently in touch with Karina, who was thrilled to be reminded of this photo.
Spartacus:
Alexakis:
Komninos Zervos
Sydney, NSW, 1993
“As soon as I went to kindergarten, I went not speaking English … I went having my name changed from Komninos, Komninaki, Kaki, to Kevin. We were in the shop, so we were constantly reminded by the drunks … [that] we were wogs, so even before I went to school I was reminded of the fact I wasn’t exactly one of the Irish-Australians that were in Richmond [in Melbourne] at that time … When I started expressing myself artistically, I started signing myself ‘Komninos’ because there was no contradiction in that … and just Komninos tells you I’m of Greek origin. Now people constantly write ‘Greek-Australian poet Komninos’. They don’t have to say ‘Greek-Australian poet Komninos’, they can say ‘Australian poet Komninos’ which tells you I’m from a Greek background, or they can say ‘poet Komninos’ … they don’t have to specify the ethnicity. They don’t say ‘Irish-Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating spoke to Scottish-Australian Opposition Leader John Hewson’, they don’t make that distinction there, but they seem to have to make it when they’re speaking about us.”
John Conomos
Sydney, NSW, 2000
Conomos is an artist, critic, writer and academic with a broad field of inquiry, marrying literature and cinema through critical visual arts theory. This has led him to use and often combine a range of mediums including video, new media, installation, photo-performance and radio-phonic art. In 2014 Conomos discussed characteristics central to his creative and lived experiences and his Kytherian background with film and media theorist Aleksandr Wansbrough:
“… the catastrophic vision, the melancholic vision, is central to my life… the catastrophic has got a philosophical, cinematic and autobiographical anchorage for me … I know one of my flaws as a human being is I can’t be happy, I don’t enjoy my life, and I need to be in a creative sphere of solitude where I can listen to music, watch a movie on my own or read a book. I can never share this unless I do it as a writer or as an artist. But this is a very deep kind of psychological connection with the catastrophic … melancholia is a huge theme that runs riot through the Kytherian imagination, my ancestral Greek island, hence Watteau’s Embarkation to Kythera, hence Debussy’s The Isle of Joy, hence Baudelaire’s poem Autumn Song, hence Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Kythera, and the melancholic part is also part of the clan that my father came from. Our ancestors were Venetian pirates, short stocky pirates of a melancholic background … So, the catastrophic, the melancholic, are complicated and interwoven as an amalgam, it’s marked my life, not that I want to carry around masochistically with catastrophic but I’ve used it as like a mother load, if I can use that expression, to create thematically and new forms in my artwork and in my writing.”
John:
TWO
IMAGES OF HOME: MAVRI XENITIA
While on a field trip in Greece in the mid-1980s, Alexakis recognised the term mavri xenitia (black, foreign land) as a touchstone expression utilised by those who had remained in otherwise abandoned villages, amongst those who had returned, or who existed in a twilight of despair – constantly travelling between country of origin and host nation, unable to settle permanently in one or the other. Alexakis explains:
The idea to document deserted homes occurred to me whilst I was on the island of Kythera in 1985. I had already noticed many abandoned houses throughout Greece, but it wasn’t until I ventured inside a whole street of deserted homes that I realised that many of the people had left their homes to migrate – to Australia, Canada, the USA – with the intention of returning. Letters, photographs and personal documents had been left behind.
Some had been vacated from the 1920s up till the 1950s and 60s, many had collapsed, and in most of them, there was information about those who had lived in them. In 1990, I went back with Leonard to document them. My idea was that what I had seen in Kythera would be duplicated on Ithaca and Kastellorizo, three islands from which many of Australia’s earliest Greeks had migrated.
In 1995 Alexakis combined photographs from both field trips with interviewee statements and presented them as an exhibition and book of the same title: Images of Home: Mavri Xenitia.
Grandparents' room
Sykea, Laconia, Peloponnese, Greece, 1990
I first visited my parents’ village, Sykea, in the southern Peloponnese in 1978. It was the first of many trips to an unspoilt, simple, traditional way of life. It was hard to imagine how ten children were raised in such a small home and with meagre agricultural means. My father, Spiros Alexakis, being the eldest, had the responsibility of helping support his younger siblings. His opportunity came in 1954 when, with other men from the village, he migrated to Australia through the Australian Government’s Assisted Migrant Scheme – he was under contract to work for two years. He eventually helped bring two sisters and three brothers out to Australia.
Many of my own family’s photographs, which were on the wall, I had never seen before. The wall of faces and places far removed from village life was symbolic of the migration process – representing lives and memories my grandparents could never really share, only witness.
Alexakis:
Polixeni with her mother
Sykea, Greece, 1985
In 1985 I went to Greece to spend a few months photographing the customs and documenting the traditional way of life. Much of this time was spent in my parents’ village of Sykea, in the southern Peloponnese, an agricultural area that supports itself mostly via the production of olives and olive oil. My parents are both from the same village, in fact, their families were neighbours. This was an advantage, as all my family members lived in this one place. Polixeni lived in the neighbourhood and I spent many hours visiting her and getting to know her family; I still see her when I visit the village. Here she was crocheting lace for her dowry.
Alexakis:
Efstathios Alexandratos
Frikes, Ithaca, Greece, 1990
Efstathios is named after his paternal grandfather who went to Bendigo, Victoria towards the end of the Australian gold rushes. His father and uncles later followed. Eventually, his grandfather and father returned to Ithaca, the former bringing with him stories of the last scrambles for gold in the antipodes and, later, the vicissitudes of working in Melbourne’s catering trade.
Efstathios, who has never been to Australia, is the keeper of numerous tales of the two generations of his family who preceded him. Though now deaf, one requires only patience and understanding to uncover the stories he holds. He surrounds himself with memorabilia of his grandfather and father’s life in Australia – portrait photographs, group photographs (all embossed with the logo of a Melbourne or Bendigo photographic studio), bank books, letters, postcards and even an early Australian flag. His home is a living museum, where the Australian and Greek flags fly alongside one another.
Kosmas Megaloconomos and his sister Anna (left) and Metaxia
Ayia Pelayia, Kythera, Greece, 1990
Born in 1909, Kosmas arrived in Sydney in 1939 to join his brother Theofanis, who had arrived four years earlier. He recalls:
“I worked for some Kytherians for six months, and then for myself for 40 years … At first I was thinking of staying a short time … went to Australia with what I had – the clothes I had on … Unfortunately war [World War II] broke out … I took over my brother’s greengrocery business in Quirindi [on the north-western slopes of NSW] – he died in 1940 … I couldn’t speak English, so people would point out what they wanted … I didn’t make a fortune there, but we [Kosmas’ wife Dora (née Comino) and their three children, Arthur, Irena and Nic] had a good life.”
In 1979, Kosmas returned to Kythera – “I had to look after my two [unmarried] sisters.” Much of the early migration of Greek men to Australia was motivated by the responsibility to acquire suitable dowries for daughters and sisters. Some of these men, such as Kosmas, still felt the weight of this duty later in life and returned to Greece, in part, to care for unmarried female relatives.
The Exhumation
Sykea, Laconia, Peloponnese, Greece, 1985
With the support of the local priest I was able to have access to the village events such as weddings and their preparations, funerals, wakes, christenings and religious celebrations. Probably the most eye-opening were the rituals associated with death.
Death in Greece, particularly in villages, is confronted openly rather than distanced behind sombre ceremony. The funeral ritual itself does not end in burial. Due to limited land space, gravesites are re-used. After a period of at least three years, it is the duty of the closest relatives to exhume the remains from their tombs. Under the supervision of a priest, the bones are then cleaned of dirt and clinging rags with water and red wine. After being blessed, the cleaned bones are placed in a new white cloth bag, initialled, and thrown into the communal ossuary. What has stayed with me after witnessing this event has been the warm, communal involvement that villagers, including children, have with death.
Alexakis:
Ilias Fountis and his wife Anna (née Lambou)
Pothea, Kalymnos, Greece, 1990
Ilias arrived in Australia in 1954, a member of the first Kalymnian diving crew which the Australian Government brought out to dive for pearl shells off the continent’s north-west coast.
Ilias:
"I wish I was there still, but now I’m an old man … I went for work … we didn’t know whether we wanted to stay. I would have liked to stay longer … I had my mother here … my wife wanted to see her daughter and the grandchildren … So we came back … I did thirty years straight in Darwin … We went nowhere else, only Katherine, Wyndham, Gove, that’s all … then came back here … The wife came to Australia around 1981 … some 28 years she was on her own here … It was bad of me for not taking my wife earlier, I would be a different person … What’s money? Health is the main thing … that was bad of me, she suffered here to ‘lose’ her husband. Anyway, that wasn’t a good thing. But now, thank God, we’re good here.”
Hatziyannakis house
Kastellorizo, Greece, 1990
In traditional Kastellorizian architecture, height dominates length. Houses are usually two to three storeys, grouped together in tight horizontal rows, with symmetrically pitched tiled roofs that pierce the skyline and emphasise their verticals.
Many buildings were left in a ruined state following the devastation of World War II and subsequent abandonment as a result of migration, but a number of those still intact are exceptionally elaborate – colourful and ornate hand-painted patterns on walls, delicate sculptural details on icon niches, wooden ceiling rosettes, finely crafted and finished timber work, built-in wardrobes, exquisite tile work and even unique push-button door locks.
These were certainly the homes of merchants – the Kastellorizians were eastern Mediterranean traders but with tighter harbour control of ports, higher taxes by Turkish authorities, loss of access to wood for their vessels and their sailing fleet increasingly unable to match steam-driven ships, their economic sustenance declined during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries – though interestingly, given the dangers of seafaring, homes were often inherited by daughters as part of their prika [dowry].
At the end of the 19th Century, the population of Kastellorizo was around 10,000 people. By the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, it had dropped to 3,000. In 1990, only around 250 permanent residents remained.
Abandoned home
Mitata, Kythera, Greece, 1990
Although their initial intention was to return after a few years of earning and saving money as migrant workers, many people locked their village homes and never came back. Whole families were persuaded by their relatives and friends who had already migrated, to come and share in the opportunity for ‘a better life’. This chain migration depopulated villages and placed them on the brink of extinction. Some have already quietly disappeared.
Over time, neglected buildings began to fragment and collapse, entombing the personal items that families left behind. These materials – including photographs, official papers and private letters, many from Australia – are important sources of historical information on the migration and settlement process.
THREE
THE HEART OF GIVING: FATHER NEKTARIOS’ SOUP KITCHEN
In early 2021, before tight COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns were declared in New South Wales, Alexakis began visiting the Greek Orthodox Church of Saints Constantine & Helen in Sydney’s inner-western suburb of Newtown. The Very Reverend Nektarios Zorbalas operated a soup kitchen for his local community in this church hall for 35 years.
During her visits Alexakis sensitively photographed and interviewed Father Nektarios, the volunteers, and those in need who would visit the soup kitchen. The resulting series is both a tribute to the human face of philanthropy, and an illustration of Alexakis’ ability to present these photographic subjects, people in need, with dignity and respect.
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FOUR
BINDING THREADS
Isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic provided Alexakis uninterrupted time to develop new projects – Binding Threads being one of the more significant. At the heart of Binding Threads – a documentary project undertaken in partnership with Helen Vatsikopoulos – is the concept of ‘unity through difference’. Here Alexakis explores how our complex identities – imbued with generational, cross-cultural layers – can be oversimplified when we impose sociocultural labels such as Greek-Australian, Italian-Australian or British-Australian.
In the series, a selection of both prominent and everyday Australians of self-declared Hellenic heritage have been dressed in traditional attire from various regions of Greece. Some, though not all, costumes have been chosen to reflect the wearer’s region of heritage.
For Alexakis, this is a metaphor for the diversity of Australia today, revealed through a Hellenic lens. The models are Australians who proudly declare their links to Greece but also carry within themselves a multiplicity of regions and cultures, across oceans and generations.
The costumes compound the metaphor, having been made with a range of stylistic elements, weaving techniques, materials, dyes, precious stones and metals which originate from regions throughout Europe and the East. The costumes depicted in this series have been provided by the Hellenic Lyceum, Sydney and the Vasilios Aligiannis Collection.
Models Left to Right: Perry, Sienna and Krystal, Costa and George, Dimitra, Lex, Olga, Yana and baby Sofia
This exhibition is supported by City of Melbourne Arts Grants, and Exhibition Media Partner, The Greek Herald
