When Flinders University academic Dr Yianni Cartledge started researching early Greek Australian migration records for his PhD thesis, he came across much treasured knowledge.

But no piece of information had more value for both historical and personal reasons to him, than the ‘secret census’ of 1916. One of the 2,398 Greeks counted was his great-great-grandfather.

This story is now brought to light again in an open access paper, Cartledge co-authored with his supervisor, Flinders University Professor of Cypriot-Australian heritage Andrekos Varnava.

Why secret?

It was diplomat and author Hugh Gilchrist who first uncovered the census documents in the National Archives of Australia in the 1980s.

But beyond those familiar with a general account of the census in his 1997 book on Greeks in Australia*, the story remains widely unknown.

The ‘secret census’, as Gilchrist termed it, was a coordinated effort by the Commonwealth government to count the number of Greek residents in each state, as well as record personal information, including age, occupation, previous convictions and information on their businesses if they had any.

“According to Gilchrist, this ‘was one of the very few secret censuses taken in Australia during the war’,” Cartledge and Varnava write.

In the year of the census, 1916, WWI was in full swing.

Interning ‘enemy aliens’ in camps was a common practice in Australia for nationals and sympathisers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.

In other words, any country in the coalition of Central Powers, opposed to the Allies with whom the United Kingdom sided in the war.

But the surveillance of Greeks differed from other migrant communities, in intensity and form, Cartledge tells Neos Kosmos.

“It’s a very unique story. Other ethnicities also experienced levels of prejudice in Australia and monitoring, obviously, the Italians and Germans and Japanese were interned during war time periods.

“But there was not much covert monitoring like with the Greeks who didn’t know they were being counted.”

They were also the only ones who had the entire community counted, not just military age men.

“Regardless of if they were elderly, if they were kids, if they were women.”

Constantine I, the King of Greece at the time, was deemed sympathetic to Germany, having completed his higher education there.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor, was also his brother-in-law.

“So, they [Australia] presumed he, the Greeks, would probably side with Germany. Their idea was to transport Greeks to internment camps if and when that happened,” Cartledge explains.

But it didn’t.

Most of Greece was loyal to Venizelos, an outspoken supporter of the Allies, the opposite camp of the Central Powers in the war.

And in 1917, the Allies found the opportunity to oust the King and install Venizelos as Greece’s prime minister.

But before that, Australia’s secret count of ‘suspect enemy aliens’ had been completed.

Out of the total 2,398 Greek residents and businesses recorded, only seven were found to be ‘pro-German’ and only two who had previous convictions, and these were for gambling.

“Which makes it so interesting because, you know, these Greeks weren’t actually at war, but they were counted at a more thorough level, even to the point of their distance from the capital and the mode of their transport,” Cartledge says.

Who was seen as ‘Greek’ by Australian authorities?

Beyond geopolitical insights, the ‘secret census’ has value in challenging official “claims regarding the number of Greeks in Australia” at the time, Cartledge and Varnava argue.

The latest official Australian Census had been conducted in 1911 with a great difference in the number of Greeks recorded compared to the ‘secret census’ which “was not the result of a mass settlement between 1911 and 1916”.

Citing a number of sources, the researchers conclude “that the 1911 census was inaccurate.”

“Perhaps ‘ship jumping’ contributed to this inaccuracy. Another factor could be the transient nature of Greek labourers in Australia.”

Like in the case of Sue Tronser’s maternal grandparents, Lucas and Vassilia Parselles, who spent their first years of settlement in South Australia’s Port Pirie, where her grandfather like many other Greeks worked in the smelter industry.

“He didn’t actually work at the smelter itself, but ran a cafe there catering to the smelter workers. When he left Port Pirie he went to Adelaide and managed a fish restaurant in Gouger Street, and in the 1920s they came to Sydney.”

“I think that’s a common story for many Greeks at the time,” Tronser tells Neos Kosmos.

The 1911 ‘secret census’ categorised Greeks by religion, and by birthplace. It listed six discernible birthplaces associated with Greeks: Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Cyprus, Crete, and Samos.

The fact that the ‘autonomous Principality of Samos’ – as the Aegean Sea island was known at the time – was considered ‘Asiatic’ “because of its former Ottoman status and proximity to Turkey”, Cartledge and Varnava say, “testified to the diversity in Greek ‘nationalities’.”

“Evidently, ‘Greeks meant those who were Greek-speaking and Orthodox, regardless of whether their birthplaces were Greece or the Ottoman Empire.”

For example, Lucas Parselles was born in Samothraki, the furthest of Greece’s islands to the north, but he left Samothraki because of a family dispute and became a trader in the Middle East, prior to migrating to Port Pirie.

“My grandmother came from Smyrna (today Izmir, Turkey) and my mum was born in Jerusalem before arriving with my grandmother as a toddler to Port Pirie to meet my grandfather,” Tronser says. Her grandparents were recorded as aliens in the 1916 ‘secret census’ even though her grandfather had been naturalised in 1913.

During WWII, the ‘pro-German’ stamp would once again hunt the family in Australia. This time, it was Tronser’s father, a German national, who was targeted by authorities and sent to a camp.

“My mother was a classical singer working in London in the early 30s’ and my father was there too. They got married in 1936, got back to Australia in 1938 and then war broke out, so he was interned as an enemy alien because he wasn’t yet naturalised.”

Dr Christos N. Fifis, an Honorary Research Associate at La Trobe University, has also examined Gilchrist’s book.

He argues that the ‘secret census’ made 1916 a landmark year for our knowledge on early Greek Australian migration history.

Not on its own though.

A book titled ‘Life in Australia’ was published in the same year, financed by Greek Australian businessman John D. Comino, who owned a luxury oyster restaurant in Sydney.

But the book told a different story about Greeks in Australia from the one revealed in the ‘secret census’.

“It was written from a middle-class perspective, featuring successful business owners, pretty much the same people who were in Greek community leadership positions at the time,” Fifis explains.

The census data, he says, paint the missing picture: the Greek working-class story.

“They were the ones counted in the census who were working at those businesses and often exploited by their employers. Paid peanuts, working endless hours and not having many other options really, as factory jobs were open to Australians only.”

The authors of ‘Life in Australia’ had also omitted any mentions to the preceding anti-migrant riots, with violent attacks against Greek shops in Brisbane and Sydney in 1915 and Perth and Kalgoorlie in 1916.

“They did not even discuss class differences, or the harsh working conditions of Greek workers in Greek shops.”

Another report on the status of Greek workers at the time comes from a letter penned by a 22-year-old medical student at Sydney University.

“Gilchrist makes a mention of George Takhmintzis who in April 1916 wrote a letter to [Greece’s] King Constantine, explaining the tragic conditions of workers in Greek shops in Sydney,” Fifis says.

“The Greek population here, writes Takhmintzis, may be divided into three groups: the working class, the rich and those who rule. The workers, unfortunate people, are condemned by fate, forced by the other two classes to work many hours a day in hard labour, for low wages – worse off even than the helots of Sparta; and because of this overload, they often fall ill.”

The letter went unanswered by the King, but it survived as a historical document giving insights into the living reality of many of Australia’s early Greek migrants.

From ‘bloody foreigners’ to ‘model migrant communities’

The ‘secret census’ documents were classified for the most part of the 20th century.

“It’s our generations that for the last 30 or 40 years have really had any knowledge of it,” Cartledge says.

Even after Gilchrist’s publication upon their declassification, “it’s still quite an unknown story to this day”.

Kyriaco Nikias, an Australian legal historian working at the University of Vienna as a doctoral researcher, first became aware of the ‘secret census’ in 2016 through a commemorative volume authored by George Paxinos on the occasion of the Ithacan Philanthropic Society’s centenary.

“Members of both my mother’s and father’s sides are to be found in the 1916 ‘Secret Census’,” Nikias tells Neos Kosmos.

He then contacted Cartledge who helped him access and interpret the documents. Nikias, in turn, helped Cartledge identify some Ithacan names in the census lists for South Australia, including his maternal grandmother’s side of the family.

“They were the family Morris, anglicised early from Moraitis.”

Nikias’ great-grandfather, Constantine Morris came to Australia with wife Polymnia (nee Callinicos) and their baby Angelica in 1928.

Polymnia’s brothers, Peter, Christopher and Nicholas, who migrated earlier, had been listed in the 1916 ‘secret census’.

Constantine worked for the Callinicos brothers before opening his own business in Adelaide.

“To open the shop, he was offered a loan from another Morris better established in Adelaide, cash in hand without a contract, an agreement built on trust.

“They were all somehow connected, through relation or by marriage. The pattern of migration was the same: one or two ‘pioneers’ would come out, establish themselves, then others would follow, usually young men, first working in their relatives’ businesses, often being underpaid or mistreated, before setting up their own businesses when they could.”

His paternal grandmother’s side, the Damianos family, hailing from Istanbul and other Asia Minor places, were also counted in the census.

“My paternal great-grandfather, Spiros Damianos (or Hadjidamianos), and his younger brothers Diamantis and Vasilios are listed as residents in Port Pirie, where they first found work in the smelters.

“They first worked as labourers but had opened businesses by the 1920s. They ran cafes and an ‘oyster saloon’ in Port Augusta. Like many others, they earned money by working in Australia, and sent money back to the family who stayed behind, whom they would visit every few years.”

The 1916 ‘secret census’, Cartledge and Varnava claim, was not just “a pre-emptive wartime measure”.

“The monitoring of Greeks drew on a longer history of Australian racial hostility to Greeks, highlighted by attacks on Greeks both prior to and after the 1916 secret census.

“These attacks stemmed from accusations of wartime disloyalty, but also from a broader hostility towards ‘bloody foreigners’.”

Not all Greeks were attacked or recorded in the secret census. Rather a class dimension, the researchers argue, appears to have permeated any expression of discrimination against newly arrived Greeks.

“There was a class dimension to the creation of Greeks as a ‘suspect community’.

“Landowning Greeks, some of whom were not Orthodox, were left out of the census, due partly to their ‘assimilation’ into rural Australian communities, and partly to the fact that comparatively they were more affluent and inconspicuous than labourers and middle-class Greeks (small business owners).”

They have identified at least two landowning families with Greek origins in South Australia who were excluded from the census, the Norths (Tramountanas) and the Rallis, faithful of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches respectively, with thousands of acres of land in their possession.

“Were these families omitted because they were non-Orthodox? Or was their absence class-based because they were pastoralists?

“Was it due to birthplace? Ralli was born in England, and the North children and grandchildren were born in SA.

“Was there a racial dimension, these families being considered assimilated into white Anglo-Celtic culture?”

The historical truth will probably remain unknown.

Regardless, Cartledge and Varnava believe that “race and labour prejudices” against Greek workers were already entrenched in Australian society.

During the war, these were exacerbated by “public perceptions of Greek disloyalty” prompting the Commonwealth decision to begin the covert monitoring.

Applying for naturalisation became a one-way street for any Greek citizen seeking social acceptance and inclusion.

But at the time of the ‘secret census’, the Australian government prohibited military-age Greeks from applying.

Meanwhile, their Italian counterparts, citizens of what was considered ‘an enemy country’ would not be barred from naturalisation until 1917.

Any historian would argue that context is key to interpreting wartime events, like the making and monitoring of the Greek ‘suspect community’.

“The Greeks living in Australia were then perceived as a possible threat to Australian and British interests because of the foreign policy of the Greek government,” Nikias points out.

But turning a blind eye to history condemns us to repeating it, whether we are ready to acknowledge it or not.

“The ‘secret census’ should serve as a reminder of the vulnerability of migrant communities to the discourses of inclusion and exclusion,” Nikias says.

Modern Australia is no short of examples, he adds.

“Later, while Greeks, with Italians and others, were represented as model migrant communities, other groups have again been cast as unbelonging, unintegrated, disloyal.

“The boundaries may have shifted but the rules of the discourse remain the same; some are included, some are not.”

* Gilchrist Hugh. Australians and Greeks. Halstead Press, NSW, Sydney, 1997

The journal article of Yianni Cartledge & Andrekos Varnava ‘Making and Monitoring a ‘Suspect Community’: Australian Attacks on Greeks and the ‘Secret Census’ in 1916′ was published on ‘Australian Historical Studies’ in 2024. It is publicly available here.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1031461X.2023.2293837