The Greek community of Melbourne began the new year with sad news. The well-known and respected fellow community member Christos Tsirkas has passed away. He was in a nursing home where he had been residing in recent years, having earlier lost his daughter and then his wife.
Two years ago, Kostas Karamarkos submitted the following personal testimony about Christos Tsirkas to Neos Kosmos, republished and translated here from Greek:
“Christos Tsirkas is one of the most recognisable and well-respected figures in the Greek community of Australia. He is held in high esteem by the circles of the community, the wider Australian society, and Greece. Rarely will you find someone who has a bad word to say about him.
His recognition is not only due to his physical presence. For example, a certain resemblance to Karl Marx with his long hair and full beard, has contributed to his recognition. Or maybe it’s his presence under the emblematic clocks of Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station, where he worked for some 44 years before deciding to retire in October 2018.
Born in Aetolia in February 1944, the son of a butcher and resistance fighter, Elasitis, he graduated from high school and was a member of the Union of Centres. He served in the military in Cyprus in 1963-1964. He is very proud to have Cypriot citizenship since then, with the surname Ioannou, Christos! He never denied Cyprus and the fate of the Cypriot Greeks in his life. He first participated in the annual protest and memorial events in Melbourne for the Turkish invasion of 1974, and then travelled to Greece for summer vacations. He always had a special sensitivity to national issues. His view of them was in terms of national liberation with socialist orientations. Whether we are talking about the Pontic Greeks and Macedonia, Palestine, Vietnam, or Chile under Salvador Allende, there was a consistency in ideological and political positions that was not shaken by the conjunctures of the times. He always remained faithful to the principles of internationalism and solidarity.
He arrived in Australia in the late 1960s. Before settling in Melbourne, he worked in Brisbane as a butcher and in Sydney, where he met his wife Stella, as a librarian. He also passed through Adelaide, where he enrolled in political science at Flinders University. Christos always remembered and always memorialised a Maori professor he had at Flinders!
People of all ages and of all social and ideological backgrounds recognise in his face a humanist with a beard and mustache, with kindness and courtesy, with passionate opinions. Through his personal and collective action, in the Greek community, the Australian Labor Party, unionism, multicultural community radio or PASOK, he always fought on the front line, alongside the “first”, without ever being “first” himself, to leave a better world than the one he found. Christos gave a lot to life and to his fellow human beings, without ever asking or expecting to get anything back…
He was a admirer of Eleftherios Venizelos, Ari Velouchiotis, and Andreas, but also a member of the youth of Georgios and a supporter of Georgios Papandreou in Greece. In Australia, he admired the great Labor and philhellenic reformist prime minister Gough Whitlam, and was an active organiser in the Australian Labor Party, as well as in the Railway Union. He served as President of the powerful Greek-speaking sections of the Labor Party in Victoria in the 1980s and 1990s, was recognised as an equal member of the party, and was elected a member of the union’s management. His organisational and communication skills, as well as his wider acceptance, made him essential in every political and union electoral contest.
His relationships with new people, decades younger than him, were impressive. Christos interested himself and helped many Greek immigrant children find jobs in Melbourne. He was respected by the young men and women he helped on the railways where he worked or elsewhere. Every time he went through a major trial in his life, for example the death of his beloved and only daughter Lambrini from cancer at a young age, or health adventures, these young men and women would show up to support him.
Less combative than his physical appearance and thunderous voice suggested, he served for many years on the Executive Council of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria, under Presidents Savvas Papasavvas, Demetrios Ktenas, and George Fountas. His contribution, alongside then President of the Melbourne Community George Fountas, to securing economic assistance of several million dollars from PASOK governments in Greece, a support that saved the Community from bankruptcy, was substantial.
His support for the recognition of new figures at the Antipodes festival at the beginning of the 1990s was also significant, as was his support for the written word, the arts, and interventionist publications. Collaborative cultural and politically family magazines of the 1980s, such as Chroniko and Allagi, even made their way into homes of families that did not have particularly good relationships with culture and politics, only because Christos distributed them.
Irreligious and not godless, I believe, at some Annual General Meeting of the Melbourne Community in the 1970s in conflict with the Archbishop of Australia, he proposed that the word Orthodox be removed from the name of the Community, but no other member seconded his proposal!
Christos Tsirkas until recently, when health problems limited his ability to read, was one of the few Australian Greeks who read two or three newspapers a day. We have been friends for over 35 years and throughout all these decades, I remember him every day reading the Herald Sun, the daily Panhellenic Herald of Sydney, and of course every edition of Neos Kosmos in Melbourne. And when he finished reading the newspapers, he didn’t throw them away. He gave them to others, to be informed as well!
His interest in social affairs steered him towards community radio. In the late 1980’s he hosted on Melbourne’s radical community run radio station 3CR-855 AM the program of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria, every Thursday evening. Furthermore, from 1989, and for decades he contributed to the Greek programs and sat on the related committees for the multilingual Melbourne community radio station 3ZZZ-92.3 FM.
He had a particular ability to raise money on the annual radio appeals of the stations. I know this first hand because we worked together on the same radio program, 3ZZZ, every Wednesday at 8 am for a decade. When it was time for the radio appeals, he would open the pledge block and “charge” his “customers,” as he called them, contributions according to their financial ability. He always started with his neighbour Dimitri, charging him hundreds of dollars without asking, which Dimitri always paid without any hesitation. The second “customer” was the tolerant friend of Thanassis Spanos of Medallion on Lonsdale St and later Vanilla in Oakleigh. For many years, Medallion was the second office, the second home of Christos in Melbourne.
He worked hard, often seven days a week. As active and social as few others, he only went home to sleep. And when Londale St stopped being the heart of Greek Melbourne, he went to the new gathering places of Greek Australians and those he knew. At Eaton Mall in Oakleigh, at Degani’s in Northcote, but also at Coburg Market, or at the coffee and pastry shop across the street, Achillion in Coburg again.
Christos life has not been generous with him. It has not allowed him to enjoy his old age in his last years, due to serious health problems. But such is life. A roll of the dice that doesn’t always land the way you want.
