When someone receives a Lifetime Achievement Award, it is usually an opportunity to think back on their life’s journey and their origins. For Maria Dimopoulos, this means remembering how it was coming from Florina to Australia aboard the Patris when she was no more than five years old.

“I remember the space”, she says of the first impression the new country made on her.

“We grew up in Geelong,” she remembers.

“When I arrived my brother and I spoke no English – we picked it up in the schoolyard and now we speak better English than most Aussie-born people we know. I don’t know how we did it, but we did; kids are especially resilient. My brother and I were among a handful of migrant children in a predominantly overwhelmingly Anglo Australian school. We tended to get into fights about our cultural identities; not a day would pass when we weren’t involved in a fistfight. One thing I’ll always remember is the time when there was a case of nits, head lice, at school and my brother and I were immediately dragged out and had this lotion poured over us in front of the school. And we actually didn’t have lice. Things like that can change you. You develop an incredible sense of fighting for justice and that’s what we ended up doing.”

Fast forward to March 2017, when the Migration Council of Australia presented Maria Dimopoulos with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual migration and settlement awards ceremony, offered in recognition of her excellence working as a human rights advocate, fighting for migrants and refugees.

“I’ve worked in the sector for 30 years”, she says.

“I pretty much started working on migration issues when I was studying law at Monash. I actively chose subjects like human rights law. I emerged out of all of that with a law degree and a real desire to go beyond private practice and engage in community education, in law reform work and lobbying governments to improve access to justice for migrant and refugee communities. Most of the work I’ve done is on two fronts: building legal literacy for newly arrived communities who are often caught up in the criminal justice system for no other reason than they don’t understand the law. The other part of my work is judicial education; I do this in partnership with an amazing judge, Justice Emilios Kyrou. We deliver educational programs to judges across Australia, on issues around racism, cross-culture and equality before the law.”

So, how does it feel to get a lifetime achievement award for all this work?

“If anything, I’m hoping that the award acts as a symbolic statement, as a reflection of the migrant women who I know are never going to get that level of acknowledgement, who are doing the hard yards but don’t speak English well,” she says.

“I’m privileged by virtue of having a law degree. I know my parents did it tough; they worked two or three shifts in factories to get us to university and that’s why I dedicated the award to them, but at the end of the day it’s now up to me as a privileged integrated Greek Australian to be able to give back to those communities that are more marginalised than ever before.”

To her, this sense of duty towards the community is bigger than the joy of getting an award.

“The irony is that, here I am, at Parliament House and the Prime Minister gives me this award and makes a speech on the importance of multiculturalism,” she says.

“And then proceeds to support amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act that literally say to Australians that it’s acceptable to be racist. I’m not sure if this is due to lack of leadership or not; maybe it is a very distinct type of leadership that believes that division in communities is the way to go”, she explains before adding: “We haven’t learned the lessons of the past. After 30 years, I think we’ve gone backwards, I’m actually seeing progress diminish.”

Would she go on to proclaim that the status of multiculturalism in Australia is fragile?

“At a formal level it is fragile, but what I’m seeing at a grassroots level, particularly in Muslim communities and the most marginalised, is a sort of mobilisation that actually excites me. We can’t rely on government, we have to be building capacities of our one community and this is quite inspiring for me.”