When I met Kleopatra Mpantisouli on our shared flight from Greece to Australia, I felt instantly grateful.
She came across as having a calming, relaxed presence; the perfect stranger distraction for my back to Melbourne blues after reuniting with family for the first time since the pandemic hiatus.
READ MORE: A Dodecanese tonic that is just right for our lockdown blues
For my fellow traveler, the reunion Down Under with her daughter and granddaughter – Kleopatra junior – was about to begin.
It was a long overdue one and Kleopatra was vocal of her determination to make it happen .
“Even if the world fell apart, I would find a way to come,” she told me within the first minutes of our chat. We had just met, but I found her words curiously inspiring.
I understood why days later, when I paid a visit to Marietta’s, her daughter’s home in Melbourne.
For starters, Kleopatra’s migration journey had some key similarities with my own yiayia’s.
Too many coincidences to ignore really; starting from the arrival with the same ship on the same year, choosing the same suburb to settle in Melbourne, raising two daughters in Australia for some years and having been forced to return to Greece by their husbands, to name a few.
But Kleopatra’s broader life story is an inspiration for anyone, whether it evokes family memories or not. Keep reading and you’ll see why.
With baby in arms and a bottle in hand
Aboard the Patris, with her baby daughter Christina in arms. That’s the image marking the beginning of Kleopatra’s migration journey in 1968 from her hometown of Larissa to Melbourne with her then husband.
The arrivals: Do you recognise yourself in this vintage footage?
Their second child, Marietta, would be born in the family’s new home a few years down the track.
“We were given tags with our names to have on display,” Kleopatra recalls when I ask her about things she remembers from that trip.
Marietta jumps in: “Mum, tell her the tsipouro story”.
A bottle of the staple Greek liquor I would hear, proved invaluable for their first steps in a new country with no connections whatsoever.
“Some friends from Trikala gave me the bottle of tsipouro and asked me to bring it as a present to a family they knew in Melbourne. At the back of my mind I was hoping they’d be good people and offer to host us for the first night.”
So it happened and in fact “one night turned into three”.
Asking around the neighbourhood, Kleopatra found a room to rent for the family and landed her first job at a factory making taps.
“As soon as I started meeting people, I was trying to find my husband a job too. He was incredibly smart, but that didn’t matter in the end. He would start a job and leave soon after for not liking it.”
Kleopatra would also work as a seamstress and then at General Electric.
In between, while at the factory, she fell pregnant with her second daughter.
“Not the best news,” Marietta intercepts laughing.
And Kleopatra opens up: “It’s true, I was like ‘ok, now what?’. I had come here to work and couldn’t afford another child. I kept thinking how are we going to make ends meet?”
Fearing she would be ‘kicked out’ of work, she kept it a secret, until eventually management found out and called her in the office.
“‘Oh my’ I thought to myself, ‘it’s done, they’ll ask me to leave. Feeling defeated, I went into the office and asked straight away if they’re firing me.”
“‘Fire you? You must be joking’ my boss, who was also Greek, replied. ‘We’re just going to move you to a better work station’.”
“Well, if I’d known, I would have told them earlier myself,” Kleopatra muses with a laugh. She would keep working until birth.
In the years that followed, she found a nanny to look after the girls so she could go back to work, managed to take a loan and buy a house in the Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill. School education started for Christina and Marietta and everything looked like the family was here to stay.
But the girls’ father decided otherwise.
“I left with the kids back to Greece, what else could I do, it was an order… he stayed back to sell the house and then came to Larissa where we resettled.”
“Ten bad moments for every good one, ” Kleopatra sums up the relationship with her then husband.
It ended when he forced her and then 16-year-old Marietta to abandon the house, right after their first daughter Christina, got married.
“We wanted to leave as well,” says Marietta, “but when you’re in an abusive environment, it’s not easy to talk. What’s more back then, when everything was considered ‘the woman’s fault'”.
“Better days did come though,” Kleopatra puts the full stop on the darker chapter.
The next one would be featuring “the best human alive”: Nikos, an islander (born in Skiathos) hailing from Minor Asia. They lived together in Volos until his passing in 2016.
Hearing more about his story, I realised he had not just won Kleopatra’s heart.
“He literally changed the course of our lives,” says Marietta.
“For my sister and I, he became the father we never had, he filled this gap of missing a dad.”
The Kleopatras meet again
It was in Volos, where the family moved to from Larissa, that Marietta met her daughter’s dad.
Kleopatra junior, now 14, has spent most of her life in Australia since migrating here.
“This is the first time she’s hearing about the story of her grandmother’s arrival here,” says Marietta.
“They haven’t lived in the same place since she was around five. It was just before we left Greece to come to Australia. And once, my mum visited when Kleopatra [junior] was in primary school.”
The two Kleopatras had last seen each other in 2018 during a holiday in Greece with that reunion only lasting a month.
“I remember her as a little kid. She’s a young woman now,” says yiayia Kleopatra.
The 14-year-old is already making an album showcasing memorable moments from their 2022 reunion: day-trips, coking sessions, games and all sorts of experiences they share. Latest outings include a Van Gogh exhibition visit and an evening spent fishing.
Importantly, there is no activities’ agenda set by Marietta, nor is her presence necessary for yiayia and granddaughter to bond.
“I feel this is the first time they interact as adults in a sense, they don’t need me as an in-between.”
A migration story under construction?
When Kleopatra left Australia, she could not have imagined that decades later her daughter and granddaughter would be making a comeback.
“I had memories from our time in Australia as a kid. In my eyes this place was paradise,” says Marietta.
She left her birthplace, Melbourne, as a prep student, around the same age Kleopatra junior had when they migrated to Australia 9 years ago.
The decision for a new start was made at the onset of Greece’s financial crisis.
And while things Down Under weren’t as ideal as in her childhood memories, it’s a move Marietta doesn’t regret making, admitting she never came to terms with some of Greece’s flaws.
“It was definitely hard for us too, to start with,” she reflects.
“Every new beginning comes with difficulties, you just have to give it a go. Fast forward to today, we’re doing just fine.”
Despite leaving Greece at kinder, Kleopatra junior’s level of Greek is that of a native speaker.
She does go to Greek school, but the ease, I can understand, comes from speaking the language at home.
Would she consider living in Greece in the future?
“Perhaps for a few years, but I wouldn’t stay there,” she responds as Marietta prompts her to ‘never say never’.
“Your grandma and I have formed our views, but yours will be based on your own experience.”
A mother’s hint to the migration story started by yiayia in 1968, with the baton now passed on to the youngest of the three women to decide how it ends.
* Do you have a reunion story to share? Email zoe@neoskosmos.com.au