At the recent Greek History and Culture seminars run by the Greek Community of Melbourne, Aboriginal activist Dr Gary Foley, speaking on ‘Reclaiming your cultural heritage’, made several references to some similarities on this most significant subject with Greek Australians, actions of solidarity and personal and socio-political relationships.

Indigenous and ethnic minority Australians have unfinished business in terms of their rights to culture, language and identity that cry out for justice and recognition in law and the constitution, and more importantly, in well-funded policies and programs to right the wrongs.

This article about the Greek Australian-Aboriginal connection, taken from my book Migrant Workers and Ethnic Communities, Their Struggles for Social Justice and Cultural Rights and the Role of Greek Australians, published in 2009, shades some more light on this historical relationship.

The more progressive elements in the Greek and other ethnic communities, and more so in the left, had sought an early association with the Aboriginal rights movement. They recognised not only the commonality of interests in defence of language, culture and identity but the historically different status of the Aborigines as Australia’s first inhabitants, thus rejecting the erroneous notion that Aborigines were another ethnic minority community fitting in with the rest. Aboriginal leaders such as Charles Perkins, Marcia Langdon, Bruce McGuinness and the Dodson brothers, frequent speakers at ethnic community forums, will make this point.

Perkins told the 1983 Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia (FECCA) national conference: “Aboriginal people must become more sensitive to the needs of ethnic communities and support their efforts to achieve equality in Australian society. At the same time we have our struggles and we need your support. Together we can do much more to remove oppression and intolerance!”

A year later, after hearing Aboriginal activist and lawyer Pat O’Shan (a Communist at that time and later NSW magistrate) speak on class, sex and race, the 1984 FECCA conference declared its support for “a treaty to be freely negotiated and accepted as an act of self-determination which will satisfy Aboriginal demands for recognition as a people or groups of people in their own right”. The nearly one hundred Greek Australians at the conference passionately supported this policy.

Perkins and other Aboriginal leaders reminded all that there are some migrants, such as Arvi Parbo, who have mining and pastoral interests and disregard the Aboriginal peoples’ concerns for the land.

Perkins had a very close and long association with the Greek communities as a player with the Sydney Olympic Soccer Club and an advocate for ethnic rights. This association was developed and strengthened in the years ahead through the common campaigns between Australia’s first people and more recent non-Anglo Australians on racism, discrimination, equal opportunity and community media.

But the links between Greek Australians and Aboriginals go back to the late 1890s. Some Greeks, like Italians and other migrants, had relationships with Aboriginal women which they kept, especially when children were born. Blood relationships run very deep in the culture and psyche even of the most adventurous Greek.

‘My grandfather was a Greek’

I recall when attending a National Indigenous Media Association conference in Canberra in 1996, as president of the National Ethnic and Multicultural Broadcasters Council, (and to be able to attend as a non-Aboriginal I was ceremoniously granted the honorary title of uncle- elder) I met an Aboriginal woman from Arnhem Land, who at the sound of Zorba the Greek played in my honour, got up and danced with me and sang the Greek national anthem. When I asked her whether she learned these from the Greeks in Darwin, she replied “my grandfather was a Greek”. She and others went on to say there were quite a number of Aboriginal people in and around Darwin and other cities with Greek parentage, names and surnames.

The Jackomos and Kamelatos are two such families in Melbourne whose fathers were respectively from the isles of Kastellorizo and Samos. In A Man of All Tribes (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), Richard Brooke and Corinne Manning tell the life story of Alick Jackomos, this extraordinary man born in Melbourne in 1924, who became a ‘living legend’: “He reputedly knew all about Aboriginal history, held a treasure trove of pictures and was a genuine ‘Gubbah-iginal’, that is, one who was both gubbah (European) and Aboriginal in understanding.”

Alick, who grew up in Melbourne’s impoverished inner-city suburbs, mixing with Aboriginal kids with whom, as a dark skinned ‘dago’, he felt a great affinity. Despite prejudices by his family, in 1951 he married part-Aboriginal Merle Morgan, whose own family was not exactly excited to see her married to an outsider. Their three children Andrew, Esmai and Michael were christened in the Greek and Anglican churches and their first names were derived from both grandparents as tradition held.

As Alick became more and more involved with the plight and struggles of the Aboriginal people, as is invariably the case with families with Aboriginal parents, especially mothers, the Jackomos family, children and grandchildren identified with Aboriginal culture and tradition whilst retaining a loose and declining link with the other part of their Greek heritage.

The Jackomos children continue their parents’ tradition of involvement in Aboriginal issues. Andrew Jackomos is the director of Indigenous Services with the Victorian Justice Department. Esmai (Assimina-Elisabeth) Manahan is the Koori Business Network manager. In their earlier years, the whole family were involved body and soul with the work of the Aboriginal Advancement League. And unlike their parents who never made it to Kastellorizo, Esmai and Andrew have both made the journey. Reconnecting with their Greek heritage also runs in their blood. Andrew contributes regularly to the Greek radio and print media.

In 1942 Alick enlisted in the Army with his Aboriginal friend Otty Atkinson and saw service in New Guinea. This experience led him, in cooperation with Derek Fowell, to write the book Forgotten Heroes: Aborigines at War from the Somme to Vietnam. In the introduction, T. Gazwood, director of Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, wrote:

Not even citizens in the land they fought for

But when the Aborigines returned from the wars, they took off their uniforms and medals and were once again forced to carry the burden of white negative stereotypes. They left their people in a humpy on the river banks and found them still there when they returned. Aborigines were not even citizens in the land they fought for.

Incidentally, in the 1960s when the then Liberal Party government sent Australian troops to Vietnam, it sought to conscript migrants it had denied citizenship on political grounds. Greek Australians, who fought in the First and Second World Wars, had to put up with the racist White Australia policies on return and before.

They watched the traditional land of their Dreaming broken up for soldier settlement blocks and they were denied blocks because they were Aborigines, because mission educations stopped at grade three, because only the most menial jobs were offered to Aborigines, because they were legally no better than a ward of the state.

The ‘Greek Grappler’ who crossed cultural boundaries

Alick later became a tent wrestler with the famous Jimmy Sharman troupe, usually billed as the ‘Greek Grappler’. The full story is told in the 1998 book Sideshow Alley which he wrote with Richard Broome.

“Jackomos crossed cultural boundaries and sought to associate with Aboriginal people when most of the population chose to shun them,” wrote Joy Wandin Murphy, senior woman elder of the Wurundjeri people and professor at Swinburne University, in her appraisal of the book, printed on the back cover. Professor Colin Tatz, Visiting Fellow in Political Science, Australian National University added: “No account of race relations in Victoria could be reliable or complete without a focus on Alick Jackomos. Ethnically Greek, he devoted his life to Aboriginal advancement, bringing sense to what were often pretty senseless situations.”

The chapter on Alick Jackomos’ political activism tells of his introduction to Aboriginal politics at Yarra Bank meetings in 1938 and 1939, of his 50 years’ association with Pastor Doug Nicholls and his church in Gore St, Fitzroy. (Yarra Bank just this side of the tennis courts, had been an open forum for radical Sunday afternoon speakers and public meetings. May Day marches concluded there.) Nicholls was a prominent political leader and ‘spokesperson for the Victorian Aboriginal community’. The developing Aboriginal movement against assimilationist policies in the 1950s began to “heat up in the 1960s taking Alick along with it”.

Bill Onus, president of the Australian Aborigines’ League, was with others promoting the Aboriginal political cause through cultural activities which attracted Alick’s interests. ASIO kept a file on Bill, claiming he was a “Communist simply because he had spoken to Communist (and Christian) meetings about the Aboriginal cause”.

The formation of the Aboriginal Advancement League in Victoria in 1959 found Alick and his wife Merle there from the beginning. By 1965 it had 2,000 members and 36 branches throughout the state. Alick, who had developed a greater awareness of politics in general, became deeper involved in political activity in the Aboriginal cause.

Labor Man – Socialist inclined

In 1998 Alick told me he had been a Labor man way back and socialist inclined. In 1963 he was unanimously elected president of the Australian Aborigines’ League. He was, with Arthur Rusden, the only non-Aboriginal member ever to be allowed into the organisation and was nominated by the radical Bruce McGuinness.

In 1964 Alick became the Victorian secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, a position he held until 1976, agitating for Aboriginal equal rights on citizenship, education, health, employment and wages, and an end to discriminatory legislation. In 1967 VCAATSI added the right to retain language and culture and the right to control land. The migrant rights movement had begun to take up similar issues at the time.

Alick worked as a public servant from 1968 to 1989, first with the Victorian Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs and them from 1974 with the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs. His journey in the Aboriginal community was not always trouble-free. Being a non-Aboriginal he occasionally came under attack from those advocating Aboriginals only for positions of authority. But more often than not, his contribution was valued by those whose rights he fought for.
‘Maybe we did not know uncle Alick as we should have’

The title of the book A Man of All Tribes was borrowed from the eulogy at this funeral in 1999 by Arnold Zable, an Australian Jew who (like Alick) grew up in working class ‘dagobash’ Carlton, married a Greek Australian hailing from Ithaca and became Australia’s best-loved storyteller of multiculturalism. The funeral revealed to many of his Greek relatives the extent of Alick’s contribution to the Aboriginal cause and the love and respect he had earned from so many. His niece Yvone Parisi remarked: “Maybe we did not know Uncle Alick as we should have. Once he passed away we realised what he had achieved in his life.” She could have been speaking for the entire Greek community. His cousin Theo Conos simply said, “his funeral stunned me”.

Alick adopted Greek Orthodox rites in hospital, but wished to be buried from the Aboriginal Advancement League headquarters. As it was being rebuilt, his funeral was held in the Northcote Town Hall, on 12 March, with candles and the Greek, Australian and Koori flags on the wall. About 1,000 people crammed inside and many more hundreds milled outside.

Under Foreign Skies

Many Greek Australian political and community activists, writers and scientists had taken up the Aboriginal cause with passion and conviction. Alecos Doukas, the doyen of Greek Australian literature, had an Aboriginal as one of the protagonists in this 1966 novel Under Foreign Skies, about the travels of the unemployed in the depression years. The Greek Australian Review (1951-52) and later Neos Kosmos regularly featured Aboriginal stories and campaigns.

Yota Krili translated into Greek the famous book (and later film) Women of the Sun, published by the University Press of Thessaloniki. In her bilingual poetry collection Triptycho, one of several poems devoted to Aborigines refers to Rosy, an Alice Springs woman, lamenting the black peoples’ lost parents and country, descent into hopelessness and the call to rise.

Vlassis Zanailis put Aboriginal findings on canvas

Another Greek Australian who put the best part of his life’s work and talent to the service of Aboriginal culture was the painter Vlassis (Vlase) Zanailis who came to Australia from Kastellorizo, aged 12, in 1940 and settled in Perth. Although little known in the Greek communities, he was recognised as an important artist in the wider community, especially among the Aboriginal tribes of central and north-west Australia.

Floros Dimitriadis, a well-known journalist and Greek and Cypriot community leader from 1932 to the late 1960s and a close friend of Zanailis, wrote in the 1987 issue of the Greek Australian literary publication Chronico: “Zanailis’ conscience made him a rebel against the obvious and unforgivable white Australian indifference and indeed attempts to banish the thousands year old Aboriginal history and culture.”

He put to canvas Aboriginal findings which he discovered in caves, rocks and cemeteries in his many expeditions into ‘unknown’ lands. He was captivated by the Aborigines’ magnificent world creation mythology. This attracted media and public attention and created a huge interest in Aboriginal art and history.

In appreciation of his work and the trust he won among the Aboriginal tribes with whom he lived for several extended periods, he was made a blood brother and given the honoured names of Linjulmara and Kaladongari by the Dadaways in the Kimberleys.

On the first anniversary of his death Dimitriadis wrote: “With the death of Vlase Zanailis, the Northern Aborigines lost a true friend and Australia one of its most dedicated and sincere artists, a man able to get to the inner truth of a subject and to put it on canvas. He was a pioneer of the North and Australian Art.”

The scientist Dr Archie Kalokerinos devoted the best part of his life in the last part of the 20th century to caring for Aboriginal health. The Greek Workers Leagues would also regularly participate in Aboriginal rights campaigns. Platon, in Adelaide, was affiliated for a long time to the Aboriginal Advancement League.

In the 1997 Reconciliation Conference in Melbourne, when Prime Minister John Howard thumped the podium against a treaty, amongst the first to stand up and turn their backs to him as a sign of contempt were the Aboriginal community broadcasting leader Jim Romedio, Tom Gergos of the Democritus League and myself, in an action that stunned the conference and made the media rounds.

The Greek Australian left became aware of the Aboriginal question though the CPA in the early 1920s, as it was the only party to have a view – and a sympathetic one – on Aboriginal rights. In 1939 Tom Wright, a CPA central committee member and union official, published the pioneering booklet A Call for Aboriginal Land Rights, endorsed by the NSW Labor Council. Michael Tsounis (interview 3 February 2000) told me how as a young man in Adelaide in 1943, he met Aboriginal people for the first time at a CPA meeting – the Williams and Paise families: “It was something entirely new for me to hear speeches with so much passion for the rights of Aborigines.”

In May 1946, just when the mass immigration schemes were taking shape, 800 Aboriginal station hands in the Pilbara in the North West walked out en masse, demanding a minimum wage of thirty shillings a week, and the right to organise and appoint their own representatives, astounding their employers.

“With the migration explosion and the foundation of new national minorities came also a big Aboriginal revival,” wrote veteran Melbourne Communist leader Ralph Gibson when commenting on the Pilbara walk-out – a most profound observation, the significance of which guided the dynamics of the relationship between the ethnic and Aboriginal rights movements.

Many actions of that type were to follow. Their struggles for recognition as people, with rights to their land and a better life, grew as they took control of their destiny and other Australians joined them. Their demand for a treaty between themselves and the white settlers which will enshrine these rights in law is still to be won. Their right to be counted as Australian citizens had to wait until 1966 and their right to be recognised in the constitution as Australia’s first people still has to go through a referendum.