MODERN GREEK STUDIES (AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND) Volume 13, 2005 A Journal for Greek Letters Pages on Australian Society Published by Brandl & Schlesinger Pty Ltd PO Box 127 Blackheath NSW 2785 Tel (02) 4787 5848 Fax (02) 4787 5672 www.brandl.com.au for the Modern Greek Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (MGSAANZ) Department of Modern Greek University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Tel (02) 9351 7252 Fax (02) 9351 3543 E-mail: [email protected] ISSN 1039-2831 Copyright in each contribution to this journal belongs to its author. © 2006, Modern Greek Studies Association of Australia All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Typeset and design by Andras Berkes Printed by Griffin Press MODERN GREEK STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND (MGSAANZ) ETAIREIA NEOELLHNIKWN SPOUDWN AUSTRALIAS KAI NEAS ZHLANDIAS President: Michalis Tsianikas, Flinders University Vice-President: Anthony Dracoupoulos, University of Sydney Secretary: Thanassis Spilias, La Trobe University, Melbourne Treasurer: Panayota Nazou, University of Sydney, Sydney MGSAANZ was founded in 1990 as a professional association by those in Australia and New Zealand engaged in Modern Greek Studies. Membership is open to all interested in any area of Greek studies (history, literature, culture, tradition, economy, gender studies, sexualities, linguistics, cinema, Diaspora, etc). The Association issues a Newsletter (Enhmevrwsh), holds conferences and publishes two journals annually. MODERN GREEK STUDIES (AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND) Editors VRASIDAS KARALIS & MICHAEL TSIANIKAS Book Review Editor HELEN NICKAS Text editing: Katherine Cassis MEMBERSHIP TO MODERN GREEK STUDIES ASSOCIATION plus ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION for two issues Individual: AUS $45 US $35 UK £25 C35 Institutions: AUS $70 US $65 UK £35 C45 (plus postage) full-time student/pensioners: AUS $20 US $30 UK £20 (includes GST) Address for all correspondence and payments MGSAANZ Department of Modern Greek, University of Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia Tel (+61-2) 9351 7252 Fax (+61-2) 9351 3543 E-mail: [email protected] The periodical welcomes papers in both English and Greek on all aspects of Modern Greek Studies (broadly defined). Prospective contributors should preferably submit their papers on disk and hard copy. All published contributions by academics are refereed (standard process of blind peer assessment). This is a DEST recognised publication. To periodikov filoxeneiv avrqra sta Agglikav kai ta Ellhnikav anaferovmena se ovle" ti" apovyei" twn Neoellhnikwvn Spoudwvn (sth genikovthtav tou"). Upoyhvfioi sunergavte" qa prevpei na upobavlloun katav protivmhsh ti" melevte" twn se diskevta kai se evntuph morfhv. VOle" oi sunergasive" apov panepisthmiakouv" evcoun upoblhqeiv sthn kritikhv twn ekdotwvn kai epilevktwn panepisthmiakwvn sunadevlfwn. CONTENTS SECTION ONE Stuart Roseworne The Shifting Power Relations in Australia’s Economic Success Story: From Neo-Liberalism to Neo-Conservatism 7 Carole M. Cusack Religion in Australian Society: A Place for Everything and Everything and Its Place 28 Evan Kanarakis Where Be the Rock? Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll: Influence, Empowerment and rebellion, or Commercial Constructs, Cheap Imitation and War Over? 46 Steve Georgakis– Richard Light The Athens of the South: Sport in Australian Society 58 Andrea Bandhauer– Maria Veber German Studies Today: Gender and Intercultural Studies 75 Panayiotis Diamadis Aegean Eucalypts 86 SECTION TWO S. M. Hawke Dancing with the Ghost of Charmian Clift: A Ficto-Critical Requiem 106 Alexander Norman Where the Church Bell Can Be Heard, There the Parish Lies: Issues of Schism and Continuity in the Greek Orthodox Church in Australia 122 Yiorgos Anagnostou Through the Lenses of Rage: Refracting Success in Greek America 132 Angie Voela The Construction of the Woman in Karkavitsas’ Η Λυγερή 145 Vassilios Letsios Back to Bable in the Time of Modern Greek. Language Varieties in the Novel Αντιποιησισ Αρχησ 167 Elena Koutrianou Poetry as Recomposition: Odysseas Elytis Translating Sappho 192 Petro Alexiou Diaspora and Colonialism in Australia in the 1920s: The Case of Alekos Doukas’s Migrant ‘Voyage South’ 206 Anthony Stephens Interrogating Myth: Ariadne 230 SECTION THREE Joanne Finkelstein The Demotic City – The Chattering Classes and Civility 263 Robert van Krieken Occidental Self-Understanding and the Elias–Duerr Dispute: ‘Thick’ versus ‘Thin’ Conceptions of Human Subjectivity and Civilization 273 Craig Browne Castoriadis on the Capitalist Imaginary 282 SECTION FOUR BOOK REVIEWS (Edited by Helen Nickas) 300 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 327 Petro Alexiou DIASPORA AND COLONIALISM IN AUSTRALIA IN THE 1920S: THE CASE OF ALEKOS DOUKAS’S MIGRANT ‘VOYAGE SOUTH’ I ‘History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time but time filled by the presence of now.’ (Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History) This essay aims to locate a Greek migrant subject in Australia in the interwar years at the intersection of two tangential but related discourses of European settlement, that of the dominant white colonial discourse and that of the Greek diaspora which mediated the existence of Greek communities in Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century. The approach is biographical in the sense that it tracks the personal narrative of Alekos Doukas1, an Asia Minor Greek refugee, on his migratory voyage to Australia in 1927 and his first ten months in the country. The narrative is based on his letters home to his family and brother, the writer Stratís Doukas, in Greece. Benjamin’s essay on the philosophy of history introduces the critical idea that history writing is a continuing process of contestation rooted in the present. This idea also informs Nicholas Thomas’s approach to colonial history in the region and he has argued that in the analysis of colonial discourse differentiation between older and newer, more subtle forms, is imperative if we are to subvert and expose the notion of ‘historical progress’ which excises racist colonialism from the ‘liberal present’ into an insulated DIASPORA AND COLONIALISM IN AUSTRALIA IN THE 1920s 207 realm of the past.2 So too in diasporic discourses it is those elements and positions, those continuities from the past that silently underpin contemporary discourses, that need to be subjected to closer historical analysis. The exploration of my biographical subject, and the field in which he is located, is guided by Thomas’s caution that ‘only localised theories and historically specific accounts can provide much insight into the varied articulations of colonising and counter-colonial representations and practices’.3 The study of a ‘located’ historicised subject in Greek- Australian history can help illuminate the specific nature of Greek diasporic discourse and its largely unexplored relationship with the dominant colonialist discourse. My study takes up Thomas’s argument that ‘unitary’ and ‘essentialist’ representations of historical discourses are counter-productive, whereas more historicised, differentiated and complex representations can help identify the continuities and ruptures in contemporary dis - courses, particularly those that relate to minority ethnic communities and their location in the broader society.4 This essay analyses primary sources in the field of Greek-Australian history (letters, unpublished manuscripts, immigrant guides and contemporary newspaper reports) with the aim of exploring ‘discursive affiliations and underlying epistemologies’ which have till now been largely passed over.5 My investigations lead me to a consideration of the extent to which Greek migrant discourses in the past, and as continuities today, are implicated in colonialist discourse. Until now Greek migration to Australia has been studied in iso - lation from the country’s broader colonial history, largely in terms of settlement patterns and with a focus on social and economic disadvantage as the primary aspect of the relationship between the Greek communities and the dominant structures of society. This essay locates itself within an undertaking ‘for a decolonised migrant historiography’6 which in the context of this study involves three research strategies. The first is the need to examine non-British migrant histories and discourses of settlement to understand their nature and terrain: the second is to ascertain the extent to which they incorporate or share space with dominant colonial discourses: and the third is to examine the extent to which ethnic communities generate their own counter-discourses and histories, in oppo- sition or resistance to dominant narratives of settlement. Alekos Doukas was born in 1900 in Moschonisi, a small island off the Asia Minor coast near the thriving town of Aivali (Turkish: Ayvalik), an area almost exclusively inhabited by Greeks in the Ottoman Empire up until the end of the Greek-Turkish War (1919-1922). During WWI Doukas was a young refugee in Greece, returning to Turkey in 1919 and enlisting in the occupying Greek army in 1920. Seriously wounded in the final days of the war, he was evacuated in September 1922 and hospitalised in Greece. He remained in Northern Greece as a refugee until 1927 when he set sail for Australia. 208 PETRO ALEXIOU The disastrous military defeat in the Asia Minor Campaign of 1919–22, not only resulted in a massive human disaster