Date of birth: 6 December 1924
Place of birth: Patra, Peloponnesos
Arrived in Australia: 25 September 1954
Occupation: Dressmaker and Factory Owner
I was born in Patra. My childhood years were very happy because we were a very close family. We made a living from our property. At Easter, for one season only, we cultivated artichokes. Every morning all of us kids would get up and go to the field. All together, we would cut the artichokes and we would finish by seven o’clock in the morning. After that we would all get on with our own work. My father used to sell the artichokes. there was no work during the winter. We were living comfortably, we had everything, nothing was lacking in my family until the war (1). The war came and all my brothers were scattered around.
I worked very hard the first few years in Australia, but now I am living a better life. I was young then, and I had lots of strength to work, but not now. I may have become very tired by working in Australia, but this country has also offered me many things. In the beginning it was very hard for migrants but gradually we all established ourselves. I am nostalgic for Greece, but I only want to go for a holiday, never for good, because the children are here, I cnnot leave them here and go.
My father had twelve children. I was the last one so I didn’t have to work as much as the others. My father did not allow my brothers to work on the property all day. He put them all into trades and into night school. All of them learned a trade. I am eight years old in the photograph. Every year in Patra we celebratea big carnival and like all the other people from Patra, I got dressed up in my costume to go to the carnival with my brothers. One of my brothers is with me in the photograph.
My childhood years were very good, but everything changed when the Germans occupied Greece (2). When the Germans came my parents didn’t know where to go, because they had ten sons to hide. We had to separate them because the Germans used to take any boy over the age of twelve to work on the road construction. A lot of people suffered with the occupation of Greece by the Germans. My family didn’t face as many hardships because we had the property, but I saw others suffer. Many died from starvation, and I remember they used to gather the bodies from the streets and load them into carts. It was very frightening to hear the bombs dropping. The Germans entered Patra on the 1st of May. Thirty-five aeroplanes were continuously dropping bombs, Patra was in a state of chaos. I remember all this very vividly because I was 18 years old. We went through a great deal.
When I finished grade three at primary school, my mother sent me to a dressmaker because I was very restless at school. I studied dressmaking in Patra for four years and afterwards went to Athens to finish my studies at a school run by nuns called ‘Krinou’. At ‘Krinou’ I studied dressmaking and when I finished, the school introduced me to some of the rich families of Athens, such as the Georgiadeous and the Xarambopouleous, to sew casual dresses for them because I was a very good dressmaker. I had a very good job in Athens. Two of my brothers came to Athens, and they worked at their trades. The three of us rented a house.
I was twenty four years old when this photograph was taken. I am dressed in the Greek national costume for the carnival. The photograph, I remember, was to send to a friend.
There in Athens I met my husband. He had come from Egypt and wanted to come to Australia, and he wanted to find a girl to get married. My friends introduced me to him and I liked him. On the 18th of February he was going and I hardly knew him, I had only known him for ten days. We went to Patra to become engaged. My parents gave a party for us and they liked their future son-in-law very much.
The photograph was taken at the port as my fiance was leaving for Australia in 1952. When the photograph was developed, I sent it to my fiance in Australia. Within a year my fiance wrote to me ‘You must come down here’. The first sponsorship was lost, and he sent me another one. After one year, on the 17th of September ’54, I left for Australia.
I arrived in Australia after one month. My husband was such a good economist that he had opened a factory of his own with an English friend. We made pickles. We pickled mussels, onions, and scallops. thirty-eight women used to work under my supervision then. the factory was in Kensington. there were thirty-eight women who worked during the summer season and eight during the winter season, who cleaned all the mussels. In ’57 I had Nikoula, my first girl, but I continued to work. What I went through with my child! I used a blanket and chairs to make a playpen to put her in, because there was broken glass everywhere and I didn’t want her to play with it.
In the photograph, I am standing outside our factory in Kensington with Nikoula in my arms. I used to get up at three o’clock in the morning, I steamed the mussels in the boiler. After seven o’clock I used to cook, look after the child, and also work in the factory with the women until five o’clock in the afternoon. At five o’clock the women used to leave, and my husband and I were left to wash the mussels, to bottle them, add vinegar and oil and at night to deliver the bottled pickles to the various stores.
During one season, I used to leave three women working in the factory whilst I went to work as a steam presser in another factory. I used to iron shirts at a factory from 7.00 to 3.30 p.m. My husband also worked at ‘General Motors’. After we finished from our jobs we would work in our own factory. The women would leave and my husband and I bottled the pickles and made the deliveries. We used to get up at half past two in the morning many times, to go to the beach to collect mussels so as not to be caught, because we didn’t have a business licence. When we returned, we cooked them and left them to the women workers and went off to work in another factory. I hardly slept, I used to sleep three hours a day only. This routine went on for twelve years.
I worked hard, it felt as if I never took the goloshes off. We could not go to church, because we worked day and night, and as you can see in the photograph when I got married I didn’t wear white because I already had a child, who is standing in front of us in the photograph. We had a church wedding in 1962, but prior to that we had a civil wedding. Twelve years later my other two children were born and we decided to sell the factory. My husband built a new house in Brunswick. After Brunswick we bought a house in Coburg in which we are living now.
1 Second World War
2 Germany occupied Greece from 1941 to 1944.
Source: ’1985. Brunswick City Council. For a better life we came’. Collected and edited by the Brunswick Oral History Project. Copies available for lending and sale at Moreland City Libraries (Brunswick) ph 9389 8600. Images taken after 1955 are available in the print publication. Original images available in exhibition boxes in storage at Brunswick Library.