The Greek Revolution of 1821 which will be celebrated on 25 March also had an impact on Australia. Like many Irish Republicans sent here as convicts there was also seven Greek revolutionaries convicted as pirates by the British and sent here to serve out their sentence.

When NSW historian, Dr. Panagiotis Diamandis talked to Neos Kosmos about the seven Greek sailors convicted of piracy, he said that they were saved from the gallows and sent as convicts to Australia.

Seven Greek sailors piloting the Maltese ship Hercules attacked a British Ship, Alcestis. The British, while professing their support for the Greek Revolution, were in a very British way, also supplying materiel to the Egyptian Ottoman vasal state that was fighting the Greeks.

H.M.S. Alcestis was supplying the Egyptian state.

“It’s amazing that both ships had Greek mythological names,” said Dr Diamandis.

The seven sailors, all from the island of Hydra, were convicted of piracy by a British naval court in Malta in 1829 and were dispatched to serve out the term of their sentence in New South Wales.

Georgios Vasilakis, Gikas Voulgaris, Georgios Laritsos, Adonis tou Manoli, Damianos Ninis, Nikolaos Papandreas and Konstantinos Strombolis were pardoned in 1834 and five decided to leave Australia, while two remained.

Dr Diamandis says the sailors were revolutionaries and adds that their defence attorneys at the trial in Malta made that a focus of their defence.

“These people are fighting the Ottoman Empire, and the seven were not pirates, was the line that was used by their defence attorneys,” Dr Diamandis said.

The British colonisation of Australia, and the rise of a new Greek state, both played out in the trial of the seven freedom fighters.

The new Greek state, formed in 1830, petitioned the British government for the seven to be returned to Greece, given it considered them freedom fighters.

However not all returned, Gikas Voulgaris had nine children and fifty grandchildren, his descendants are scattered throughout New South Wales and all over Australia.

“Adonis tou Manoli (του Μανώλη meaning ‘of Manolis’) is without a family name, and I find that very curious,” Dr Diamandis said.

“Adonis tou Manoli married an Irish woman and became a farmer in Picton, approximately 80 kilometers southwest of Sydney. His grave in Picton can still be seen today,” Dr Diamandis said.

In 1998, when Dr Diamandis taught at Macquarie University, the university’s Catholic chaplain, “a man the same age as I am now in my 40s, came up to me and said that his ‘great, great, great, grandfather was the pirate Voulgaris’, I nearly fell on the floor.”

Dr Panagiotis Diamandis is a historian from NSW who has published on the history of Greeks in NSW, and on the genocides of Indigenous Hellenes. He has contributed for the Dictionary of Sydney on the history of Greek settlement in NSW https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/greeks