The first Greeks in Australia are hard to name with certainty. Myth and record have mixed, as they do in the Odyssey. What is clearer is that small groups of men began arriving in the early 1800s, some as adventurers, some looking for a new start.
The earliest documented arrivals are usually given as seven sailors sentenced by a British naval court for piracy and transported to New South Wales in 1829. They were later pardoned. Two stayed.
Gold, then shops
The next wave was also made up of sailors. In the 1850s they left English ships in Australian waters after gold was found. Most meant to go home. Very few women came. In 1871 Victoria had 127 Greek-born men and only 19 Greek-born women.
Return was often postponed. When the rushes faded, those who stayed became merchants or worked in food, retail, orchards, factories and mines. Relatives followed. By the end of the 19th century, Greek communities in Sydney and Melbourne were established.
In May 1898 the foundation stone was laid in Sydney for the first Greek Orthodox church in Australia, Holy Trinity, with Greek, Russian and Syrian worshippers. In 1900 the first exclusively Greek-speaking church was begun in Melbourne, dedicated to the Annunciation.
The 1901 census counted 878 people born in Greece. Many ran or worked in shops and restaurants. Others cut cane in Queensland or worked in mines, fields and factories.
War, quotas, then mass migration
Numbers reached about 2,000 by 1911. The first Greek-language weekly appeared in 1913. When the First World War began in 1914, Greece was still neutral and Canberra barred Greek entry. The ban stayed in place until 1920, even after Greece joined the Allies in 1917.
The interwar years brought a sharper rise: an estimated 3,654 Greeks in 1921, 8,337 in 1933. Historians link part of that increase to the Greek, Armenian and Assyrian genocide in Turkey and to the 1923 population exchange, which left many Greeks displaced. A quota still limited non-British immigration. From 1925 to 1929, Greek arrivals were capped at 100 a month.
After the Second World War, Athens encouraged emigration, especially from 1950 to 1965, as unemployment grew. Australia wanted labour for industry and a larger population for defence. Arthur Calwell, the first immigration minister, sold the policy as “populate or perish.”
By 1947 about 12,000 Greek immigrants were in Australia. Assisted passage from the 1950s to the early 1970s brought tens of thousands more. The largest flow was in the 1960s, driven by unemployment and, from 1967 to 1974, the military dictatorship.
Islands, cities, a new generation
Until the mid-20th century, about 42 percent of Greek immigrants came from Kastellorizo, Kythera and Ithaca. Kytherians mostly settled in Sydney, Kastellorizians in Perth and Ithacans in Melbourne. Those three cities still hold most Greek Australians. Adelaide is the third-largest centre. Melbourne has the biggest community, then Sydney.
The 2016 census recorded 397,431 people of Greek ancestry, of whom 93,740 were born in Greece. It is one of the largest Greek communities outside Greece.
The Greek-born population is now old — a median age of 67 — and many Australian-born children were not formally taught Greek language or history. Ties to identity, language and Orthodoxy remain strong, especially among older people.
Researchers Maria Irini Avgoulas and Rebecca Fanany have described a shift from Greek to English as Australian-born generations dominate, alongside pride in heritage and contact with Greece and other diaspora communities online. The result, they argue, is an identity that is both more transnational and more Australian.
The first arrivals saw themselves as Greeks living somewhere else. Their children had to stand between immigrant parents and Australian society, and many moved into the mainstream in business and the professions.
In Greece, diaspora policy sits with the Secretariat General for Public Diplomacy and Greeks Abroad, successor to the General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad set up in 1983. Its brief is to keep ties with the homeland and support language and culture.