Growing Up Between Two Worlds

On Melbourne, Greece, and the space between.

I was five years old, sitting in the shelter shed at school during lunch on a cold and rainy day, when my mother appeared. She had walked from home carrying a pot of avgolemono – chicken soup thickened with egg and sharp with lemon – because her son was cold, and that was what you did when your son was cold.

She fed me. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

The teasing that followed lasted for months. My classmates had clearly never seen anything like it: a mother at school during lunchtime, a soup they didn’t recognise, a transaction between parent and child that violated some unwritten rule about where mothers belonged and what lunch was supposed to look like. I was old enough to understand that something had gone wrong. I was not old enough to explain what it was.

My mother couldn’t see it. That’s the thing I came to understand later. It wasn’t stubbornness – she genuinely could not see the world I was navigating, because it wasn’t the world she was living in. When I asked her to stop coming to school, she heard me. She adapted. From then on, she packed my lunch.

Mortadella and feta cheese on split vienna bread, spread with olive oil.

(You can get that sandwich at most good cafes in Melbourne now. In 1966, it marked you as an alien.)

The house we grew up in spoke Greek. My parents had arrived in Australia separately in the early 1950s, both from villages in Greece, with a rudimentary primary school education. They met in Melbourne and were building a life from nothing – my father on the factory floor, my mother at the sewing machine. His sister and her husband lived with us; they were childless, and my sister and I were effectively theirs as well. Off the living room there was a small room where two commercial sewing machines had been installed, and most evenings you could hear them running well into the night while my sister and I turned collars and belts outside-in as they came off the machines.

My father and uncle would come home from the factory, wash up, and go straight out to the vegetable garden. When the factory closed for holidays, the men took temporary work. The women kept sewing.

There was always someone at the kitchen table who wasn’t quite family but wasn’t quite not. The Greek community in Melbourne had its own infrastructure: you arrived with nothing, someone put you up until you found work, and when you were steady you did the same for the next person off the boat. It was not charity. It was physics.

Next door was a family with four children, the oldest my age. What I noticed first was the freedom: they played outside until all hours, came and went without the gravitational pull that kept us close to home. They had a car – something my family would not own for another fifteen years. They took holidays.

They were also renting the same house their grandfather had first moved into. Meanwhile, almost every family in our Greek social circle was buying. The apparent insiders weren’t building. The apparent outsiders were.

A few doors further along lived an elderly woman who took my mother under her wing. My mother’s English was limited enough that I translated most of their conversations – standing in a doorway at seven or eight years old, converting not just words but entire worlds for each of them. It was that woman who later advised my mother to have us sit the selective high school entrance exam. My parents had no way to pay private school fees, and no way of knowing selective schools existed. Without that conversation, a door simply doesn’t open.

The world outside the house was not uniformly kind. Derogatory slurs were common enough that they stopped surprising me. The physical incidents were rarer, but they stayed. I remember a school excursion in Year 7, walking around Albert Park Lake with the class. Two older boys came toward us from the opposite direction. As one of them passed me, he punched me hard on the cheek and called me a dirty wog.

The teacher escorting us looked away.

That moment did something I don’t think those boys intended. Instead of pushing me toward assimilation – more English, less Greek, different food, different music – it pushed me the other way. I joined a Greek dancing team. I listened to Greek popular music almost exclusively. I stayed in after-school Greek language classes all the way through to my final year of high school. If the country of my birth was going to keep reminding me I was a foreigner, I would find somewhere else to belong.

I was a foreigner living in the land of my birth. That was simply how things were.

Things changed, though not in the way I expected. After dropping out of my Dentistry degree to the consternation of my father, I completed a commercial training course in Computer Programming. I got my first professional job at Telecom Australia almost as an experiment because my qualifications were commercial, not a recognised degree, and some of my more senior colleagues later admitted they’d wanted to see whether someone like me could handle the work. I could. I was the first of my intake to be promoted, and before I turned 25 I was the Facilities Manager for the largest computer installation in the southern hemisphere.

What I learned – and heard echoed by other Greek-Australian professionals making their way in those years – is that denigration has a practical ceiling. It simply cannot withstand the reality of working alongside people who are clearly better at the job than the people doing the denigrating. Melbourne was changing too. Multicultural Australia was becoming less theoretical and more actual. The slurs didn’t disappear overnight, but they lost authority.

The first time I went to Greece as an adult, something was immediately clear: the Greece my parents had carried with them to Melbourne was not the Greece that still existed. The community they had built in Melbourne was extraordinary and genuinely generous – and it had preserved, almost perfectly, the Greece of the 1950s and ‘60s. While Melbourne’s Greek community maintained the old world in amber, Greece itself had kept moving.

For the original migrants, going back was often a disappointment. The country they’d held in their hearts had changed shape without asking permission. For those of us born in Australia, the experience was different. The Greece we found was, in certain ways, less conservative than the community we’d grown up in. Less bound by the old rules. More comfortable with itself.

The relatives who had stayed had their own mythology about the emigrants: that Australia was a street paved with easy money, and the people who left had simply shovelled it up. They had no framework for what the immigrants had actually lived through – the factory floors, the cold, the vegetable gardens that substituted for the villages they’d left behind. That mythology has largely dissolved since the financial crisis. Greeks who have lived through real hardship understand now what the hunger migration of the 1950s was actually about.

I have owned an apartment in Greece for some years now. We come every year and stay for months. The people here don’t think of us as foreigners. We are simply the Australians – which is entirely accurate, and entirely comfortable. Being called the Australians in Greece is not what being called a dirty wog in Melbourne was. One was designed to cast you out. The other just says what you are.

I was born in Australia. I have worked there, raised my children there, and I am proud to call it home. I also feel, in a way that resists precise explanation, that Greece is home too. Something in the land and the language that feels less like a choice and more like a fact.

I grew up between two worlds. I live there still.

It turns out that’s enough.