On November 9, 2012, Con Castan, one of the most significant and complex men in the Greek Australian community, passed away at St Andrews Hospital in Brisbane.
After a prolonged illness which isolated him voluntarily from all his friends Con finally found mental peace and bodily rest. Until the very end was his beloved wife Voula, who never left his side during his long period of suffering and deterioration. Con was a remarkable man in an unremarkable way: cautious, prudent and reserved he was a puzzling enigma and at the same time a model for emulation. He didn’t want to be seen ill because of his dignity and aesthetics.
Yet his legend grew all over Brisbane and amongst his friends and before the end his shadow fell heavier and heavier on the minds of all those who met him. His family from both sides had moved to Brisbane before the end of the 19th century; his father was for the Peloponnese and his mother from Smyrna, Asia Minor. He was born in 1931 and finished his high school there.
His mother Sophia nurtured him with a profound love for music, so much so that Con went to Sydney to study at the Conservatorium. While in Sydney, he was awarded a scholarship for further studies in England, where he moved in the late fifties and studied at the University of Leicester. Despite his non English origins and the prejudices of the times, he was one of the very few colonials who studied Victorian literature and became one of the most important scholars of the period. Upon his return to Australia in the mid sixties, Con had a stellar career in the Australian academia, (becoming the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Queensland) which he didn’t hesitate to abandon after his love for Greek letters grew stronger, especially the letters of the Greek immigrants in Australia.
He was later offered a professorial position with the University of Athens. It was a position he didn’t accept in order to remain in his native land for ever. During the ’80s and ’90s he was involved in political activism for the Labour Party, the Peace movement, the Australian republican movement and the promotion of human rights for aborigines and immigrants. At the same time his academic work focused on the study of Dimitris Tsaloumas and other Greek Australian poets. His pioneering works established an interpretive language for the contextualisation and the understanding of immigrant literature in Australian and contributed greatly to the expansion and enrichment of the official literary canon.
I met him for the first time shortly after my arrival in Australia in 1991. He was visiting Sydney and thought, as he said, “it would be good to have a chat about life.” We went to the staff club and the conversation evolved into a strange exploration of topics as diverse as politics, religion, literature and translation. “Since you came here to stay, he admonished me, you must read, Manning Clarke, Patrick White, Donald Horne; the grand trio of liberal thinkers in the country.” And then, “Don’t forget the ethnic writers: Tsaloumas, Kefala and some others. They have established a new frisson in the Australian language.” After hours he concluded, almost with shyness while lowering his voice: “What else is the theological meaning of the holy trinity but of unity in diversity, like in music?” In 1995, he invited me to Brisbane for a lecture at the famous literary association Dionysios Solomos he himself had established; he asked me to stay at his home where I met his wife Voula, the ultimate dynamo in energy and love, and her mother, a magnificent story-teller.
Con played his clarinet, “Mozart, he said, always Mozart!” and read pages from his beloved Victorian poets, especially Arthur Hugh Clough whose work he thought as unfairly neglected. “He must have been an influence on Cavafy”, he said somehow shyly, as if he was protecting one of the most important discoveries of his life. Con was the humblest person I have ever met; he avoided the first personal pronoun, always using the first person plural, or asking constantly about you and never revealing much about himself. He was a private man, whose inner life was manifested through relentless social engagement; he was also a true intellectual with cosmopolitan interests expressed through voracious reading. He loved books and their world: he believed that through the silence of reading the pangs of individuality might emerge.
“Remember,” he once told me, “our true self is the child of silence.” Perhaps he didn’t manage to produce the magnum opus that would immortalise his name.
He wrote great books on Greek Australian writers but many of us were always waiting for something more personal even more autobiographical from him. At a certain stage he had told me that he was working on his autobiography but as he said “I must find the appropriate form, le mot just, to tell the story of my origins. I must find the correct way of entering language in order to be fair to my ancestors.”
His origins became a very important aspect of his late work: he established the Asia Minor Historic Society, in order to explore the roots of so many Asia Minor Greeks, as a tribute, I feel, to his mother the first person who taught him the sophisticated elegance, the cultivated temperament and the open cosmopolitanism of Oriental Hellenism.
Together with his mother nevertheless, he wanted to study the countless “small stories” as he said once of ordinary people, whose past was wiped out and the memory of their lost homelands was transformed into a guilty secret unable to be communicated. I deeply admired Con’s perspicacity, his ability to go directly to the heart of the matter and never waste time with tactical movements or useless posturing. When we first met I was young and full of the European certainties that destroy human sensibility.
He showed immense patience with me because he thought that “there are so many good elements in you wrapped in spiritual confusion and intellectual restlessness.” In the beginning I was annoyed, but soon I started appreciating more and more his ethical character which privileged truth above social niceties and sincerity over protocols of politeness. His profound honesty made him so distinct and special. He was a man who could only be loved because he radiated innocence and integrity, synthesising the best elements of his double traditions: the Australian communitarian spirit and the openness of Hellenic philoxenia.
His work paved the way for this creative synthesis between sensibilities and sensitivities. He was the ultimate bridge-maker between cultures and societies, himself the epitome of both, the happy conjunction between forms and perceptions not so incompatible as usually claimed as they are based on the same foundations of humanism and classical education. Con Castan was a man of virtue and moral righteousness, like his beloved Victorians; closer to Matthew Arnold and Charles Darwin than to Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault. In him the Greek paideia met the ultimate English gentleman in an almost perfect symmetry. We shall remember him with gratitude.