MP Maria Vamvakinou’s migrant life started out with segregation, but soon her Greekness became a commodity.
“We learnt to live double lives.”
That was how Vamvakinou grappled with her Greek heritage and her adoptive home. For a Greek girl, her school life was about suppressing her Greekness, while her home life was about suppressing her Australian influences.
Her Greek influences could be easily seen in her lunch box. Bringing her gourmet bread and latherings of zucchini and olives was a far cry from her peers’ lunch.
“I often threw my lunch away. I couldn’t convince my mother to buy the white bread; she just didn’t understand what Vegemite was and certainly didn’t think hundreds and thousands were food.”
The MP’s love of community can be seen coming from her grandmother’s approach. With her impending trip to Australia, she was entrusted with looking after the grandkids and, in turn, looking after the vast majority of the neighbourhood kids.
“We were also the happy recipients of collective childcare,” she says.
“Our grandmother was dispatched to Australia to look after the grandchildren. As a result she walked us to school, walked us home and half the neighbourhood. And on school holidays when everyone was working, my grandmother looked after us and everybody else.”
Despite such a warm approach by Vamvakinou’s grandmother, racism was still rife in the community.
She learnt quickly that it wasn’t acceptable to speak in her mother tongue – the passengers on the bus made sure of that. Taunts would often be directed not just to her, but to her family. The notorious, “Go back to where you came from”, wasn’t absent in Vamvakinou’s life.
Subconsciously this pushed Vamvakinou into a career to champion multiculturalism. She was proof it worked.
The shift came when she was finishing high school. Suddenly the taunts dissipated and being ethnic was almost like currency.
“I was coming of age in the ‘70s, and enter Gough Whitlam and multiculturalism, and suddenly it was hip to be ethnic,” she says.
The political ramifications of that time transformed Australia into the mostly tolerant society we live in today. More than 20 years would have to go by until laws would be introduced to protect migrants and their interests.
Vamvakinou watched the progress first hand.
“It was such a dramatic change from the ‘60s to the ‘70s,” she says.
“Suddenly the political leadership of this country was developing policy embracing that diversity.”
The Labor MP has worked tirelessly to promote multiculturalism and is the chair of the Standing Committee on Migration. Her electorate in Melbourne’s North West is one of the most multicultural in Victoria and she is still the first Greek woman elected to parliament.