Ethnic Compartmentalisation: Greek Australian (Dis)Associations with White Australia and Indigenous Sovereignty

ABSTRACT

Based on Greek diasporic articulations of historical consciousness in Australia, this article introduces an analytical framework called ethnic compartmentalisation. Bringing Australian studies of ethnicity into dialogue with settler colonial scholarship, ethnic compartmentalisation examines how Greek migrants/settlers fragment their sense of belonging to Australia. By compartmentalising their sense of history, race, and migration, the segments of the Greek diaspora in Australia justify their ongoing settlement on Indigenous lands by separating or leveraging the multiple parts of their inherited migrant histories as insiders and outsiders.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonialism
• Indigenous
• First Nations
• Australia
• Greek Australia
• whiteness
• migration
• sovereignty
• diaspora
• ethnicity

Introduction

Ethnic community spaces are often framed in traditionalist and essentialist forms of cultural retention like rituals, food, and music. Yet these spaces also act as platforms for intra-ethnic dialogues that address broader societal questions of identity, racism, and belonging. The Greek club is one of many ethnic spaces that acts as a site where diasporic Greeks¹ celebrate their collective origins and share in their enduring connections to culture in Australia. It is also a site where competing representations of cultural identity, community history, and the parameters of national belonging interact. Indeed, ethnic community spaces can act as spaces that contest stereotypes (of the archetypal migrant, for example) and rework ethno-nationalist forms of identity. The club is accurately depicted in a scene of Head On, an Australian film directed by Ana Kokkinos (1998) that was adapted from Christos Tsiolkas’s (1995) novel, Loaded (Shek-Noble 2022). Traditional Greek music plays in the background as a group of dancers are hand-in-hand, passionately dancing in unison to the kalamatiano. Ari, a young second-generation Greek, moves through the dance circle; walking towards a table where a group of multi-generational Greeks are huddled in conversation. They gesticulate as they argue over the politics of the Greek diaspora in Australia. Dissecting the intricacies of national belonging and racism, a dialogue of tolerance (and intolerance) animates the debate:

Sean:

Anyway, there shouldn’t be any barriers. The idea of a nation state’s a thing of the past.

George:

But immigration should be cut back. It’s an ecological argument.

Ariadne:

That bullshit feeds into racism, George.

Peter:

George, you’re sounding like an anally retentive skip, mate. It’s too late, they’ve already let us in. The barbarians are inside the gates.

Old Greek man:

But they’re not like us. The Vietnamese spit in the street. They [Anglo Australians] give them houses and jobs, but we had to struggle for everything.

Ariadne:

That’s what’s wrong with this country. Everyone hates everyone. The skips hate the wogs. The wogs hate the Asians … 

Ari:

And everyone hates the Blacks.

Ariadne:

Yeah, exactly.

Ari:

You don’t even know any Kooris.²

Ariadne:

What’s that got to do with it? I fight racism wherever I see it. Whether it’s the Greeks, the Italians … 

(Kokkinos 1998:

01:0:28)

Humorously depicted, the scene provides an entry point into the particular historical associations that circulated in the Greek diaspora during the 1990s. Indeed, the scene offers insights into the intricate modes of relating to colonialism and racism that are specific to non-Anglo ethnic groups in Australia. This includes the descendants of non-Anglo migrants who, unlike their forebears who laboured in post-war nation-building projects or arrived as refugees, occupy distinct socio-historical positionings in relation to the ongoing structure of settler colonialism; their intergenerational presence on Indigenous lands signifying a transition from ‘migrant-cum-settlers’ to ‘ethnic-settler-colonisers’ (Piperoglou 2020: 450; Pallotta-Chiarolli and Ricatti 2022: 2). Migrants from the Mediterranean region, including but not limited to Greek, Italian, and Maltese peoples, were, along with German settlers, among the earlier non-Anglo migrants who established themselves as settlers on the continent. The dialogue’s separation between ‘the skips’, ‘the wogs’, ‘the Asians’, and ‘the Kooris/the Blacks’ highlights the differing ethnic classifications that emerged across the shifting landscape of everyday Australian multiculturalism. The terminology of ‘wog’, an amalgamating racial slur that, in a similar vein to the word ‘dago’, historically emerged to marginalise people from the Mediterranean region and has since been re-appropriated to express inter-ethnic anti-racist solidarities, points to the socio-historical treatment of migrants and their descendants from the Mediterranean region as a homogenous entity (Tsolidis and Pollard 2009; Piperoglou 2022a). In other words, ethnic-settler-colonisers from the Mediterranean region share experiences of racialisation, reflecting the nuances of their ethnic specific settler colonial condition³ – a condition that is tied to the processes of ethnicisation in Australia and the politics of responsibility towards First Nations sovereignty.

Cultural historian, Hsu-Ming Teo, describes ethnicisation as ‘a process bound up with migration and settlement, geographical location, identity attribution by the dominant culture, and voluntary identification with others as a statement of solidarity and difference’, and which results in a group becoming or being made ‘ethnic’ (2003: 148). In Australia, non-Indigenous groups who fall outside of the definition of ‘white’, ‘British’, and ‘northern European’ (Curthoys 2009) are labelled as ‘ethnic’, and thus, while the term ‘ethnic’ might be perceived as derogatory, I reclaim the word here and use it in tandem with the euphemism ‘non-Anglo’ in recognition of the term’s everyday relevance. As ethnicisation is created in part by experiences of discrimination (Teo 2003), the modes by which ethnicised peoples shift identities in relation to the settler colonial condition to maintain and exercise agency is a key point of difference between Anglo-settler-colonisers and ethnic-settler-colonisers. I use the category ‘Anglo’ to describe the dominant colonial ethnic group on the Australian continent who are the arbiters of whiteness and represent the pinnacle of Australianness through generational proximity of nineteenth century British colonisers (Hage 2000; Curthoys 2009; Moreton-Robinson 2015). Unlike Anglos, Greeks, as well as other ethnic groups, negotiate multiple cultural realities. Correspondingly, certain non-Anglo groups may share a common and distinct experience of the settler colonial condition, which converges while also differs from Anglo experiences of coloniality. Scholarship (see Hage 2003; Balint and Simic 2018; Chatterjee 2019; Piperoglou 2020; Piperoglou and Simic 2022) has increasingly recognised that ethnic experiences are distinctive settler experiences. Not only does the scene in Head On open a window into the multiple ways that ethnic-settler-colonisers relate to Australian migration narratives and intercultural relations, but it also introduces a distinctive way that Greeks relate to themselves in regards to Australian history.

Head On [Film] chronicles the life of a young and gay Greek Australian man, Ari, who grapples with the paradox of his Greekness and Australianness and hence the complex dynamics of ethnicisation. Countering dominant narratives of Greek Australian identity, Ari resists and reworks his allegiance to Greek and Australian identities. Furthermore, he challenges conceptions of transcultural solidarity and multiculturalism; maintaining that capitalistic self-interest and individualism supersede ideas of community loyalty and responsibility (Tsiolkas 1995). The ‘urban myth’, he professes, of settler colonial Australia is ‘about solidarity’, that is, the idea that ‘we stick together, we are a community’ (Tsiolkas 1995: 142). When, within transcultural spaces of engagement ‘where communal solidarity is meant to flourish’, the sub-divisions of community stick together and thus conceptions of an idealised transcultural network of interconnectedness and interdependence are, according to Ari, a fallacy (Tsiolkas 1995: 142–143). Through creative and literary expression, Tsiolkas’ (1995, 2020) character of Ari confronts the intergenerational impact of shifting definitions, categorisations, and markers of identity that emerge across the fluctuating terrain of migration and ethnic politics. Exploring the ways in which migrants and their descendants (re)negotiate their identities in an exclusivist Australian settler state, Tsiolkas illuminates the many internal struggles and external conflicts that arise for those seeking to belong whilst being suffocated by rigid ideas of multiculturalism and essentialist framings of ethnicity.

Ethnicised peoples in settler colonial contexts embody a tension between national and transnational identities. Ghassan Hage characterises the embodied tension as ‘diasporic fragmentation’. He asserts that ‘a structural feature of the constitution of the diasporic subject’ is traversing ‘two opposite forces that make’ an individual ‘both a globally propelled and a homely subject’ (2022: 65). Positioned as outsiders-within, Greeks in Australia have had to simultaneously negotiate the personal value of their cultural heritage with the ‘public association of Australian citizenship’ that is attached to ‘a dominant ethnicity to which they [are] not themselves bound’ (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2007: 152). This gestures to the relational nature of ethnicity (Teo 2003). The Greek diaspora in Australia (as well as other diasporic groups) engage in a continuous cycle of reworking, retaining, and rejecting certain aspects of their identity and their particular relations to the past in order to adapt to the changing demands of the local context or environment, thus altering their mode of being in the present (Hall 1990; Anagnostou 2009; Ali and Sonn 2010). Hage’s theorisation of ‘the diasporic condition’, as a mode of being in a singular space but living ‘in multiple realities’ (2022: 5), is also useful for us here. Comparing colonising subjects and diasporic subjects, he writes:

The colonizing subjects experience the world as organized by their own nation-state and their own national law as their turf. Transnational space becomes their national space as well as their national law writ large. Diasporic subjects […], on the other hand, have always seen themselves as being subjected to or having to negotiate with, confront, submit to, or move in the shadows or between the cracks of an already Western-occupied world organized by laws not theirs […] only to settle for the crumbs, leftovers, and marginal spaces within already colonized nations. (Hage 2022: 28)

The intergenerational presence of ethnicised subjects on Indigenous lands blurs the distinction between colonising subjects and diasporic subjects and hence complicates the relationship between the diasporic condition and the settler colonial condition. Considering the two conditions together, migrants, according to Hage, might be seen as occupying ‘a contradictory colonial location’ (2003: 96). I view the ontologies of ethnic-settler-colonisers as overlapping and multiple. Greeks, as simultaneously ethnicised and privileged subjects, are both diasporic and settler – both placeless and possessor – and hence occupy multiple subjective positions when articulating their sense of belonging or separation from Australia. Acknowledging their distinctive non-Anglo experiences of racism and coloniality (Piperoglou and Simic 2022), I extend the notion of diasporic fragmentation towards what I call ethnic compartmentalisation – an ethnic settler defence mechanism that provides an avenue to reconcile the diaspora experiences with the everyday realities of settler colonialism. In what follows, I develop an analytical framework that allows us to examine how Greeks justify their presence on Indigenous lands by fragmenting their diasporic consciousness as both insiders and outsiders, allowing for a more fulsome understanding of the outsider-within paradox.

Many studies on transcultural relations have drawn on psychoanalytic theory to explore the interrelationship between the psychological and the political (see Fanon 1986; Hage 2022, 2000). Studying the conscious and unconscious mind, psychoanalytic approaches have explored the unresolved, contradictory, and seemingly inexplicable aspects of human consciousness. Scholarship has noted that tensions between identity markers might result in ‘compartmentalisation’ – the organisation of ‘self-knowledge in ways that [...]enable avoidance, distortion, or denial of negative self-beliefs’ and which involves separating parts of the ‘self-structure’ into distinct categories based on their utility (Thomas et al. 2013: 719, 720). When considering transcultural relations, Frances Kendall (2013) argues that:

one of the psychological tools that we white people use to protect ourselves from seeing the pain and injustice we regularly inflict, whether we want to or not, is to keep our thoughts compartmentalized. (Kendall 2013: 96)

Kendall upholds that compartmentalising ‘is part of our anaesthetizing ourselves’ so that we ‘don’t have the responsibility to pay attention or to act’ on the implications of our social-structural positions of privilege (2013: 98). Within Australia, this thought process has permitted insulating ‘from the confronting reality of settler colonialism’ (Maddison 2011: 155); shielded from the fact that settler colonial identities cannot come into being without dispossessing First Nations. Thus, I extend the concept of compartmentalisation to the study of ethnicity, applying it to the phenomenon of ethnicisation, to explore how self-identifying Greeks avoid, are confused by, and/or deny responsibility for transforming Indigenous-settler relations.

Greek interpretations of themselves, their identity, and their community determines who they feel a sense of responsibility towards and how they conceptualise responsibility. Through the exchange in Head On, we are afforded a glimpse into the ways that the discourse of tolerance (and intolerance) presents outside of Anglo Australia and how it determines relations of responsibility within the ethnic sphere. The scene demonstrates that community divisions are central in shaping the parameters of social and political responsibility. Ari’s declaration that ‘everyone hates the Blacks’, albeit essentialising, foregrounds a common sentiment that non-Indigenous peoples share, which is the desire to legitimise colonial territoriality on lands where Indigenous peoples possess an inextricable and unextinguishable ontological connection (Moreton-Robinson 2003). Self-identifying with ‘the wogs’, the distinctions between who is considered an outsider-within provide justification for selective (in)action in anti-racist praxis. Ariadne, on the other hand, refers to the core of ‘what’s wrong with this country’, which is the notion that ‘everyone hates everyone’. This relational conflict began with the Frontier Wars that perpetuated mass Indigenous loss of life and dispossession and paved the way for the formation of the Australian settler nation-state. Such dispossession persists in the settler colonial present due to the structural nature of settler colonialism (Wolfe 2006; Moreton-Robinson 2015; Veracini 2015) and the failure of state-sanctioned policies, such as reconciliation and multiculturalism, to fully address historical injustice and cultural difference in the present (Hage 2000; Little and McMillan 2017). Ariadne encourages to ‘fight racism wherever [we] see it’ and implicitly calls for the adoption of what Snelgrove et al. refer to as a ‘responsibility-based ethic’ that foregrounds our ‘accountability to each other’ (2014: 4, 27); moving beyond typical framings of relational transformation that recount Anglo-Indigenous and Anglo-Ethnic relations as discrete entities. Some scholars (Young 2011; Snelgrove et al. 2014; Land 2015; Maddison et al. 2016; Little and McMillan 2017: 526) advocate for a conception of moral and political responsibility that is ‘inherited’ by all ‘non-Indigenous people through the structural positions that they inhabit in Australian society’ either as perpetrators of injustices or beneficiaries of settler colonialism. This perspective recognises that the settler state only exists as a result of Indigenous dispossession (Wolfe 2006; Maddison and Nakata 2020). Certain obstacles, however, impede on settlers enacting this responsibility.

Specific framings of Greek identity in Australia are constrained by the settler colonial state’s definition of who they are, leading to particular associations of the Greek diaspora with White (Anglo) Australia and preferential understandings of their responsibility to Indigenous sovereignty. This is heavily influenced by whiteness, which, in an Australian context, has been defined as ‘a set of institutionalised practices which legitimate and privilege certain ways of knowing, seeing, curating and being at home’ (Nicoll 2004: 18). It is ‘an aspiration’, ‘a fantasy position of cultural dominance born out of the history of European expansion’ (Hage 2000: 20), that ‘confers both dominance and privilege […] in Australian institutions and in the social practices of everyday life’ to those deemed whitely or white enough (Moreton-Robinson 2000: 172). The condition of Australian whiteness is thus predicated on ‘the relationship between racial identity and colonising practice’, and therefore the connections and dissonances between understandings of ‘white’, ‘British’, and ‘European’ identities (Curthoys 2009: 3). To associate with White (Anglo) Australia involves associating with the colonising practices of whiteness. I will now introduce three key associations of the Greek diaspora with White (Anglo) Australia, which stem from racialising, colonial, and ethnicising framings of Greek identity.

Associations of the Greek Diaspora with White (Anglo) Australia

Associating with (Their) Civilisational Prestige

During the Enlightenment, Greece was constructed as the origin of Western civilisation (Koundoura 2007). The reinterpretation of Greece as the foundation of Europe engendered the present construction of Greeks as the originators of Europeanness. This construct had ramifications for the ways in which Greek migrants in Australia were positioned, and indeed, situated themselves, in relation to dominant hierarchies of ‘whiteness’ and ‘race’. In the nineteenth century, the rise of Darwinism meant that Greek people, as well as the allure of classical Greece in the Western imagination, were being racialised in tandem with the rise of ‘white men’s countries’ (Lake and Reynolds 2008). Debates circulated in Australia about the racial character of modern Greeks and their proximity to ‘Hellenic antiquity’ (Piperoglou 2020). Modern Greek people, especially those that migrated across the global British Empire, were positioned as the backward or ‘degenerate remnants’ of the classical past (Koundoura 2007: 108). Albeit inflected to render Greeks subaltern (Gunew 2004), Greeks inherited an understanding of their civilisational heritage as symbolic capital. Furthermore, they inherited their own experiences of colonial regimes and the hierarchies that they impose as, at the time of British invasion in Australia, European powers were colonising the Mediterranean (the Ionian Islands, Malta, and Cyprus, for example). Greeks migrants thus brought their own understandings of ‘race’, Empire, and colonialism to Australia. Ionian Greeks expressed loyalty to the British Empire, Macedonian Greeks brought their own histories of conflict and occupation by German and Bulgarian forces, while Cypriot Greeks arrived with their own distinct experiences of Turkish invasion and British colonial rule. Positioning themselves as the exemplars of Europeanness through association with the grandeur of Hellenism permitted proximity to whiteness (Piperoglou 2018a, 2020). This framing continues to be articulated in the present. In 2021, the main finding of a study on identity construction for third-generation Greeks in Australia was the perception among Greeks that ‘Greeks are different to Australians’, specifically, that ‘“being Greek” is superior to “being Australian”’ (Papadelos 2021: 1984). The perception of superiority was attached to the idea that ‘Greeks have a richer cultural heritage’ (Papadelos 2021: 1985). Civilisational heritage bestows invaluable cultural and symbolic capital to Greeks in the present, which influences Greek self-identifications with whiteness and Europeanness.

Associating with Historical Narratives of Migrant Contribution

Greek migration to Australia is typically framed in the context of migrant contributions to Australian nation building. In the post-WWII era, specific groups of non-Anglo migrants were invited to advance the interests of the nation and treat Australia as a clean slate, in exchange they were afforded a new beginning to transplant themselves and rebuild their lives. The hard work of migrants was recognised in settler colonial metrics of progress and success, and the labour contribution of post-war Greeks was commended. In comparison to pre-war Greeks who migrated in smaller numbers from the islands of Ithaca, Kythera, and Kastellorizo from as early as the nineteenth century, post-war Greeks migrated in large numbers from rural locales across the entire region from the 1950s onwards, contributing to demographic change and shifts in ethnic identity building. Learning and adopting settler colonial discourse while preserving their cultural difference, Greeks were careful not to destabilise the status quo (Piperoglou 2018b, 2020; Alexiou and Piperoglou 2022). Intergenerationally, Greeks internalised and passed on the role that the settler colonial state bestowed them as the ‘success story’ of cultural integration. A third-generation Greek recounts:

The proudest aspect would be how hard my grandparents have worked for our family and all the barriers that they had to overcome. Coming here, working hard, being victims of racism, not sacrificing anything to do with our culture, being proud of where they came from. This sense of “pride” is something I value the most. (Papadelos 2021: 1984)

Greek migrants’ struggles to succeed induce a sense of pride in their descendants. However, the level to which they could succeed and achieve upward social mobility was contingent on their associations with the settler state. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos describe this as ‘the relationship of mutual dependence’ between Anglo and non-Anglo European migrants (2004: 46, 2014). In exchange for legitimising the settler state, non-Anglo migrants were afforded a set of privileges such as citizenship and property ownership at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty (Moreton-Robinson 2003). Nonetheless, the ability to ‘give and receive the necessary form of mutual recognition [from the settler state’s authority] while remaining readily visible as a foreigner’ could only be achieved by those who Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos term as ‘perpetual foreigners within’, a position reserved for ‘white-but-not-white-enough’ immigrants in the white Australian national imaginary (2003: 167; 2004: 32). Positioned as ‘perpetual foreigners-within’ yet recognised as a ‘success story’, Greek migrants and their descendants possess a palatable sense of difference.⁴

The association of the Greek diaspora with narratives of contribution fails to consider the colonial dimension of migration. Andonis Piperoglou (2018b, 2020, 2021, 2022a, 2022b) argues via a series of historical case studies that diasporic Greeks have been active participants in settler colonial cultural production, and, in turn, encourages a rethinking of commonplace historical migration narratives. Migrant contributions to the Australian labour force, their wilful desire for naturalised British subjecthood, and their practices of ‘ethnic capitalism’, are argued by Piperoglou, as non-Anglo practices of serving settler colonial interests that permit for the retention of cultural distinctiveness while also profiting off Indigenous displacement (Piperoglou 2018b, 2021, 2022b). The history of Greek settlement is entwined with the colonising practices of nation building (Piperoglou 2021, 2018b), which has intergenerational implications today.

Associating with Model Multiculturalism

As earlier migrants to Australia, Greeks are positioned and self-situated as ‘the makers of multiculturalism’. They are ‘often hailed and constructed as a “success story”’ by the Anglo majority (Mavroudi 2020: 130). Following the policies of assimilation, the state-sanctioned policy of multiculturalism re-positioned the contribution of migrants to encompass cultural merit. The merit of Greeks was centred on what they could offer Anglo Australia in terms of cultural capital, and hence, ‘the production of ethnic surplus value’ (Hage 2000: 128). Multiculturalism symbolised a move away from a racialising frame, focusing instead on ‘distinct “ethnic” cultures’ that revolved around an Anglo centre, ‘inducing pride in people’s “ethnic heritage” and in Australia’s cultural diversity’ (Teo 2003: 145). Greek ‘language, religion, food culture, and family structure’ seemed ‘very marked against the Australian mainstream culture’ (Fanany and Avgoulas 2019: 1197). Executed via ‘the discourse of cultural enrichment’, Greeks were positioned as secondary to the Anglo Australian who is situated ‘in the centre of the Australian cultural map’ (Hage 2000: 118). The careful negotiation, adherence, and association with the settler state’s definition of an ‘ideal’ and ‘model’ migrant nonetheless relied on a contained sense of difference that conformed to the settler state’s parameters of a tolerated other. As a commentator in the survey by Papadelos (2021: 1984) writes, Greeks conform to the settler state’s metrics of success all the while ‘not sacrificing anything to do with our culture’, which situates them as the archetypal ethnics. However, their cultural identity is valued insofar as they conform.

Associations with Settler Colonialism and Whiteness

The scene from Head On showcases all these associations in tandem. Peter’s statement that ‘the barbarians are inside the gates’ is a play on Greek civilisational heritage. The self-reference as a ‘barbarian’ flips the typical association with supposed Greek civility to reflect barbarism and hence racialisation in Australia. The elderly man’s claim that, unlike other groups, Greeks ‘had to struggle for everything’, points to an affiliation with narratives of contribution and social mobility, where migrant struggles are regarded as a prerequisite and rite of passage towards achieving success. The elderly man situates Greeks as exceptional migrants who have earned their right to belong compared to their ‘less ideal’ and ‘less white’ counterparts. Indeed, the elderly man’s remark that ‘the Vietnamese spit in the street’ and are ‘not like us’ situates Vietnamese migrants as less ‘civilised’ (read as: less white) whilst it establishes Greek migrants and their descendants as model ethnic inclusions worthy of determining the conditions of tolerance and intolerance towards the remainder of non-Anglo Australia. If we look more closely into the remarks made by the old Greek man, his comments offer another window into Greek diasporic consciousness and the processes of relating to the multiple senses of Greek belonging.

Shehrazade Emmambokus’ use of the term ‘situational ethnicity’ to describe the technique that post-migrant generations use ‘to navigate in and around different cultural frameworks’ and ‘adapt their personas to suit the cultural norms of the environment’ is apt here (2011: 89). It allows for a forging of ‘a particular cultural identity by selecting from the array of cultural elements [that] have [been] absorbed’ (Emmambokus 2011: 89). In this context, Greeks are thus able to actively influence and participate in their experiences of racialisation in settler colonial Australia. The various ways that diasporic Greeks identify with these historical associations provide a lens into what can be thought of as distinctive non-Anglo experiences of coloniality, and indeed, distinctive Ethnic-Indigenous relations. I will now explore how these associations with migration narratives are used to avoid developing relations of responsibility towards First Nations in the present. The next section analyses corresponding disassociations that are key to the dynamics of ethnic compartmentalisation.

Ethnic Compartmentalisation: The Greek Australian Experience

The associations with White (Anglo) Australia led to particular ethnic identifications with history, identity, and culture, which lead to mirrored disassociations from Australia’s colonial past and present. By compartmentalising historical privileges and inheritances that are bound up with their association with comfortable, palatable migration narratives and multicultural discourses, ethnic-settlers negate or sideline themselves from the injustices of settler colonialism. The following section is divided into four subsections that explore the various modalities of ethnic compartmentalisation. Firstly, Greeks may disassociate from the privileges of whiteness by focusing on experiences of migrant struggle. Secondly, they ignore that their contribution to the nation is tied up with coloniality by focusing on stories of invited migration and secondary arrival. Thirdly, there is a reluctance to move away from the Anglo-centred colonial aspect of multiculturalism as it compromises their positioning as the model migrant. Together, these disassociations result in compartmentalised ethnic specific historical articulations that silence the Greek diaspora’s co-contribution to settler colonial structures.

Negating Whiteness by Privileging Narratives of Struggle

Whilst diasporic Greeks associate with Greek civilisational heritage, they concurrently negate whiteness by focusing on their experiences of racialisation in Australia. Indeed, they disassociate from privilege by centring their experiences of struggle. In the eyes of whiteness, Koundoura argues that ‘“real” Greeks are one of two stereotypes, ancient or ethnic’ (2007: 46). The first stereotype, ‘ancient’, is the product of the discourse of Philhellenism and reflected in civilisational heritage mentioned earlier, while the second stereotype, ‘ethnic’, is the product of Orientalism (Koundoura 2007). It is this second stereotype as ‘ethnic’ that comes into play when Greeks over-focus on their experiences of othering and discrimination and thereby disassociate from their inherited privilege.

Globally, the racialisation and eugenic categorisation of Greeks as lower-class Europeans meant that racial hierarchies were reproduced in settler colonial contexts (Lyng 1927; Anagnostou 2009; Piperoglou 2018b). When they arrived in Australia, Greeks were racialised as non-or-less-white and positioned as subordinate or inferior to the Anglo (white) Australian. Although they were European, Greeks possessed a non-Anglo (read as: non-white) cultural identity (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2004), which meant that the gaze of whiteness attributed Greeks with ‘alleged racial ambiguity’ (Ricatti 2013: 127). Racialist categorisations of difference were unable to encompass the multiplicity of Greek subjectivities, particularly when considering Greece’s geographical position as sitting on the axil point between East and West, between ancient and modern, between barbarism and civility.

The notion that Greeks ‘challenged color race taxonomies’ led to contested and inconsistent definitions of ‘racial’ identity (Piperoglou 2022a: 35). The shifting legal definition of Greeks from aliens to naturalised British subjects, and finally as Australians citizens, is a response to – as well as a producer of – the ‘racial’ ambiguity. A Greek migrant residing in Queensland noted in 1917:

I was always under the impression that all Europeans were white, so it comes as a surprise to find that Spaniards, Italians and Greeks are not white. What I want to know is, are they black, brown or brindle? (Cairn Post 1917 as cited in Piperoglou 2022a: 35)

The migrant’s ‘suggestion of the more uncommon color/racial category of brindle’, Piperoglou contends, ‘acts as a form of ridicule that calls into question the fantastical yet persistent rigidity of whiteness’ (2022a: 35). Furthermore, it highlights Greek interpretations of the shifting nature of whiteness and its impact in producing confused self-perceptions. The inconsistency of ‘race’ is evident in a more recent newspaper article from Neos Kosmos, a Melbourne-based Greek newspaper, titled ‘When did I become “white”?’ (Kapetopoulos 2016). ‘White’ is thus a contested and messy category for capturing the nuances and cultural specificities of the settler colonial condition; and, accordingly, colour-race categories alone fail to fully explain relational conditions in settler colonial polities.

As a result of racialist discourses, Greeks faced racialised discrimination. Today, Greeks are still falsely rendered dependent on the settler state for validation of their places in Australian society as Australia continues to revolve around an Anglo-dominated centre. The lasting use of the term ‘wog’ speaks to the discrimination of migrants and descendants from the Mediterranean that is entrenched in everyday Australian vernacular (Tsolidis and Pollard 2009). While racism and discrimination today are mainly directed at non-Europeans, Greek historical experiences of othering remain firm in their sense of Australian belonging. For example, in Loaded, when Ari reacts to being considered ‘white’, he exclaims ‘I’m not white, I’m a wog’ (Tsiolkas 1995: 5). His response to racialisation and ethnicisation manifests as a staunch upholding of his racialised identity that feeds into a negation of whiteness. This self-identification has historical precedent and standing. However, the self-identification with ‘wogness’ operates as a barrier to taking responsibility for injustice as it is accompanied by dismissing contemporary immersions in privilege. Indeed, affiliation with a non-Anglo cultural background means established ethnic groups often disassociate themselves from whiteness and instead privilege their ethnic identities, as opposed to sitting with and interrogating how they are still immersed in the history of white privilege and colonial evasiveness. The elderly man’s remarks in Head On, for example, represent a firm disassociation from privilege in his explicit claim that other racialised groups are given ‘houses and jobs, but [Greeks] had to struggle for everything’. The comparison between Greeks and other racialised groups is a regurgitation of the hierarchy of privilege that collectively centres Greek experiences of struggle over the Greek experiences of success and accompanying privilege. In other words, Greeks negate their privilege due to their calculated self-positioning, capitalising on their sense of difference to produce a newer form of privilege that is subject-specific to their (self)imposed ethnic position.

Disassociating from Historical and Contemporary Settler Colonialism

The colonial dimension of migrant contributions to the nation is widely ignored in ethnic public spheres. Indeed, discourses about settler colonial intrusions revolve around Anglo, British, and northern European occupations of First Nations lands, whereas discourse about migration revolves around the plethora of non-Anglo migrants’ contributions to national progress. The sidelining of non-Anglo migrants in framings of settler colonialism fails to situate cultural specificity in colonising practices. Moreton-Robinson suggests ‘the elision of certain kinds of migration denies the ways in which whiteness as a possession will mark migrants’ differing implications in a colonizing relationship between themselves and Indigenous people’ (2003: 29). Distinct Greek-Indigenous relations are not well understood (exceptions include, Broome and Manning 2006; Pallotta-Chiarolli and Ricatti 2022) as Greek identities are merely absorbed into the multicultural mainstream.

The separation of migration from its colonial dimension allows non-Anglo peoples to partition off their Greek identity from ‘Australian’ identity, strategically reworking their identity to suit evasive interests. Opting in and out of settler colonialism, a third-generation Greek describes the negotiation:

I do not really identify with the Australian identity and struggle to respect it given its brief and bloody history. I am proud of the freedom and high level of society that has been created here in a short time. (Papadelos 2021: 1985)

Papadelos argues that the choice to self-identify with Greekness and reject Australianness is the result of Australia’s colonial legacy, and, arguably, I add, the dynamics of responsibility that ‘Australians’ inherit as non-Indigenous peoples residing on Indigenous lands. Even with the knowledge that the nation-state’s formation is inextricably tied to Indigenous dispossession, the commentator still praises the rapid progress and development of the state. Such a dual response – of a lack of respect and a feeling of pride in the nation – illuminates an awareness of the harsh reality of settler colonialism, a desire to separate from it, and an experience of enjoying the privileges that accompanies it.

Although differently situated in relation to colonising practices, non-Anglo peoples still profit from living on Indigenous territories (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 2003). Any benefit that Greeks experience as a result of colonisation, such as property ownership and possession of land is nonetheless regarded as secondary to the privileges of Anglo descendants. Thus, Australian society creates a normative distinction between ‘first-hand’ and ‘second-hand’ beneficiaries of settler colonialism. As later migrant arrivals, Greeks as non-Anglos separate themselves from settler colonialism by distancing their migration experience from the initial acts of colonial intrusion. The idea that the original sin is reserved for deceased Anglo-settler-colonisers, and that the enduring responsibility is reserved for multigenerational Anglos, affords Greeks access to ‘the rhetoric of “before my time” about the past’ when engaging with the politics of responsibility (Schech and Haggis 2004: 188). Greeks may make a claim along the lines of ‘we didn’t do the colonising, so why does it concern us?’ Such rhetoric ignores the colonial dimension of migrant contributions to the nation, as well as Greek experiences of British colonialism in the Mediterranean. The ways in which Greeks historically arrived via invitation as opposed to imposition becomes another factor contributing to this defence. The distinction in method of arrival is exemplified in the words of a Greek Australian from a Karagiozis puppet theatre dialogue: ‘we didn’t come here on our own, we were invited’ (Katsoulis 1983: 4–5 as cited in Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2019: 59). Even though post-war migrants, via bi-lateral assisted passage schemes, were encouraged to sail and settle to Australia, it is worth considering the authority of the invitation from the colonisers themselves. First Nations did not provide consent for the admission of Greeks to these lands and thus their sovereignty was denied. Removed from the initial settler colonial imposition, diasporic Greeks nevertheless benefited from the invitation to migrate but conveniently disassociate themselves from its colonial implications. The effort in the present to create a normative differentiation between beneficiaries is an attempt at ‘settler moves to innocence’ (Tuck and Yang 2012: 10) and ‘exoneration’ from the challenges posed by the politics of responsibility (Little and McMillan 2017: 520).

Conforming to The Idea of ‘The Model Migrant’: Reluctance to Move Away from the Anglo-Centric Colonial Aspect of Multiculturalism

Simultaneously, as Greeks associate with the idea that they are ‘the makers of multiculturalism’, they disassociate from the responsibility to uplift other more marginalised groups in the present and engage in more substantive acts of anti-racism. In dialogues about settler colonial injustice, Greeks can acknowledge that the injustice exists and affirm that somebody should do something about it, yet the focus on Anglos, as the perpetrators and first-hand beneficiaries of settler colonialism, means they are sure that is not themselves (see Young 2011). It is as though they have fulfilled their end of the bargain, that they have already ‘made’ Australia a more ‘tolerant’ society, and thus they are absolved from the responsibility to continue contributing to societal betterment in the present. Multiculturalism thus shies away from more substantive alterations to the functioning of society as it operates around an Anglo-dominated centre that relies on non-Anglo conformity. Sneja Gunew (2004) aptly demonstrates the ways in which the transnational discourse of multiculturalism is bound up in colonising practices such as assimilation. The reluctance to move away from the Anglo-centric colonial aspect of multiculturalism prevents the formation of relations of responsibility towards First Nations and the centring of Indigenous sovereignty. This phenomenon is clearly discernible in an article in Neos Kosmos by former politician and Cypriot Community President Theo Theophanous. Describing the experience of Cypriot Greeks in Australia, Theophanous contends:

There have been many challenges but also many successes. Our parents worked hard, and they and their children contributed to the arts, in law, in politics, in healthcare and many other areas. Together they helped build Australia while retaining their traditions and culture. More than that, they helped change Australia into a multicultural tolerant society. (Theophanous 2022)

Multiple associations and mirrored disassociations are enacted here. Theophanous directly praises how Greeks ‘helped build Australia’, commending the achievement of success in the face of adversity. He illuminates the pivotal role that Greeks played as the agents of change who transformed ‘Australia into a multicultural tolerant society’. Indeed, he continues by presenting a sequence of examples that chronicle his lived experience of arduous and ‘inhumane’ working conditions in farming and construction. Theophanous goes on to express his motives:

I highlight this account to show the intensity of our ancestors struggles in Australia. But also, to show that the injustices in Australia were not just perpetrated against our indigenous populations. They are rightly being recognised today, but a word should also be spared for the injustices against European settlers in the early years which were no less severe. (Theophanous 2022)

This example places the operation of ethnic compartmentalisation in view. With no other mention of Indigenous peoples or politics, Theophanous refers to First Nations solely to claim equivalence between Greek and First Nations experiences of injustice. His assertion that the ‘injustices against European settlers […] were no less severe’ than that of Indigenous peoples diminishes the magnitude of Indigenous dispossession and state-sanctioned genocide. Theophanous’ acknowledgement that Indigenous struggles for justice ‘are rightly being recognised today’ is negated by his use of the word ‘but’ to argue that ‘a word should also be spared’ for ‘European settlers’, ignoring the ways that Greeks and other non-Anglo settlers are implicated in settler colonial injustice. Situating Cypriot Greeks into a story of Australian multiculturalism, he fails to acknowledge the ways that state-sanctioned multiculturalism and reconciliation have, and continue to, fail First Nations calls for self-determination and sovereign recognition. Furthermore, he positions Greeks in opposition to First Nations, all of which is in service of painting Greeks as under-privileged. Read in tandem with the previous excerpt, the emphasis on Greek migration as an archetypal story of ‘struggle and success’ conveniently allows for compartmentalisation from the need to disrupt or compromise their provisional toleration by Anglo Australia, thereby ignoring the politics of responsibility to enact Indigenous calls for sovereignty.

Compartmentalisation, Complicity, and Complacency

Through the examples presented in this article, I have identified the various associations of the Greek diaspora with White (Anglo) Australia and the corresponding disassociations that prevent the extension of relations of responsibility. The co-constitutive thought processes culminate in Greek Australian complicity in settler colonialism (through associating with White (Anglo) Australia / the settler state) and complacency over the privileges that they experience from their social-structural positions (through disassociating from responsibility). Ethnic compartmentalisation involves picking up and piecing together the fragments of ethnic identity formation that position self-identifying ethnics as removed from dialogues of responsibility, exonerated from grappling with the desire to contribute to alternative futures. The ways in which Greeks relate to the social construction of ‘race’ and narratives of history (both pre-migration and post-migration) are central to understanding compartmentalisation as a process that is enacted through memory, narrative, and memory-making.

Re-narrating Histories, Creating Possibilities

Greeks in Australia have been able to strategically establish themselves as part of the mainstream, and, concurrently, solidify their diasporic relations of shared experience with other peoples from the Mediterranean region. The focus on building relations with communities who have been racialised in similar ways has often meant that relations between non-Anglo and Indigenous peoples have come second. This does not negate the stories of Greeks who developed inclusive conceptions of community that encompassed Indigenous peoples and campaigned for Indigenous political issues (see Broome and Manning 2006; Pallotta-Chiarolli 2019; Pallotta-Chiarolli and Ricatti 2022), but rather, it points to the fact that ethnic and Indigenous struggles have often been framed as unrelated or separate (see Curthoys 2000; Hage 2000; Gunew 2004; Piperoglou and Simic 2022).

The limited availability of vernaculars to make sense of the multiplicity attached to Greek Australian identities compounds this disjointed view of the self in the present, contributing to the scarcity of coordinated, community-led action and political change. Indeed, the position of Greeks as simultaneously ethnicised and privileged subjects who are both diasporic and settler, both placeless and possessor, complicates traditional framings of ethnicity and coloniality. Through this alternative view of the paradoxical relationship between diaspora and coloniality, we see the placelessness of diasporic Greeks in Australia is provisionally secured by their possession of property on Indigenous lands and their compartmentalisation of relations of responsibility, thereby intergenerationally sustaining the connection between migration and settler colonialism. Ethnic streets and neighbourhoods that create a sense of home away from the homeland also become sites of hardship, displacement, and injustice. This ‘uneasy conversation’, as articulated by Curthoys (2000), needs to be had within community. However, the dialogue must come in tandem with a nuanced understanding of settler colonial societies as sites of transcultural exchange, focusing not only on migration as a facet of settler colonialism but migration as a space of connection between Greeks and First Nations peoples. Engaging with the diasporic experience whilst centring Indigenous sovereignty has the potential to generate alternative collective ways of living in transcultural communities (Chatterjee 2019).

Comparing Anglo-Ethnic relations with Ethnic-Ethnic relations, a third-generation Greek in a survey on cultural identity articulated:

Greeks are different to Australians in many ways. […] However, I do want to point out that I feel Greeks are very similar to other non-Anglo Australian ethnic groups in Australia. The obvious ones are Italians, Lebanese, Slavic, but even Indian and Asian immigrant families tend to have more in common with Greek families than Australians. (Papadelos 2021: 1986)

The recognition of this commonality lays the foundation for stronger relationships of responsibility outside of the singular ethnic community, not only between ethnic groups from the Mediterranean region, but beyond the confines of ‘multicultural Australia’ to include and centre First Nations. The approach adopted by Ariadne, for example, in Head On illustrates this aspirational method of relating to First Nations and other non-Anglo groups, as she invites her fellow ethnic club goers to cultivate relations of responsibility and ‘fight racism wherever [we] see it’. Greek individuals in the past, such as Alick Jackomos, drew on the specificity of their identity to create meaningful relationships with First Nations that were politically active, fostering renewed conceptions of community and kin (Broome and Manning 2006). More recently, the largest and oldest Greek community organisation in Australia, the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria, reminds its members of these connections by hosting an event called ‘Ancient Greece meets Aboriginal’ (Kalimniou 2022). Such engagements with First Nations, however, reduce Greek-Indigenous histories and present realities to positive narratives of solidarity. There is a need to bring intercommunal solidarity into dialogue with notions of colonial responsibility, bridging the disconnect between Greek experiences as outsiders-within. Uncovering the challenging histories and re-remembering the hopeful narratives in unison are radical acts that have the potential to fundamentally transform Ethnic-Indigenous relations in the present. These multifaceted narratives have the potential to provide some of the missing pieces that will help bridge the disconnect in Greek diasporic consciousness in the present, rewriting the script of ethnic identity to create space for newer cultural formations, and reconfigured relations. Channelling the specificity of Greek Australian identity has the capacity to intervene in the (re)production of ethnic compartmentalisation.

To conclude then, my intent here is to move understandings of ethnic expressions to the foreground of Indigenous-settler relations. Ethnic compartmentalisation provides a lens into the nuanced relationship between the diasporic condition and the settler colonial condition. Through exploring how Greeks have reworked their identities in an exclusionary and racialising settler state, this article provides a framework for understanding the mindset that constrains Greek Australians from developing relations of responsibility towards First Nations. Ethnic compartmentalisation is a conceptual framing to describe how ethnic-settler-colonisers routinely negotiate their sense of belonging to Australia, to the detriment of First Nations sovereignty. By compartmentalising their sense of belonging, Greeks separate and leverage the multiple parts of their inherited migrant histories as insiders and outsiders to simultaneously enjoy certain privileges and avoid responsibility for transforming Indigenous-settler relations. Nevertheless, there is possibility of generative reworkings in the ethnic settler colonial modes of being. Migration narratives and ethnocultural identity no longer need to be used as insulation against taking responsibility. Greek visibility in Australia does not need to come at the cost of Indigenous sovereignty.

As the Tsiolkas story shows, ethnic compartmentalisation is not the destined outcome of cultural identity negotiation. The Tsiolkas story is about the desire to avoid stereotypes and the need to create new identities. Non-Anglo identities, therefore, might be better understood as occupying multiple intersecting and dynamic positions at once. This new way of thinking about the settler colonial condition I hope invites a more fulsome engagement of the transcultural connections and multifaceted exchanges that ethnic minorities and Indigenous groups have experienced and shared under the illegitimate authority of the white-Anglo-settler-colonial regime. Ethnic compartmentalisation has clear applicability to a range of other migrant/ethnic/diasporic groups, especially groups from the Mediterranean region. Acknowledging how ethnic groups compartmentalise their place on Indigenous lands can open new pathways for understanding how ‘in-between’/‘ambiguous’/‘not quite white’ peoples could play a role in mediating and facilitating a culture of responsibility and justice; bringing diasporic and Indigenous peoples together in an ongoing and ever-evolving transcultural dialogue.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply appreciative of the many relationships and connections that I have shared with First Nations peoples, which have shaped my relations to this place I call ‘home’. Above all, I wish to acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation as the Custodians of the Lands on which I have been nourished, raised, and continue to live and benefit from in Naarm. My acknowledgement extends to the neighbouring Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation and to all First Nations across the continent, recognising First Peoples’ unceded sovereignty, and enduring and evolving connections to culture and Country. As peoples of the Greek diaspora, my community and I are responsible for enacting First Nations sovereignty in our daily ways of being, as a reflection of our gratitude for existing on these lands. I would like to thank Andonis Piperoglou for reading earlier drafts of this article. This research has been supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust Scholarship at the University of Melbourne.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article interchangeably refers to ‘Greek Australians’ and ‘diasporic Greeks’ as an ethnic-specific collective grouping in settler colonial Australia.

2 ‘Koori’/‘Koorie’ is a generic term used to describe Aboriginal peoples from Victoria and Southern New South Wales. This article mainly uses the terminology of First Nations, First Nations peoples, and Indigenous peoples to refer to the collective First Peoples of Australia, while acknowledging the multiplicity and heterogeneity of First Nations identities and the cultural diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groupings on the continent.

3 I refer to the ‘settler colonial condition’ as the state of being in settler colonial societies of a collectively embodied coloniality.

4 Migrants from the Mediterranean region are typically afforded this label whilst groups originally from the Asian, Pacific, and African regions tend to be disqualified from this value.