Neville Wran, the Labor icon who led New South Wales as its premier for a decade and died at the age of 87, was very well known and respected by the Greek and other migrant communities in Australia.
According to the late Takis Kaldis, a Labor MLC in New South Wales and a fried of Neville Wran, the late Premier was an admirer of the Greek culture and a friend of Greeks. In the 1980s Neville Wran and his wife Jill Hickson visited one year Greece and the following year Cyprus.
Amongst others they visited the islands of Hydra, Poros, Spetses and Aegina, and they retained long held pleasant memories from those trips.
As Takis Kaldis writes in his autobiography When the sea ends, one night at Pasalimani in Piraeus, Neville Wran was so impressed by his Greek experience that he confessed to Kaldis that even though he was an agnostic, if there is such a thing as paradise, then it must be similar to what he was witnessing at Pasalimani.
