Writing for the Community (Ethos magazine, Spring 2024)–– Diasporic Labor: “Greek Melbourne” as a Center of Hellenism

“Diasporic” institutions require labor; we know this all too well. Organizing a Greek festival, running community educational programs, and participating in organizations all demand considerable energy and resources. Building, expanding, or sustaining institutions without continuous work is impossible. 

The labor is both physical and cultural. As a faculty member working in a Greek American academic unit—a Modern Greek Program—I am familiar with the demands of this kind of work. But nothing had prepared me for the scope and scale of labor needed to contribute to the cultural vitality of a diaspora until I visited Melbourne, Australia.

In Autumn 2023, I was invited as a Fellow at the University of Melbourne for a series of talks and seminars. Upon arrival, I was also embraced by the city’s Greek Community. New friends introduced me to the Greek aspects of Australia’s 2nd-most-visited city, offering tours of immigrant neighborhoods, and taking me to social events. They created opportunities for me to interact with cultural leaders, educators, authors, poets, and scholars. My six-week stay in the city was filled with delightful interactions.

Travel often opens ways for sojourners to see the world anew. My experience in Greek Melbourne was not an exception: it reconfigured how I think about diasporic identity. Prior to visiting, I primarily thought of diaspora as the scattering of people from their homeland and the subsequent connections with their ancestral origins and culture across generations. And also as experiences of cultural betweenness and mixing. But my encounter with Greek Melbourne added a new layer to my mental map of a diaspora.

It is not rare to hear or read in commentaries in the media the Greek Melbournian view of their παροικία (community) as a center of Hellenism. Not as a cultural periphery to Greece (the so-called “metropolitan center”), as some see it conventionally, but Greek Melbourne as a cultural center—one among many.

A diaspora as a center of Hellenism! I was intrigued. What was it that gave these Melbournians the right to this weighty claim? What makes a diasporic community a center?

The παροικία has a population of approximately 180,000 people, having the largest Greek-speaking population outside Greece. But demography and a high percentage of Greek speakers alone do not make for greatness. Something else validates this claim to distinction. As I gradually realized, it connects with the rich Greek cultural presence in the city.

A critical mass of individuals turns to the arts and learning to explore and express the community’s history and contemporary culture. It is a form of labor—we could call it cultural activism—that creates a multifaceted cultural landscape. It consists of staging plays, designing murals and installations with Greek Melbournian themes, exhibiting photography, organizing film festivals, creating venues for literature and poetry, and coordinating community-sponsored seminars hosting academics.

A community cannot boast itself as a cultural center without an understanding of itself. The official Community operates a forum called Greek History and Culture Seminars for the purpose of sharing academic research with the public. Greek Australian topics are numerous. It has financed research resulting to a book on its history. 

An illustration of investing in self-knowledge is the Community’s support in establishing a Senior Hellenic Lecturer in Global Diasporas at the University of Melbourne. This is the first time that an endowed academic position is dedicated to the study of the Greek diaspora.

Greek Melbourne utilizes the arts to honor its migrant past. An installation of five Greek-style columns in the suburb of Brunswick pays homage to domestic immigrant labor. Each column is “delineated by a cage of galvanized steel uprights and mesh. It is filled with recycled ‘kitchenalia’ toasters, kettles, saucepans,” some donated by immigrant families.

Cooking provides sustenance and contributes to the continuity of a culinary tradition. The utensils require continuous labor: washing, scraping, and maintaining to maximize their life span. The memorial makes tangible this mundane reality, emblematic of the immigrants’ struggle for survival.

But the immigrant past is not idealized. The play Byron’s Life, which I was fortunate to watch, exemplifies the “growing up Greek” genre. It dramatizes the dilemmas, ambivalences, and anxieties of a Melbourne-born Greek male who struggles to find a measure of balance between the Australian culture pulling him toward one direction and his “Old World” surroundings toward another.

A thriving center of Hellenism produces notable literature. Melbourne-born novelist Christos Tsiolkas has earned international acclaim. Poet π.O. is “a legendary figure in the Australian poetry scene” and “a chronicler of Melbourne and its culture and migrations.” In 1992, author and educator Helen Nickas founded Owl Publishing in Melbourne, a venue aiming “to nurture, study, translate and disseminate Greek-Australian literature.” The online magazine Kalliope X publishes Greek Australian and Greek poetry while supporting a variety of multicultural writings. The literary journal Antipodes, launched in 1974, is “the longest published, bilingual periodical circulating in Australia.”

Clearly, the claim of Greek Melbourne as a center connects with the emergence of the city as a center of Greek cultural production. It involves the support of the arts and scholarship enriching the understanding of the community’s history and culture. 

But diasporic institutions and identities cannot be taken for granted. Diasporas continuously negotiate new conditions, must respond to new challenges, and, in turn, may need to reinvent themselves anew. They require the involvement of the next generation. This condition engenders concern, even anxiety, about the cultural future.

A recurrent topic of conversation among Melbournians I spoke with during my visit was precisely this concern. Will there be a new generation of journalists, artists, scholars, and educators to keep documenting, reflecting, and interpreting the ever-changing diaspora? Who will be creating and curating the archives? Will there be a diasporic museum and a center of diaspora studies? What are the best practices for promoting bilingualism? There are no easy answers. Involving the next generation is certainly a necessity. However, as we know all too well, creating a robust cultural future for a diaspora requires yet another layer of demanding diaspora labor…

Yiorgos Anagnostou

Spring 2024