Stories in the ocean

I take Pearly out for her morning walk. The old Greek couple who live next door are out the front of their house, sweeping the leaves off the footpath.  Pappous pats Pearly and says ‘Good dog’.

I have been listening to the couple and their extended family chat away in their lovely language for weeks now, over the back fence. I have been waiting for an opportunity to use the four words of Greek I remember from a holiday twenty years ago.

‘Kalimera! Ti kanis?’ I say to the couple. Good morning! How are you?

They both look at me, surprised to hear my faux heritage. Pappous says,

‘Kala’ I’m well.

Yaya looks skeptical.

I walk off with Pearl, leaving them with the unsettling prospect that their backyard conversations may not have been as private as they thought. Maybe I know about the fact that she nags him for not changing his socks often enough, or that he thinks her spanakopita is a bit dry. I don’t, but they don’t know that.

The next time I take Pearly for a walk, they are there again, sweeping the leaves off the footpath. It is afternoon, so I say,

‘Kalispera!’ Good afternoon!

‘Ti kanis?’ he says.

‘Poly kala!’ I reply. I am very well.

Then we speak English.

Pappous says that he wants the council to remove the tree out the front of their house because it is dying and dropping its leaves on the footpath. He says he wants to put in an olive tree, so at least they can eat from it. I agree. It is a most excellent idea!

Yaya says something to me in Greek, which I cannot understand. …is she testing me? I avoid answering by nodding and rushing Pearly off for an urgent walk.

Melbourne suburbs are a patchwork of different cultures. Northcote and our surrounding suburbs are predominantly Greek. The Psarakos markets are just up the road and run by the extended Hellenic family. On a Saturday morning, the deli becomes a chaotic chorus of indecipherable frantic syllables. I love peering through the thick glass display at all the fetas and salamis and olives, waiting for one of the pretty aproned girls to call my number. I listen hard to what the mamas call the products, in an effort to build my deli vocabulary.

It is always like this for me, I find myself in a new place and I immediately want to speak the language and blend into the business of having been there for a hundred years. But in such an eclectic city, which language to choose?! We have been throwing ourselves into the markets and cafes from Carlton to Coburg, hobnobbing with the likes of the Italians, the Vietnamese and the Middle Easterners. Oh my lord! Those za’atar pizzas!

So on a cold and windy night, when an invitation came to drink red wine and join a conversation with the locals about Australia’s refugee and migrant history, we were keen. Klaus Neumann was launching his new book, Across the Seas - Australia’s Response to Refugees; a study of Australia’s attitude to refugees and asylum seekers since federation. We rugged up and headed down to the Richmond town hall.

Klaus, not so long ago from Germany, was in conversation with Arnold Zable, the son of Polish - Jewish immigrants, award-winning writer and human rights activist. Arnold brought to the room his passion for the personal stories of ‘new arrivals’. He dipped the history of Australia’s immigration policies in real life experiences and the impacts those experiences have had on the next generations; usually very sad. I drank more wine.

I had not read Klaus’s book at the time, but a few days later I was cringing as I turned the last pages. I was cringing at all those bills passed by successive governments, designed specifically and unashamedly to keep people out of Australia who were not white; to protect our ‘stock’. The first Australians were not white, but even if I could ignore that, I cannot discover any other source of the standards used for the white Australia policy; just that motley cast of pickpockets and crew who arrived on the first fleet. Never the less, white was adopted as the identity of a nation, and for a good part of a century, successive governments went about the business of bedding down that precarious truth.

When the room opened up to questions, the eclectic mix of immigrants showed themselves. French, Polish, Germans, Vietnamese, all putting their hands up, wanting to share a story about the circumstances under which they arrived in Australia, the prejudices they faced, how they adapted, and the lives they have since made for themselves - some stories went on for a long time.

I wondered, what was it that compelled these people to come out on this bleak night to tell their stories?

Klaus talked about how the history of Australia is so often defined by the things we do as a nation wanting to grow into its own skin; the ANZACS, the cricket, political events. But apart from our Indigenous countrymen, he pointed out, all of us here are immigrants, and so our history reaches far beyond anything that sits under the ‘Australian experience’, and far beyond any of our borders. We are a population that holds within us the languages and cultures of many countries, and the strength of our personal constitutions is bolstered by the journeys and challenges faced by our ancestors as they made their way to these shores.

I think that’s why people wanted to tell their stories. I think they felt like their experiences had been lost in the grand narrative, that in the context of a new country, the lives they came from had been forgotten.

I realised why I had come here.

My mother was born on a little orchard in Lithuania during the second world war. Her father was a German soldier. While the rest of her family were sent to work camps, my grandmother was transported to a convent in Germany. The war ended and Grandma got herself a job at a US officers’ mess. By the time Mum was six, Grandma had earned enough money to get herself and Mum to Italy, where they boarded a refugee ship to Australia. Mum slept in a box while Grandma threw her photos and past into the ocean. She never saw her husband again and years later, she swore to me she did not remember his name.

This is the story as my grandma told it, but Mum says you can’t trust anything that Grandma says about those times.

We never learnt Lithuanian and I have never been to Lithuania. The closest I have come to my culture is through the wonderful recipes my Grandma taught me. She is dead now and she has taken the truth of it all with her.

After Klaus's talk, I chatted with Arnold about my family story. I felt compelled to share it, even with its shaky foundations, and probably because of them. He encouraged me to write it down.

Maybe I will. After all, I am the daughter of an immigrant. My Grandma’s story may be floating about in an ocean somewhere, but I still carry her around with me, because her daughter is my Mum. Her lifelong struggle to forget the past and belong in her new home is what made our constitutions strong.

Oh Melbourne! You are alive with the cultures and languages that live on in their new homes. The stories of immigrant families may have faded, but they are loud and clear in every market, deli and backyard, and even on the footpath outside my house. And I am a part of that.

Adam and I have been trying our hand at making spanakopita. I was tempted before to take a piece of our excellent pie over to pappous and yaya, just to complicate things a little. I have changed my mind though. I think I will deliver them a heart-warming pot of my Grandma’s most excellent goulash and knoedels instead.