Learning to be (multi)national: Greek diasporic childhood re-memories of nationalism and nation-building in Australia

ABSTRACT

The paper explores unstable, interconnected and dynamic processes of diasporic nation-building and memory-making of adult members of the Greek diaspora in Australia as they recall their childhood experiences. The paper makes two key original contributions. First, we identify the importance of the re-membered and embodied diasporic child and childhood spaces to hybrid Greek and Australian adult national identities. Second, the paper provides an empirical example of the contribution that adults’ re-membered childhoods can make to children’s geographies – these are not direct representations of the past but are creatively, affectually, individually and collectively re-membered timespaces. These contributions emerge through three interconnected themes emerging from the adults’ accounts: the importance of childhood ‘work’, particularly language acquisition, to being an embodied adult Greek and Australian; nostalgia towards homelands and, crucially and originally, Australian childhood diasporic spaces; and Forging hybrid subjectivities: the presence of the diasporic child in the Greek and Australian adult. Therefore, the paper brings together in novel ways, work on diasporic childhoods and memories, the ways in which adults in diaspora use these past timespaces in present processes of nation-building and national belonging and the value of using re-memories as a method on children’s geographies.

KEYWORDS:

• Greek diaspora
• Australia
• re-membered childhood
• nationalism
• memory-making
• diasporic subjectivities

Introduction

The paper focuses on childhood memories through the notion of adults’ re-memories¹ of negotiating national belonging and the ways in which they engaged with Greek and Australian nation-building in childhood, drawing upon qualitative research with members of the Greek diaspora in Australia. The Greek diaspora in Australia is one of the largest Greek-identifying communities in the world. Most of the migration of Greek populations to Australia took place in the late 1940s and 1950s and was tied to crises in Greece associated with the Second World War (1949-1945) and the Greek Civil war (1946–1949) and their aftermath, along with the opening up of the ‘White Australia’ immigration policies of the early twentieth century to include non-British Europeans (Tamis 2005). In the 2016 census there were 317,421 people of Greek ethnicity in Australia. The paper first makes a critical methodological intervention, by demonstrating the importance of adults’ accounts of their childhoods to geographies of children and youth. Childhood experiences are embodied within the adult subject and re-membered as the multifaceted timespaces of the past are refracted through the timespaces of the present. Second, we identify the importance of childhood re-memories to adult Greek diasporic subjectivities. These overarching contributions are drawn out from three key empirical themes. These accounts emphasise the re-membered importance of childhood experiences which occurred through participation in key childhood diasporic spaces, such as Greek school, to knowing and embodying the cultural attributes (particularly language acquisition) to be ‘Greek’ and ‘Australian’. We also highlight how both homelands and, originally, early diasporic spaces are reflected upon nostalgically by adults and tied to sometimes idealised views of past childhoods although adults also re-member difficulties of growing up as part of the Greek diaspora. This is because they experienced racism and sometimes hierarchies within the diaspora and an imposition of ‘traditional’ Greek values. Finally, we highlight the importance of the re-membered and embodied timespaces of diasporic childhood, which are re-imagined individually and collectively through the emotional timespaces of the present, to hybrid Greek and Australian adult national subjectivities.

The focus on adults’ re-membered experiences of childhood addresses an ongoing debate in geographies of children and youth, which animated the earliest pages of this journal, and has been most recently returned to by Millei, Silova, and Gannon (2019) and Kraftl (2017). Philo (2003) in dialogue with Jones (2003) represented an early discussion about the potential methodological resource of adults’ re-memories of childhood. This concern has been sidelined within the field which has predominantly focused on the voices and experiences of children and young people, and to a lesser extent, adults involved in their care or education. Taking our steer from Philo (2003), Jones (2003), and Kraftl (2017) we argue that adults’ re-membered childhoods are important methodological resources for geographers of children and youth (see also Horton and Kraftl 2006). As critical memory scholars have emphasised (Keightley and Pickering 2012), whilst memories cannot be seen as a direct window into the past, being filtered by imagination and emotion, they are a crucial resource for understanding the past and its relation to the present.

We seek to address Stephens' (1997) question of ‘how do childhood experiences and memories come to function as crucial resources for nationalist sensibilities?’ (9). By examining the re-memories of experiences of growing up in diaspora, we highlight that being influenced by more than one nation is critical in forging multiple and flexible adult national subjectivities. We also emphasise the importance of considering personal as well as collective childhood re-memories in accounts of nation-building and national belonging, as those in diaspora struggle to make sense of (dis)connections to the homeland and to one another, and a need to create and maintain boundaries even as they are transgressing them (Brubaker 2005). We view this paper as embedded in discussions around the tensions which exist in the relationships between nation and diaspora, and how those in diaspora are both part of, and transgress, but also contest and subvert, national borders and nation-building projects (Yeoh and Willis 1999). We thus view diasporic nation-building as multi-scalar and dynamic through timespace as individuals in diaspora negotiate national belonging in relation to past and present people and places and top-down/bottom-up attempts to mould them into members of a nation. In this paper, we emphasise how specific re-memories are tied to particular re-membered spaces and times of childhood and that these call forth and articulate national subjectivities as Australian and/or Greek.

The paper proceeds through three further sections. The next section sets up the key conceptual arguments, establishing why it is important to consider adults’ re-membered diasporic childhoods to understand personal and collective processes of nation building. Following a discussion of methods and context, the findings from 50 semi-structured interviews with adults re-membering their childhood experiences are presented. This empirical section addresses three key themes emerging from the narrative accounts. First. the importance of childhood work which occurred through key childhood diasporic spaces, such as Greek school, to knowing and embodying the cultural attributes (particularly language acquisition) to be ‘Greek’ and ‘Australian’. In the second empirical section, we identify how homelands are reflected on nostalgically. However, we also make the important contribution that childhood diasporic spaces in the country of residence (Australia) are often re-membered nostalgically by adults and tied to idealised views of the past and past childhoods, although adults also re-member difficulties of growing up as part of the Greek diaspora such as experiences of racism and struggles over hierarchies and constructions of Greek ‘traditional’ values. Finally, we highlight the importance of the re-membered and embodied timespaces of diasporic childhood, which are re-imagined individually and collectively through the emotional timespaces of the present, to hybrid Greek and Australian adult national subjectivities.

Adult re-memories of diasporic childhoods and the negotiation of nationalism

This paper addresses a call by Mavroudi and Holt (2015) to examine children’s everyday nationalisms in particular spaces such as schools. Similarly, Millei and Imre (2016) have emphasised a need for more sustained research about nationalism in childhood which brings together what Benwell (2014) has labelled blatant (forged by governments and elites) and bottom-up (everyday practices) versions of the nation. These calls emphasise that nationalism is socially performed, grounded and part of people’s everyday lives (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008), unfolding in everyday contexts, and yet also purposefully constructed, represented, articulated and performed for political reasons (Benwell 2014).

Children negotiate nationalism in relation to wider social networks, as part of their ‘becoming’ (White et al. 2012). While children are constrained by structural factors, they are active agents, carving out their own versions of nationalism (Spyrou 2011; Millei and Lappalainen 2020) and belonging. National identity negotiations thus become entwined with children’s own subjectivities, networks and spaces, as national subjectivities gradually unfold, materialise and resonate as part of their everyday lives. Existing research with diasporic children has focused more on identity negotiations in general rather than being focused specifically on nationalism or national identity (see for example, Dwyer 1999; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013; Reynolds and Zontini 2016; Graf 2018; Müller-Funk 2019). In this paper, we specifically examine the childhood re-memories of the members of Greek diaspora in Australia through the lens of national identity and nation-building. This is because we see those in diaspora as being part of, and affected by, nation-building projects, both in the country in which they live and other places to which they feel emotional connections to, initiated both in top-down ways by host/homeland governments and, for example, religious/community/educational leaders within diasporas, but also in bottom-up ways, for example, by friends and family.

The Greek diaspora in Australia is seen as a ‘success’ (Tamis 2005) because the population is largely middle-class, despite myriad experiences and memories of loss, trauma, war and exile (Damousi 2015; Ehrkamp, Loyd, and Secor 2019). Detailed accounts reveal the complexities of the Greek diaspora in Australia as well as the endurance of gendered ethno-regional attachments and increasing evidence of hybrid, in-between subjectivities which are constructed in particular times and spaces (Avgoulas and Fanany 2015) and across generations (Tamis 2005). In this paper, we conceptualise Greek diasporic identity in Australia as socially constructed, stressing that there are many ways for diasporic Greeks to be and feel Greek and Australian (see also Arvanitis 2014).

Diasporas constitute dynamic, complex, gendered, historicised entities ‘on the move’ in-between roots and routes, both positioned and attached in myriad ways to homelands, and also untethered, transgressing the boundaries of nation-states (Mavroudi 2019). Collective memory is seen as one of the defining ‘characteristics’ of diaspora (Safran 1991). Re-memories of the homeland and the myth of return are important in these accounts; however, we argue these should be understood as socially and materially constructed, while feelings and re-memories in diaspora are recognised as complex, nuanced and contingent on intersectionalities of race, class, history and gender (Dwyer 1999; Ní Laoire 2003; Blunt 2007; Mavroudi and Christou 2015). Diasporas are involved in constant and dynamic boundary creation, maintenance and erosion (Brubaker 2005) as they negotiate potentially hybrid, multiple subjectivities and belonging and the past, present and future, ‘here’ (place of residence) and ‘there’ (the homeland), often jarring, messy ways through timespace (Anderson 2006; Skrbiš 2017; Mavroudi 2019). Within these accounts, there is ample work on the relationships between diaspora and memory (see for example, Agnew 2005; Hirsch and Miller 2011; Tolia-Kelly 2004) and within transnational migration more broadly (Chamberlain and Leydesdorff 2004). The role of nostalgia has been identified as important to constructions of diaspora (Blunt 2003; Theodoropoulou 2019). Scholarly accounts of adults’ re-memories of growing up in diaspora are relatively rare (although see King, Christou, and Teerling 2011; Graf 2018; Blachnicka-Ciacek 2018), and this paper addresses this gap.

Such a gaze is important since key facets of the Greek diaspora are forged principally within childhood (e.g. learning the Greek language, customs and dances, visits to or collective re-memories of ‘the homeland’). These embodied and emotional elements of Greekness, and shared collective re-memories of growing up Greek and Australian are critical to adult negotiations of national identity and belonging in flexible, hybrid and multiple ways. For those in diaspora, both space and time can be problematic, as can the tensions between personal forms of re-memory and more top-down mythscapes (Benwell 2014). On the one hand, those in diaspora are dispersed, away from the ‘myth-making’ centre of the homeland; on the other hand, those in diaspora may, and often are, involved in nation-building from afar, influenced by both ‘here’ and ‘there’. This contested and dynamic process of shared, collective re-memory making occurs alongside equally unstable personal re-membering and it is necessary to explore the tensions which are created as the two coalesce and jar as adults build and negotiate their national subjectivities and their re-membered childhood through timespace. Timespace articulates the dynamic, interconnected, performed and socially articulated, nature of space and time (May and Thrift 2001; Massey 2005; Lulle 2014; Boyle 2001) and how we understand this concept is further discussed in Page et al. (2017) and Mavroudi (2019).

The pages of Children’s Geographies and the broader scholarly accounts of geographies of children and youth are only just beginning to engage with adults’ experiences of childhood, given this task is fraught with methodological pitfalls (see, for example Millei, Silova, and Gannon 2019). In drawing upon adults’ re-membered childhoods we are, however, entering a debate that graced the first pages of the journal (Philo 2003; Jones 2003). As Philo and Jones argue (and indeed a point central to psychoanalytical geographies), adults’ childhoods are never fully left behind, rather they forge part of adults’ embodied subjectivities – therefore childhoods and adulthoods should not be understood dualistically. Recently, Kraftl (2017), Silova (2019) and Millei, Silova, and Gannon (2019) have returned to the question of adult memories of childhood (see also Harris and Valentine 2017; Jones 2007). We take our departure from Millei, Silova, and Gannon (2019), who, in a paper in this special issue, highlight the importance, along with the challenges, of adult’s memories of childhood to understanding the forging of collective nationalisms. These accounts reflect recent work on diaspora and critical memory studies. Rather than retrieving an objective or empirical past, re-membering is a creative and imaginative process (Mitchell and Elwood 2013). Viewing the past from the viewpoint of the present via is a fraught process, and the picture evoked is always partial; it is nonetheless valuable, an important insight into individual and collective histories, both nostalgic and traumatic (Hirsch and Miller 2011; Ehrkamp, Loyd, and Secor 2019) through ‘memory work’ (Lohmeier and Pentzold 2014). We take forward Tolia-Kelly’s (2004, 9) concept of re-memory, viewing re-membering as an ongoing, active, emotional and affective, and potentially transformative process, an iterative process between past and present feelings. The act of re-membering is fluid and temporal, not static and stable (Stock 2010, 24). This has been labelled mnemonic imagination by Keightley and Pickering (2012):

… the re-membering subject engages imaginatively with what is retained from the past and, moving across time, continuously rearranges the hotchpotch of experience into relatively coherent narrative structures. (43)

Jones (2007) emphasises how these re-memberings of past childhoods are bound up with re-creating places: ‘ … suggested memory is spatial; it is also clearly bound up with processes of place and emotional attachments to place’ (213). Although not objective accounts certainly, adult re-memories of their childhoods offer unique insights into timespaces– that person’s re-membered experiences at that particular time and space, which connects with broader social and collective histories which can be recovered in no other way (Keightley 2019). Adults’ re-membered childhoods have connections to qualitative research in being always partial, constructed, subjective, habitual, emotional and corporeal as well as reflective and rational. They are simultaneously specific and personal and collective and shared, forged within socio-spatial, political and cultural contexts in specific and material spaces and times.

Methods and context

The paper is part of a broader project about the Greek diaspora in Melbourne and Canberra. These two locations were chosen because of the visibility and ‘success’ of Greeks in these settings. Melbourne is the site of the largest Greek diaspora in the world, whereas Canberra has a smaller population that identifies as ethnically Greek, and therefore the case-studies provided opportunities to engage with a wide range of members of the Greek diaspora in Australia with differing experiences tied to their place of residence, alongside differences in terms of their engagement with Greek and Australian civic society. The data discussed in the paper is drawn from 50 semi-structured interviews which were undertaken by Mavroudi with first and second-generation diasporic Greek Australian’s (26 men and 24 women); participants were spread equally between the two locations of Canberra and Melbourne. The resulting sample included a diverse group of diasporic Greeks aged between 20 and 70. Although class backgrounds were diverse, a relatively high proportion of the participants came from educated and professional backgrounds, in line with the Greek population of Australia.

The interviews were analysed using a mixture of thematic and narrative approaches (Wiles, Rosenberg, and Kearns 2005), in which interviewees’ accounts were, like the researchers’ interpretations, seen as situated and partial. Drawing upon critical memory studies, the interviews were not viewed as providing a direct insight into the past; rather they are evoked and created stories, tied to the present and imbued with emotion, selectivity and partiality, although presented by the participants, ‘authors’ of the narrative, as valid and complete (Keightley and Pickering 2012; Hirsch and Miller 2011; Jones 2011; Jones and Garde-Hansen 2012). The three key themes discussed in this paper are (1) the importance of childhood ‘work’, particularly language acquisition to being and embodied adult Greek and Australian; (2) nostalgia towards homelands and, crucially and originally, childhood diasporic spaces alongside the difficulties, conflicts and challenges of growing up in a diaspora; finally, (3) we highlight the importance of the re-membered and embodied timespaces of diasporic childhood, which are re-imagined individually and collectively through the emotional timespaces of the present, to hybrid Greek and Australian adult national subjectivities.

Creating diasporic national subjectivities through memory-making

This section examines adult discourses of their re-membered childhoods through the active process of memory-making. These processes of ‘mnemonic imagination’ (Keightley and Pickering 2012) create specific timespaces of identity construction. These recreated timespaces are often (although not always) imbued with a nostalgic longing for a lost past. Adult collective and individual re-memories of childhood frequently evoke an idealised notion of both childhood and the past (Burrell 2011; King, Christou, and Teerling 2011).

Re-re-membering the ‘work’ of childhood timespaces to forging diasporic adult subjectivities

And when you meet another Greek there is so much you don’t need to say because there is so much you assume there is already in place between you – you already have that bond between you for so many things whether it is religion, language, cultural, they are all already there and it’s a wonderful thing to have between us. (Yiorgos 2nd generation male, Canberra, age 40–50)

Such feelings around the importance of shared language, culture, religion and traditions are seen by some in diaspora as crucial elements re-membered as critical for creating a sense of a diasporic Greek subjectivity. Re-memories of this past togetherness and the shared consciousness is created in multiple ways including: family and homeland relationships (King, Christou, and Teerling 2011); language (Mavroudi 2020); Greek school (Arvanitis 2014); food (Duruz 2010); dances, festivals and social and religious events (Avgoulas and Fanany 2015; Kallis, Yarwood, and Tyrrell 2020), which also help to forge subjectivities as both Greek and Australian (Naficy 1991). Our participants re-membered these sites and practices of childhood as essential to forming a sense of Greek identity in Australia.

Crucially, these habitual characteristics of a Greek subjectivity tend to be actively forged in childhood through the work of childhood and then drawn upon as a kind of embodied capital in later life. Adults re-membered that Greekness was instilled through shared language, food and customs, constructed around ‘home’ ‘community’ and shared Australian spaces in childhood, whereas being Australian was learned in the public spaces of the school, and learning the English language. In addition to the home (Blunt 2007; Tolia-Kelly 2004; Tsolidis and Pollard, 2010), Greek school was re-membered as a crucial space in which a specifically Greek and Australian sensibility was produced. As Anna (2nd generation female, Melbourne, age 40–50) re-calls:

Also Greek school, Greek dancing was a large part of our lives, at Greek school we learnt dance, a little bit of religion, grammar obviously, the major ethnic yiortes [celebrations] in Greece  … 

In Anna’s narrative, personal and collective re-memories merge as Anna re-members how she became part of a Greek nation in embodied and material ways, through learning about Greek food, dancing, customs and social connections and the Greek language in Greek School. Kostas also recalls the ‘work’ of learning Greek language and culture during childhood, which sometimes involved punishments which are not considered appropriate in the contemporary context:

Our teachers were slightly heavy handed – there were beatings and things like that … (Kostas, 2nd generation male, Melbourne, aged 40–50)²

Learning to speak English was an important part of the ‘work’ of childhood to become Australian for the participants, which took place in Australian schools, along with other spaces and general social spaces (e.g. the beach). Ariadne highlights how she learned to speak English, which she loved:

… and I loved school, I learnt English very quickly and I learnt quickly, I loved all of that. (Ariadne, 1st generation female, Melbourne, aged 60–70)

This stresses the importance of language for diasporic national belonging and the quest for inclusion and perceived legitimacy within the nation building project of the host country. By stressing how she loved to learn English and school, Ariadne was actively participating within the Australian nation-building project as English speaking, and as white, which is discussed later, albeit from a position of the Other.

Forging Greek and Australian subjectivities in childhood: re-memories of ‘the homeland’, and Greek diasporic spaces in Australia

(Dis)connection to the homeland is an important aspect of learning to be part of a diasporic nation (Mavroudi 2019). The majority of the interviewees re-called the Greek ‘homeland’ as an important space of their childhood and a site for learning to be Greek and Australian in two key, and interconnected, ways: first, as a place which they visited as children to (re)connect with family and friends through practices of diaspora tourism (Murray 2018) and which they re-membered in their dialogues with the researcher; second, as an important figurative space within their childhoods in stories forged by Greek friends and adults as they were growing up, which was not always depicted positively – the Greece that the first generation left was ravaged by war and poverty (Christou and King 2010). This demonstrates the double-edged nature of nostalgia (Naficy 1991), and how its contradictions have helped shape diasporic Greek constructions of national identity; they are thus both connected to the homeland through re-memories of and stories about, the homeland but also disconnected from the homeland as most of the participants did not physically live there and may not visit often. For many in diaspora, nostalgia is synonymous with a lost past and often idealised and romanticised homeland; although the reality of re-membering and confronting one’s homeland is often more complex and problematic (Blunt 2007; Christou and King 2010). The coming together of past and present timespaces evokes powerful re-memories and emotions as the participants weaved together narratives, stories and subjectivities of national belonging in diaspora, through long-distance nationalism (Skrbiš 2017; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001).

For some of the participants, re-memories of a past rural ‘homeland’ was contrasted to current lives, in (sub)urban Australia and evoke a past place that is often constructed as more wholesome and ‘authentically’ Greece:

I lived in Greece from the age 9 until 12 … We lived in a village and it was very carefree everyday … there was always an adventure, there was always something to do, it was an exploration around the village. It represents four seasons of the year; there’s snow there’s summer; it’s like a farm lifestyle where all things are natural. It a lot different that here- not just everyday life here going to work coming home watching TV and that stuff, I didn’t watch any TV in Greece at all. Also interacting with people, in Australia the lifestyle is very much you have to organise who to call, make an appointment to see somebody. In Greece everybody gathers together; we’d be 40–50 kids in one area all playing soccer and this and that. It was different. For a child it’s the best life, you can’t beat it. And of course the village poses no danger; here people are scared so it’s different. (Petros, 2nd generation male, Canberra, aged 40–50)

These re-memories continue to exert an influence in the belief for many participants that they are Greek, and part of a diasporic Greek nation. This forms part of a Greek diasporic consciousness, which is simultaneously shared and intensely personal and emotional (Christou 2011) but also uses and constructs the homeland as an anchor point in re-memory making and nation-building.

Although such visions and versions of Greekness are powerful, they do not necessarily translate into ‘neat’ perceptions of Greek national identity. Being in diaspora often sharpens or stresses certain aspects of national identity (Naficy 1991); as lives and subjectivities unfold here, the past invariably comes into focus albeit in imperfect, partial, messy ways. Blunt (2003) conceptualises ‘productive nostalgia’, which: has political potential to construct positive diasporic subjectivities; frames the present and the future, rather than being solely focused on the past; is active, tied to embodied practice rather than only in the realm of the imagination; and, can remake ‘proximate’ as well as ‘distant’ homes (see also Hirsch and Miller 2011). Thus, a past ‘there’ becomes an active, and potentially empowering part of a present ‘here’.

Nostalgia was not reserved for the homeland. In many accounts, participants reproduced a nostalgia for a past specifically Greek diasporic childhood in Australia which they felt was disappearing, as Anna emphasises:

But we had such a great Greek population, we had more Greek schools then, now with the intermarriages people are not so passionate and not so traditional to their culture and a lot of kids don’t go to Greek school  … (Anna, 2nd generation female, Melbourne, age 40–50)

So, for Anna and others, nostalgic re-membering also evokes timespaces of growing up within diasporic communities which were often very different to how they live today – generating a sadness and longing. This nostalgia parallels that of nostalgic attachment to a ‘homeland’ and is a nostalgic connection to a lost time and space of an earlier diasporic community. This nostalgia is also tied to an idealised past childhood (Burrell 2011; Rixon, Lomax, and O’Dell 2019).

Re-membering evokes timespaces of growing up within diasporic communities which were often very different to how they live today generating a sadness and longing. This nostalgia parallels that of nostalgic attachment to a ‘homeland’ and yet the nostalgia is for lost time and space of an earlier diasporic community. This discussion demonstrates how the past can construct particular and often essentialised ethno-national versions of diasporic national identity, here rooted in understandings of Greekness as speaking Greek, not marrying non-Greeks, and as upholding traditions of religion and culture, reminiscent of Billig’s (2017) banal nationalism.

Nonetheless, not all re-membered interactions with the Greek diasporic community were positive; many participants re-called conflict, and strict, hierarchical cultures, as they argued their parents and other first-generation migrants continued to uphold a set of ‘Greek’ values that were reminiscent of the Greece of the past, rather than the contemporary Greece of the time; as Alexi, (Canberra, second generation, 40s–50s,) stated:

… That is one thing that got me about my father and how strict he was …  but they left there as young kids and whatever they knew that’s what …  they literally brought over what they had they had been taught whatever they believed in that’s how they actually thought Greece was and even if they’d been back they hadn’t been back long enough to actually see you know the changes you know so I’ve come back … Greece is pretty westernised.

The re-membered ‘homeland’ figured as a space our participants returned to during their childhoods; further, the re-membered homelands of parents and other adults who influenced their childhoods (such as teachers) influenced our participants’ re-membered experiences of Greek diaspora in Australia as parents attempted to hold onto traditional Greek values and subjectivities. In re-creating the ‘homeland’, our participants were drawing upon a myriad of interpretations and recreations involving individual, collective, family and material spaces that they had often visited and yet had to evoke through a creative mnemonic (Keightley and Pickering 2012) process in the interviews.

In addition to the difficulties of negotiating Greekness, participants re-membered exclusions and difficulties encountered growing up Greek in an Australia, within the context of the ‘White Australia’ Policy.³ Although Greek immigration into Australia was framed within a context of ‘opening up’ Australia to migration from white Europeans, racism was pervasive and applied to non-British Europeans. Tasos discusses this in his re-memories of growing up in Canberra, where he acknowledges that being a minority in a double sense (ie being Greek but also being in Canberra where there were fewer Greeks than in places like Sydney and Melbourne) had an impact on the racism he experienced at school and in public:

Well when you say xenophobia, I mean racism, yeah I vividly re-member experiencing that in Canberra, yeah. But that could have been my circumstances, I mean … you know where you have … I find where you’ve got groups that are sustainable, like large groups of people with similar background, they experience it a bit less, maybe I didn’t have that bigger group around me. But definitely, you know I mean from Anglo speaking people, well people with Anglo background, there was definitely racism that I experienced as a child. And perhaps its effects as a child were you know magnified more than they would be to me today … . Yeah, certainly, I mean … and they were experiences that I had at school mainly, but I’d seen it happen in public as well you know. I don’t think we’re free of racism in Australia, I don’t think anyone is actually but … ! (Tasos, 2nd generation male, Canberra, aged 40–50)

Here, Tasos is reflecting on his childhood but also making links to the Australia he sees today, and it clearly is a part of his past that still has an impact on him and his perceptions of nation and identity. Likewise, Irini’s experiences below reflect the specific time, place (in this case the neighbourhood) and school space in which she experienced xenophobia growing up and which also influenced her as an adult:

I’m sure my parents faced insurmountable difficulties – they bought a fish and chip shop in a fairly middle-class sort of area and there weren’t very many Greeks. Now when I started school I was the only Greek child [interviewers’ name] I re-member this was a sad memory that I have, but apparently this is a very common one. The teacher would sit me by myself and also would hit me because she had no experience of dealing with immigrant children and she thought I just refused to speak and so I would go home with ruler hits on my legs … that didn’t scare me – I went on – it’s just a vague memory of myself sitting in a corner and from then on I made like a silent vow to myself that I would really know English and I did. I went on and I taught English. (Irini, 2nd generation female, Melbourne, aged 50–60)

Many participants had painful re-memories of racism being pervasive and endemic, with commonly used derogatory names, which they had heard even if they did not always re-member or tell us that these words had been applied to them. Ariadne (Pontic Greek⁴ Ist Generation female, Melbourne, 60–70) discusses the racism Greeks encountered, the intolerance towards languages other than English, and also how she was able to subvert some of this, as she was able to ‘pass’ as a white Australian:

I didn’t have much of a problem when I was young growing up in Australia because I didn’t look Greek, I was fair with red hair so I blended in very well. It was more difficult for someone like my brother who was darker and especially at that time, don’t forget Australia had a white Australia policy and it was very difficult growing up, there were times when other kids, sometimes even adults would have a go at us, at me, you know, call us names  …  but we never spoke in Greek in public, never, because Australians weren’t very, you know, open, speaking a foreign language, they didn’t like that, that’s when the name calling and dirty looks would start so when we travelled in public transport or whatever, we just spoke English or we didn’t speak at all.

Ariadne clearly expresses the lines of language and hair colour were key axes around which xenophobia and racism coalesced and such perceptions of ‘passing’ stress the unstable and uneasy position of those who are deemed to be Other within narrow and prejudiced constructions of the nation (Mavroudi 2010; Srinivasan 2016). It also suggests a ‘third space’ of liminal hybridity or in-betweenness from which to subvert and resist the whiteness of the Australian nation. In this case Ariadne framed and re-membered her positionality in more unproblematic ways but she acknowledges the wider negative ramifications of racism; likewise although such ‘passing’ and liminality can potentially be empowering, it is not necessarily so (Bhabha 1994; Ahmed 1999; Mitchell 1997). Although Tasos (above) was less specific about the racism he had experienced, he recounted that he had experienced racism as a child. Both Tasos who came from Canberra with a smaller community from the Greek diaspora and Irini who lived in an area of Melbourne that did not have a significant community of Greek origin emphasised that this might have been a factor in the racism they experienced.

This section has demonstrated that childhood re-memories are not always positive and are also differentiated in terms of where people feel they belong/are connected to, and how they are positioned and perceived as Other where they grew up and where they currently live. As Irini and Tassos re-member, living in areas without a significant community of Greek origin brought particular challenges. Many participants told stories of how they and their parents in particular came from humble beginnings and overcame challenges such as racism to achieve economic success. This in itself forms part of the narrative of diasporic Greeks in Australia as a ‘success’ story, but it is not a life that has necessarily been easily won. This narrative of the past through timespaces also suggests the dynamic ‘memory work’ (Lohmeier and Pentzold 2014) that occurs as adults try to make sense of, and articulate, their childhoods and what they mean to current national identities and belonging. These narratives of belonging to Australia, are often hybrid and negotiated in tandem with Greekness in quite specific ways, as the next section demonstrates. This has resulted in versions of diasporic Greekness which are uniquely Australian and which have been forged in a childhood in which difference was constantly having to be negotiated.

Forging hybrid subjectivities: the presence of the diasporic child in the Greek and Australian adult

No, I’m Australian that’s what I am. How I feel is different. I feel Greek; Greek-Australian. (Alexi, Canberra, second generation, 40s–50s)

In their narratives, such as in Alexi’s above, the interviewees reflected upon how their changing connections with Greek and Australian communities, languages, and spaces helped sow the seeds of their belonging and the ways in which they construct their belonging as part of the Greek, but also Australian nations in the present. Australian culture and the English language had attractions and provided alternative frameworks of subjectivity for the participants. Irini, who discussed her experiences of racism also emphasised that she ‘loved’ English and learned the language so well that she went on to teach it, similarly Ariadne, emphasising that she learned English well and ‘loved’ English and Australian school.

The adults’ childhood experiences, and the ‘work’ of learning Greek cultural attributes whilst negotiating Australian society, have constructed their adult subjectivities, perhaps not in ways that are straightforwardly and empirically retrievable. The re-memories of the experiences of childhood and youth and the materialities of those experiences have forged who they are now in ways which can be consciously reflected upon and in more intangible, subconscious and habitual ways. In their narratives, the interviewees reflected upon how their changing connections with Greek and Australian communities, languages, and spaces helped sow the seeds of their belonging and the ways in which they construct their belonging as part of the Greek, but also Australian, nations in the present. Christos reflects:

But speaking Greek at home and things like that with the years that pass I find myself that I’m more Greek in mentality, in things that I like, like I said before I’m quite passionate about going to Greece, I find it awkward if I’m in Europe not to pop in. (Christos, 2nd generation male, Melbourne, aged 40–50)

Despite acknowledging that he has felt ‘bicultural’, he also feels strongly connected to Greece and has ‘become more Greek’ as he has become older. This demonstrates the fluid nature of diasporic identity-making, and the active ways in which re-memories generate diasporic subjectivities. Childhood experiences are crucial, with skills and habits acquired in childhood providing the cultural resources to be ‘Greek’ and ‘Australian’ in adulthood. Christos emphasises that there is an element of selectivity to being Greek Australian, with a choice that can be made between being ‘Greek’ or ‘Australian’ in particular timespaces. Like Christos, other participants commented on how their attitudes to Greekness changed as they got older: as children and young adults they often resented having to go to Greek school and their strict Greek parents. Then, as adults, they were pleased that they had at least some knowledge of the Greek language and an appreciation of their Greek origins:

With the second generation there is almost this push away/repulsion of your heritage and I have seen friends go through this and they really dislike it and dislike their migrant parents and get quite frustrated by it and then suddenly something happens in your later years that you get pulled back. When people turn around 28–29 they really want to go back – they want to know everything that their grandparents went through and they are trying to do family trees and everything. (Dina, 2nd generation female, Melbourne, aged 50–60)

Dina re-calls that her primary school-aged years were, as she re-members them, a ‘bubble of Greekness’ forged through learning the Greek language, Greek dances, the Orthodox religion and then as she and others got older, they started to rebel against this overt and at times extreme Greekness which some found a little claustrophobic; however, her early childhood experiences were embodied as a kind of capital (language and cultural knowledge) which she re-calls being able to draw upon to reconnect with her Greekness and forge a hybrid and dynamic diasporic subjectivity:

It depends on which country I am in. If I am in Greece I am Australian and in Australia I am Greek – so I always call myself Greek-Australian but in Australia I feel more Greek than Australian if that make sense. (Dina, 2nd generation female, Melbourne, aged 50–60)

Such re-memories and processes of nation-building in diaspora demonstrate both the importance of national identity negotiations for those in diaspora, but also their complex relationships with it; as Hua (2005) discusses, diasporas subvert nation-states. This is why Dina says that she feels Greek in Australia and Australian in Greece: being diasporic sharpens and brings to the fore the ways in which people belong, but also don’t belong to nations and this arguably has necessitated more hybrid, flexible and selective negotiations of national belonging. Childhood experiences of learning Greek language and traditions, along with English and elements of Australian culture provide the, often habitual, backdrop to these hybrid subjectivities.

Conclusions: negotiating multiple, multinational diasporic belongings through timespace

In this paper, we have examined adults’ perspectives of their childhoods as part of the Greek diaspora in Australia, and have made two key interconnected, novel contributions. We have made a critical methodological intervention, by demonstrating the importance of adults’ accounts of their childhoods to geographies of children and youth; childhood experiences are embodied within the adult subject and re-re-membered as the multifaceted timespaces of the past are refracted through the timespaces of the present. In addition, we identify the importance of childhood re-memories and embodied subjectivities to adult Greek diasporic subjectivities. These overarching contributions are drawn from three key empirical themes. The re-membered importance of childhood work which occurred through key childhood diasporic spaces, such as Greek school, to knowing and embodying the cultural attributes (particularly language acquisition) to be ‘Greek’ and ‘Australian’. In the paper, we have highlighted how both homelands and, originally, early diasporic spaces are reflected upon nostalgically by adults and tied to sometimes idealised views of the past and past childhoods although adults also re-member difficulties of growing up as part of the Greek diaspora, such as racism. Finally, therefore, we highlight the importance of the re-membered and embodied timespaces of diasporic childhood, which are re-imagined individually and collectively through the emotional timespaces of the present, to hybrid Greek and Australian adult national subjectivities.

We have emphasised that adults are important subjects for geographers of children and youth as their re-memories of their childhoods provide unique insights into collective historical geographies which cannot be retrieved through secondary historical analysis alone. Adults’ re-membered childhoods, even if partial, dynamic and unstable, are important timespaces in forging individual and collective re-memories of diverse diasporic Greek childhoods in Australia and in providing a context for current diasporic subjectivities and how the national is negotiated. Clearly, memory-making is a contested process, forged through the ‘mnemonic imagination’ (Keightley and Pickering 2012), or ‘the psychological memory–imagination mixture’ (Bachelard, 1960, 119; cited in Philo 2003, 12); and it is simultaneously individual and psychological, rationally reflective and emotional, refers to specific, empirical, times and spaces and is relational, framed by current collective and individual experiences.

For those in diaspora, time and space can be problematic, as can the tensions between personal and collective forms of re-memory and myth-making. On the one hand, those in diaspora are dispersed, away from the ‘myth-making’ centre of the homeland; on the other hand, those in diaspora may, and often are, involved in nation-building from afar, influenced by both ‘here’ and ‘there’. The process of creating collective, shared re-memories takes place away from (but also influenced by) the homeland through in-between, potentially hybrid diasporic spaces such as the home, community events, places of worship, educational spaces, in which people are situated and positioned differently and which are connected to, and form part of, childhood and adulthood. The spaces and places of childhood are important sites for the construction of a Greek and Australian identity – the school (both Greek and Australian), the Greek church, visits to and stories of the Greek homeland provide the sites of learning about both Greek and Australian cultural markers. These re-membered childhood spaces can be, like the homeland, sites of nostalgia for a lost timespace of a Greek community in Australia. These timespaces are mutilayered and multi-faceted, refracted through the lens of the present and imbued in emotion and affectually experienced in the re-telling, albeit usually presented as coherent narratives by the participants. They are also an important part of collective histories and diasporic subjectivities. Importantly, in discussing re-membered childhoods, it becomes apparent that there are complexities and contradictions in the relationships between ‘here’ and ‘there’, and past and present, as adults can struggle to make sense of past homelands ‘there’ and present realities ‘here’ as they negotiate belonging to multiple nations, Greek and Australian. Thus, deliberations and explorations of nation-building and national identity negotiation in diaspora need to pay attention to these dynamic and unstable processes of childhood (re)memory, which form part of adult subjectivities and negotiations of multiple national belongings.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We use the term re-memory following Tolia-Kelly (2004) to indicate that these memories are re-constructed, selective, partial and imbued with the emotion and context of the present.

2 It is important to note the corporeal punishment was permitted in many countries of the ‘Global North’ in schools until the 1980s.

3 White Australia Policy was established in 1901 to restrict firstly non-British and then later (since 1947) non-European migration into Australia. It was abolished in 1973 (Tavan 2004); however, the legacy of the policy is argued to continue into the present with racism continuing to be experienced by minorities and first people’s (Srinivasan 2016).

4 People of Greek ethnicity and who speak a distinct dialect of Greek who lived since ancient times on shore of the Black Sea in Turkey and Georgia. Pontic Greeks and other Greeks experienced Genocide in the First World War under the Ottoman Empire and the majority of those remaining in Turkey were expelled to Greece in 1923. Much of the Pontic population were displaced from Greece during the Second World War (Popov 2010).