13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

NICOLACOPOULOS, Toula and VASSILACOPOULOS, George

Struggles to Belong: Greek migrants of the 1950s and 1960s

Within the mainstream visual field of the Anglophone political participant/observer, Greek-Australian migrants have been portrayed as politically invisible up until the 1970s. Within a related construction of the identity of the Greek-Australian political activist, political life is divided into a valorised public side, that is potentially but not actually lived out in the mainstream political arena, and a subordinate private side that is identified with the life of the ethnic community.

In contrast, our bottom-up research, which is based on the stories of Greek-Australian political activists, reveals their much more integrated understanding of their political life. In our paper we defend the view that in the period of their so-called political invisibility, Greek-Australian political activists were subjecting the meanings of ethnic politics and of political participation to defining processes that proved significant for their later involvement in Australian political life.

We will outline the conditions during the 1950s and 1960s that made possible the emergence of the identity of the Greek migrant worker as a recognisable political entity. Our discussion will show how two processes, that of gaining strength in numbers and that of shaping a collective voice, combined to give a certain form to the Greek migrant political identity, namely its self-recognition as a self-organising political force. Greek-Australian political activists defined themselves through processes oriented towards the formation and adoption of a collective identity that addressed their need, not just to belong through becoming organised, but to actively determine the modes of their organization as migrant workers.