Irini belonged to a generation of Greek immigrant women who escaped poverty out of the need to create a better world for ensuing generations.
As with the Greek girls of her generation, Irini endured the brutality of a world war and the ensuing civil conflict to create out of the shards of devastation a world anew.
As the first child of Georgos and Ioulia and sister to Gianni and Anna, Irini left her village of Koukounara at the age of 23 for a distant and foreign land with the intention of creating a world where her children and grandchildren would flourish into loving human beings. As with her fellow female travellers of post war Greece,
Irini sought a future that would deliver all that her homeland denied her. And in quietness and in confidence she found the strength to create a world where tomorrow would always be better than today.
Like many young immigrant seamstresses who arrived at Station Pier in the 1950s and 1960s, Irini immediately got to work on the floors of Melbourne’s clothing factories to lay a bedrock for her first family home in the then humble working-class suburb of Oakleigh.
There Irini and her husband Fotis created a safe and loving abode where their children, Maria and Christos, dwelled harmoniously with their yiayia and papou.
I recall, as her son, the many occasions when friends, neighbours and family members arrived at our Oakleigh home with garments that required adjustments and modifications for a forthcoming Name-day celebration, wedding, baptism or χορός and Irini happily obliged with a smile.
Even today the hum of a sewing machine reminds me of such times and all that my mother represented. Hard work, generosity, community, and love.
Irini’s smile was a balm for all of us, who were often overjoyed by her laugh and her humour. We were healed by her tender touch and her warm embrace. She consoled us in times of distress, and we reciprocated in kind.
She listened to our grievances and reassured us with kind words, always emphasising, as her eldest granddaughter Renni reminds us, to look for the good in every human being.
She instilled in her children and indeed her grandchildren the value of humility, kindness, love, and compassion. Her youngest granddaughter, Jessi, recalls how her grandmother would drop everything to ensure that she was well fed and kept warm by draping a blanket over her as she slept on the couch after she returned from school.
Her grandson, Nick, often speaks of the times she greeted him with a warm smile and a plate of steaming avgolemono when he visited his grandparents. While, her granddaughter, Pamela, recalls the many times she spent with her sister in her grandmother’s Mt Waverley kitchen preparing diples, yiayia Irini’s specialty.
Irini wrapped all who knew her, with love and affection, and they embraced her with equal kind-heartedness. Particularly in her later years when her guardian angels Effie, Ourania, Christina, and her sister-in-law Angeliki provided the comfort and security that only a girlfriend can proffer. They will no doubt be reunited in the soul’s final migratory phase.
How fitting that Irini departed at a time when her granddaughter Pamela was due to bring a new life to the world that Irini helped to create, reminding us that the cycle of life is indeed grief’s emollient, as emphasised in Ecclesiastes 1:8, What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
On the day after the Irini left us, we awoke under a vast cloudless sky and realised that only an infinite and boundless spiritual realm can contain a heart that bursts with Irini’s love.
