Anastasios (Anestis) Poulioglou. He was born in Smyrna, now named city of Izmir. Over 100,000 Greeks lived in this city until their forced eviction in 1922. My grandfather was a toddler, barely able to walk when his parents gathered him and his siblings and joined those forced into long marches of misery to safer ground in Greece. Many did not make it.
He now rests on the Island of Lesvos, a mere three kilometres off the Turkish coast, with his parents, facing their birthplace which my ancestors have called home for well over 2000 years.
Within 20 years, his identity and home would again be under attack. This time he was among many Greeks who formed the human manifestation of the then Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas’s response to the Italian ultimatum to surrender in 1940. Oxi! (Ohi or No)
As a regular soldier, he and his comrades pushed the fascists out of Greece. But it was not long before he got to taste the fate of his parents when the Germans replaced the incompetent Italians and placed Greece under occupation. Within months he was fighting as a partisan within northern Greece, mainly focused on trying to disrupt the deportation of Greek Jews.
The next five years of his life were horrific, as victory in 1945 was replaced by a civil war that landed him in prison. He fought on the losing side.
My family, like many Greeks, fully understand the concept of dispossession, banishment and genocide. This is why Anastasios’ daughter and grandson in Australia will be voting Yes in the upcoming Referendum on an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
We will vote Yes because of who we are and where we have come from. When surveyed by Newspoll, over 60% of Multicultural Australians intend to vote Yes. My research company, RedBridge, has found similar levels of support for the Yes proposition within diverse communities.
Earlier this year, the No campaign made a bold statement that they would target diverse communities, attempting to appeal to a sense of our communities being ignored and not being recognised in the Australian constitution.
Perhaps they should have picked up a history book and studied our ancestors’ history of struggle, and loss of ancestral homes. Some political commentators are always quick to stereotype multicultural Australians. They overlook the reality that we empathise with First Nation Australians. We empathise with their tragedy, their loss of lands, and the killing of their ancestors.
Maybe the individuals running the No campaign have misread us. Our community may indeed harbour many conservative values around religion and culture but we mostly are unified on the concept of racial sovereignty.
Whether you are a Greek born Australian, an Indian migrant Australian, a young Arabic Australian, we all have two homes. The one that houses us and the one which we identify as our ancestral home. Most of us are in this country because of some form of dispossession, be it economic, cultural, religious or political. The land that has given us this incredible second chance belongs to a 40,000 year old culture. We respect their deep ancestral history and want to thank them for it.
We don’t want to echo the history and hate of our persecutors, our invaders, or our genocidal oppressors.
This is why we are voting Yes.
Kosmos Samaras is a pollster and the former Deputy Director for the ALP and is the Director of Strategy and Analytics for the Redbridge Group, he comments regularly on politics for major news outlets. www.redbridgegroup.com.au