The Greek Community of Melbourne (GCM) will launch Georgia (Juliana) Charpantidou’s book ‘The Embodiment of a Distant Homeland: the history of the GOCMV from its founding to 1972’ on Sunday, March 26, 2023, at 3:00pm at the Greek Centre, 168 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.
GCM President Bill Papastergiadis OAM talking to Neos Kosmos expressed pride and praised Juliana’s deep and wide research for her book, “as it uncovers the rich threads of the Greek Community’s history, spanning from the late 1800s to the 1970s.
“The research undertaken is deep and wide, and it is very important, it takes in primary sources that extend back to the late 1800s right up to the 1970s.”
He called Charpantidou’s work “monumental” and said it will add to the body of work which documents the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria “the oldest institutional representative of a Greek community in Australia. ”
Charpantidou’s book follows the Greek Community of Melbourne’s historical course from the late nineteenth century until the early 1970s. Much of the research for this book is based on primary sources – the Minutes and Archives of the Greek Community of Melbourne, the National Archives of Australia, the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora at Latrobe University, and Greek and English language newspapers of the time in Australia.
Charpantidou graduated from the School of Management and Economics at ATEI Thessaloniki, and obtained a Master’s degree with a specialisation in Social Exclusion and Minorities from the Department of Sociology at Panteion University. From 2014 to 2018, she worked at the Greek Community of Melbourne as a researcher of its history and archives, and her published monograph is a result of these research efforts. Her ongoing academic research on the Organisation of the Greek Diaspora in Australia serves as the basis for her Doctoral Thesis at Panteion University.