Andrea Michaels, the 46-year-old mother of two, is South Australia’s Minister for Small and Family Business, Minister for Consumer and Business Affairs, and Minister for the Arts. Her family fled Cyprus in 1974.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Cyprus by the Turkish state.
Her family arrive in South Australia with “nothing but the clothes on their backs” she was 11 months old.
“Mum was pregnant with me when Turkey invaded.
“They escaped to London because dad had brothers there. I was born there, and we came out here in 1976.”
Regardless of the war, and its wounds, the minister believes that Cypriot and Greek Turks can again coexist again.
“We had Turks living with us, in our village.”
Her portfolios, small and family business and the arts, suit the minister. Small businesses employ more than five million Australians and contribute $500 billion to the national GDP. Much of that activity is driven by migration. Small family business is a driver for success, and class ascent.
“We came here with absolutely nothing and had to live with my dad’s uncle who was in Adelaide, and my brothers and I all went to university” says the minister.
“We lived in his shed for the first couple of years until they bought a little house. My parents busted their guts, they invested in property, and we succeeded”.
Michaels says that Greeks, and other migrants, came here “at various points in time with little or nothing”.
“We are hard workers, Greeks have invested in property and, you know, made some money.
Small business is also a way of maintaining independence, growing, and ensuring the next generation benefit.
“I think it just comes down to our work ethic, our passion. We all have parents who wanted us to go to university.
“Having that background and knowing you can make a difference, helping people like that was an influence.
Know your audiences
Small cities, Adelaide, Edinburgh, Thessaloniki, are excellent at festivals. The city becomes a vibrant heaving hub of creativity as arts lovers from far and wide, meld with locals. Anyone who has been to WOMAdelaide, the Adelaide Fringe or Adelaide Festival, in March can testify to that.
The challenge for venues and producers is getting audiences after the major festival season. Widening and diversifying is important but
the funded arts are curate’s egg when it comes to putting ethnic bums on seats. This is in contrast to multicultural community festivals and events run by community, and professionals within them. Michaels wants changes.
“We will be launching a new cultural policy, later this year – and a lot of the public feedback we were getting was about having arts everywhere for everyone.
“We have cultural diversity, and you must allow people to tell their stories.”
There is some elitism she believes, “particularly with, some of the larger cultural institutions.”
The Adelaide Festival Centre (ASC) chair, the former governor Hieu Van Le, AC, “was himself a refugee.”
“He stepped down late last year, and he assisted in diversifying arts and audiences”.
Michaels praises the past chair of the ASC, who she says tried to make the centre “more welcoming of migrant groups, so we just must keep working at it”.
Michaels wants to ensure government funded arts institutions “are communicating with a broad as possible audience as they can”.
She pulls out the the OzAsia Festival an “Asian Australian festival that exists and specifically tries to talk to those communities and bring them on board.”
Adelaide-Athens new sisters, almost
Adelaide was touted as the ‘Athens of the South’ by its colonial forebearers. It is ironic that, regardless of 19th-century delusions of melding British ‘whiteness’ with fantasies of Ancient Hellas, it is the children of Greek migrants—’wogs’—who are near signing a formal agreement to make Athens and Adelaide sister cities.
Michaels says that “negotiations on making Athens a sister city to Adelaide” are tantalisingly close to being signed—well, until a last-minute change of Athens’ mayor. That’s Greek politics, after all. However, she’s hopeful it won’t take too much longer.
“If we can get that up and running, that will give us a mechanism to have cultural and art exchanges, and that’s something that I’m certainly keen to pursue.”Landing in Adelaide as a baby from a war-torn Cyprus to key government minister, Andrea Michaels’s passage embodies migrant resilience and aspiration. The stuff that makes Australia.
