“The Bonegilla Greek Migrants Residents Association Inc. is unable to continue.”

This was the message from the association’s president, Theofanis Emmanouilidis, and its secretary, Achilleas Amiridis.

In an announcement sent to Neos Kosmos they state:

“Dear Greek Australians, friends, and supporters of the Greek Migrants Association, we inform you and invite you to celebrate with us the 71st anniversary of the arrival of the first 77 Greek migrants who came with DEIME in 1953 and headed to the Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre (Victoria). Everything in life has a beginning and an end.

We inform you that the Board of the Bonegilla Greek Migrants Residents Association Inc. is unable to continue its work. It would be appropriate for anyone interested in continuing to take over the historical work we started in 1987, with our assistance. It would be our honor to see our history preserved.

Our Association is non-political, non-religious, and non-profit. It is financially supported by the government for current expenses.

We thought it proper to invite you to celebrate our 71st anniversary once again.

Join us on Sunday, June 30, 2024, at the Holy Church of Saint Charalambos (corner of Porter St. and Church Rd., Lower Templestowe) for the memorial service of the deceased migrants.

After the service, we will move to the Parish Hall for speeches, our national anthems, and the cutting of the cake. Refreshments and drinks will be offered, and a film of our historic arrival in Bonegilla will be shown.

We look forward to seeing you.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Theofanis Emmanouilidis, President

Achileas Amiridis

Secretary”

Bonegilla: A historical overview of Greek Migrants’ experiences in Australia

Bonegilla,approximately 300 kilometers from Melbourne in northeastern Victoria, was designated by the Australian federal government as a Migrant Reception Centre.

It is estimated that around 35,000 Greeks endured tough experiences at the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s. Most of those who stayed there came to know Bonegilla as a detention center.

In 1952 and 1961, Bonegilla was the focal point of two migrant uprisings demanding work and freedom.

From 1947, when the first residents arrived, until its closure in 1971, more than 320,000 refugees and migrants experienced these facilities as their first home in Australia.

Their struggles for settlement and equal rights in the new country began there, before moving closer to cities with factories.

Italians were the largest group at Bonegilla. The place housed 10,000 people from diverse European nationalities, all crammed into 30 corrugated iron blocks, each with 350 people.

Guards and barbed wire fences protected the camp from illegal entry or exit.

Residents were provided with personal utensils, bed linens, towels, and other necessities.

If these were not returned in good condition, the cost was deducted from their unemployment allowance, from which living expenses had already been subtracted by the authorities.

Arriving in Australia under the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (and earlier under the Displaced Persons Resettlement Scheme), migrants were contractually obligated to work according to the Ministry of Immigration’s instructions for two years. Otherwise, penalties were enforced, including repayment of fares to the Commonwealth if they returned to their country of origin. The obligation of the Australian government to find work for migrants was often implemented with disdain, if at all.

Regarding job placements, there were no other choices.

Jobs in rural areas, for which residents were destined, were few and mostly unsuitable. Therefore, escape to the city, where more job opportunities existed, was inevitable despite authorities’ efforts to prevent these escapes.

Bonegilla was run on a military-style basis. Those in top positions were army officers.

Many overseers and guards, chosen from among the residents, were actually guards and employees of former Nazi concentration camps, as confirmed by Bob Greenwood, head of the War Crimes Special Investigations Unit appointed by the Hawke government in 1987.

The late Plutarch Deligiannis, an educator who arrived in Bonegilla on April 16, 1954, confirmed to the late Neos Kosmos journalist Kostas Nikolopoulos back on April 16, 2004 that:

“The living conditions of new migrants did not cause any concern to the government. I must tell you that we often found worms in sausages, and whether we liked it or not, we had to eat them after removing the worms, as sausages were our main food.”

After waiting 33 days without work, Deligiannis, his two brothers, and three others decided to escape one night, walking towards Wodonga or Albury, “to board the train to Melbourne where they returned to civilisation and began to live like humans.”

Thanasis Koukiás, who arrived on December 12, 1954, considered himself lucky to have stayed only two weeks “in that strange, isolated place where high temperatures, dust, mosquitoes, and flies made our lives unbearable.”

However, his escape did not lead to freedom. He was caught and, along with 37 other Greeks, sent to work in Queensland.

The Bonegilla migrants’ uprising did not receive enough attention from the Australian media, or public at that time.

The management partly attributed the uprising to “communist activity in the center – the appearance of some communist pamphlets and the activities of known communists in the area.”

An investigation by the Special Police Service and the Ministry of Justice showed that the reasons for the uprising were the lack of money and unemployment among migrants.

The so-called Reception and Distribution Centres were set up far from the capitals so that migrants could be held and controlled there. It wasn’t just the inevitable overcrowding and long wait for a job but also the mistreatment and mentality behind the creation of these centers, such as Bonegilla, that tell the real story.

People were humiliated, treated as a herd, and suffered discrimination because they did not fit an Anglo Australian mold.

The authorities’ reluctance and inability to recognise and respond to cultural differences were rooted in the prevailing foreigner perception until full assimilation prevailed.

Migrant and refugee reception facilities are euphemistic terms for detention centers or concentration camps.

The Australian ruling class and their British colonial predecessors have a long history of using measures like convict conscription, Aboriginal and Kanak labour camps.