13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

VASSILACOPOULOS , George and NICOLACOPOULOS, Toula

Doubly Outsiders: pre-war Greek-Australian migrants and their socialist ideal

In the 1930s Greek-Australian migrants with socialist ideals were positioned as dual ‘outsiders’. They were excluded not only from the broader Australian society but also from their own ethnic community. Australia's Greek communities had previously been formed largely by the shop-owning sections whose members forcefully advanced the 'stranger' mentality. According to this mentality it was the place of the Greek migrant to work hard and remain law-abiding without ever making any social and political demands on the system.

In this paper we explore attempts by Greek-Australian radicals to overcome their dual ‘outsider’ status through a process of constructing the Greek communities of Melbourne and Sydney as political entities and linking them to the Australian left and labour movements of the time. The account we offer is drawn from the recollections of six Greek-Australians who migrated to Australia as young men during the 1920s and early 1930s. Their stories, along with that of Andreas Raftopoulos, whose efforts to unionise the Greek café workers ultimately resulted in his suicide, show how the ‘outsider’ status of these migrants created an opening for the construction of an Australian identity that could be positively related to their Greekness.