I am so pleased to have recently launched the new photographic exhibition, A Visual Journey of Greek-Australian Life. Last year’s exhibition, Greek Weddings under the Southern Cross, broke new ground by documenting our community’s post-war history through the photographs from our own photographic studios, the gaze of our own photographers.

This second exhibition has been curated by Agi Argyropoulos, under the direction of Democritus president, Thanasi Salahas, and secretary Agapi Pashos.

Portraits of resilience: Capturing the early Greek migrant experience

The theme is once again a facet of our Greek-Australian reality but the photographs this time have been taken by the subjects themselves.

These visual artefacts, in black and white and some in 1970s saturated colour, and no doubt taken on the most rudimentary of cameras, provide immediate visual delight and a sense of knowing. They are so familiar to all of us through our own such gems in our homes – while drawing us into the complexity of layer upon superimposed layer of meaning. They are an intimate recording of daily life, daily preoccupations, collectively contributing to a more intricate depiction of the early years of post-war mass-migration to the Antipodes.

When considering the exhibition’s poster, it counterbalances strikingly with last year’s poster. Whereas in 2023 we had a scene of female beauty, the exquisite bride, the gorgeous bridesmaids, the stylised pose in a photographer’s studio, this year’s scene is diametrically different. We see a group of young men and a happy little boy.

The fact that they are assembled on this side of the fence – with a Greek-looking gentleman walking towards the other humble, weatherboard houses – suggests that this is an inner-suburban immigrant neighbourhood, with compatriots living in adjoining houses. They are drinking beer which the men, as we all know, embraced with fervour as their drink of choice, some are smoking, while the central figure is holding a bouzouki. The placement of his fingers clearly suggests that he knows how to play it. He might well have been an accomplished musician back in Greece, while here the factory floor ensured that this skill was relegated to the little time off after work. The two men at the front look older, more seasoned in outlook, while those at the back look so young. Beautiful young boys so like their descendants that we see around us today. Meanwhile that little boy is now, no doubt, in his seventies. We are looking at a photograph from well over half a century ago, this exhibition shining a spotlight on a broad thematic range contextualised in historical, cultural, and political realities.

A past of struggle – picture tells the story

What we are also looking at is a reminder that, although we are today considered a powerful and well-established Greek Diaspora, this Diaspora is embedded in a working-class reality that informed this community’s militancy in progressively demanding its rights, establishing its concerns, fighting for its voice to carry political weight, all of which paved the way for our inextricable position within today’s multicultural mosaic.

There are numerous photos of demonstrations regarding wider democratic ideals through to specific causes such as the Macedonian issue. The austere form of application regarding alien residency recalls the difficulties faced by our ancestors who arrived prior to the second world war. Meanwhile, those who arrived immediately after the Second World War and the Greek Civil War faced other challenges. Immigrants who aligned with the Communist Party were scrutinised at best and persecuted at worst. The efforts of many individuals, together with the efforts of the Democritus Workers’ League, eventually alleviated the insurmountable pressures exerted upon Greek-Australian communists and communist sympathisers, many of whom went on to gain positions of influence within the trade union movement in the 1970s and 80s.

These photographs radiate a sense of pride. The photo on the factory floor where some inspection is taking place reminds us in no uncertain terms as to where our post-war immigrant ancestors worked. The surrounding photographs, however, serve to remind us of the outcome of this harsh working reality. Our parents or grandparents were – for the most part – able to buy a house, a car and to start to lay down roots in this foreign land where they increasingly realised, they were going to live in henceforth.

The initial dream of working for two years and then returning to Greece starting to fade as a desired goal, transplanted by educating their children and establishing clubs, churches and schools. We have a beautiful photo of school children, in national costume, as part of the parade to the Shrine, a snapshot of what is now also a moment in time. There are photos of soccer teams and playing fields; there are images of theatre programs, scenes from plays and excerpts from poems.

These photographic exhibitions contribute to the cultural heritage of our Greek Diaspora in a powerful and smart way. A photograph has its own language that is not dependant on spoken or written language. We would all like our third and fourth generation children to speak Greek – who would disagree with that? But that is not the reality of the situation, and we all know it. However, whether they speak Greek or not, they have their own experiences and memories and will look at this exhibition through their own gaze. Most have shared a very close bond with their grandparents, their beloved pappou and yiayia. Our children are also growing up within the Greek Diaspora, albeit a Greek-Australian reality very different from the one so many of us grew up in, in the 1960s and 70s, and will one day determine the future of our Greek-Australian community.

This exhibition highlights a facet of our community that acts as a glue that binds successive generations.

The power of ritual: Celebrating life’s milestones in a new land

Rituals gave us comfort during those dark early post-war years when we were a new minority group, and rituals continues to sustain us now that we are an established Diaspora community. Just as we saw the ritual of the wedding through last year’s exhibition, this year we are presented with the ritual of the Christening. And these overarching rituals create a ripple effect of other resultant rituals: honouring the occasion by dressing beautifully, the men in their suits, the women in their exquisite, usually homemade dresses, the children in their Sunday best.

We are reminded of the ritual of inviting extended family, friends and χωριανοί (people from the same area in Greece as you) to your Name Day party at your home. The ritual of Greek dancing and that joyous sensation of body and music fusing into a glorious whole. And the rituals with which so many of us are, sadly, becoming all too familiar – those rituals that accompany our funerals and memorial services. As we see in stark juxtaposition, those joyous, colourful, hopeful photographs of the early years, give way to the black-clad despair of these more recent reminders that this pioneering generation of extraordinary men and women were not immortal – even though, on a subliminal level, we somehow imagined that they were – and they left their last breath in the foreign land. So, photographs capturing precious moments, some relegated to the realm of dreams, to a past that is looking increasingly remote, others transported into our current consciousness through the enduring power of ritual – all the photographs a collective tribute to the story of Greek migration to Australia.

Dr Konstandina Dounis is a cultural historian and literary translator at Monash University who has a particular interest in immigrant stories and their impact on the Australian literary canon.