Ramblings of a Modern Day Oracle (Revisited)
An Explanatory Note
In 2018 I decided it would be a good idea if I started a blog. After a few posts I lost interest, which really isn’t surprising.
I have always enjoyed writing as a form of therapy, but I never take it very far.
Probably because I have always thought that there are enough stories about Greeks in Melbourne, a bit of self-sabotage there, but it is what it is. For some reason everything ends up being autobiographical.
Getting older you realise that each story is unique, still I think I lost interest in my blog because I felt it was insular, a vanity project. I lacked the life experience to develop it in an appealing way.
The blog was called Ramblings of a Modern Day Oracle.
Now, with more distance—and more lived life—I’ve decided to revisit it. What follows are two pieces that have survived the test of time, and me.
A piece I wrote that came from a moment when I realised that World War II is the beginning of my story, my pre-story.
ANZAC Day
So here I am, a Greek Australian woman living in a house with Anglo men in Melbourne, Australia. It’s ANZAC Day.
What does ANZAC Day mean to me?
What does Australia mean to me?
And who are these men I’m living with?
The Anglo men are my beautiful husband and son. I didn’t give birth to my son, so he is fully Anglo, an exotic mix of English, Irish, Welsh, with a little Scandinavian and Western European thrown in.
My husband’s family history spans England, Australia, and New Zealand, reaching back to the 1600s. If he is anything, he is Kiwi through and through. I know this because every time we visit Aotearoa, the country of his birth, he transforms, vowels and all, into the version of himself our cousins across the ditch are so well known for.
My son, on the other hand, is still figuring it out. He identifies as white, but in a very global way.
I may be white, therefore Caucasian, but I am not Anglo. On my maternal side, I identify with the ethnic Greek families of Asia Minor. On my paternal side, I have a great grandmother whose ancestry traces back to Sparta.
My grandmothers, on both sides, were warriors, war widows who worked relentlessly to raise their children.
At this point, you may be thinking I’ve digressed.
Growing up in a Greek household in Melbourne, ANZAC Day was always a day of reflection and of stories. Stories of the Battle of Crete during the Second World War. My mother, who was a child at the time, remembered the horror vividly. My father’s memories of Patra were filled with hunger, searching for food to bring home to his mother and siblings, often at great personal risk.
So for me, war, based on my parents’ stories, was hunger, fear, enemies, parachutes, tanks, bombs, the black market, and death.
Growing up in Caulfield South, war was also the woman across the road whose sons had been sent to Vietnam. It was the First World War too, when my ethnic Greek maternal grandmother, still a young girl, was forced to leave her comfortable home in Asia Minor and enter Greece as a refugee.
War, I learned early, was about displacement.
It meant leaving, either as a refugee running for your life, or as an economic refugee trying to build a better future.
My grandmother was born in Alatsata (modern day Alaçatı).
My mother was born in Chania, Crete.
I was born in Melbourne, Australia.
Three generations. Three places of birth.
Not because we were adventurous. The older generations were not afflicted with wanderlust.
But because of war.
So when I trace my family history and consider where I stand today, am I grateful to Australia? Yes, very much so. Do I love Australia? I do.
And yet my heart is fragmented.
My grandmother never forgot her homeland. She wondered constantly about her house and the land her family had owned for generations.
My mother, who likely lived with some form of post-traumatic stress her entire life, believed she was in Chania during her final days. Dementia, it seems, can take you wherever you wish to go. Grief, loss, and trauma never truly leave us.
And me? I feel like an imposter everywhere.
Not Australian.
Not Greek.
Not Cretan.
And in the Peloponnese, just a stranger.
When I think about ANZAC Day, I think of the young Australians who died fighting a war so far from home that my heart breaks. I think of their parents, siblings, sweethearts, the magnitude of their loss.
And yet, somehow, people go on. Australians go on. We forgive. We welcome people from all over the world. Most of us believe in giving people a fair go.
Today, it feels as though war is never far away. People arrive from conflicts we’ve barely heard of. Trauma spills quietly into our communities. Even when it isn’t your war, it leaves its mark.
Years ago, in my early thirties, I visited the Nautical Museum of Crete in Chania. Tears streamed down my face as I stood before the Battle of Crete display. They fell faster when I saw an Australian Army uniform.
What were those boys doing in Crete?
How senseless is war?
As Boy George once sang, War, war is stupid.
That day, for the first time, I felt rooted. As a Greek Australian, I realised I had a shared history, Greek and Australian, tied to the same place.
In 2008, I returned to the museum with my husband. When tears ran down his face, I assumed it was his father’s wartime experiences that had shaped his childhood. I was wrong. It was a photograph of Māori men in a boat, floating in Cretan waters.
“How senseless it all was,” he said.
In 2018, I was in Chania with two of my second cousins, trying to decide where to eat dinner. I suggested that since I was the foreigner, they should choose. They looked at me and said, We may still be in Greece, but we’re foreigners here too.
They had moved for study, marriage, life. I was born elsewhere. The decision was made long before I existed, because of war.
What binds us is DNA. We are all descendants of Alatsata.
Chania is our spiritual home, the place our ancestors arrived as refugees, as decreed by the Treaty of Lausanne.
These days, I describe myself simply as a Greek Melburnian. Greek migration has left an indelible mark on this city, just as the Aussie and Kiwi diggers left an indelible mark on Chania.
ANZAC Day, for me, is about survival.
It is about honouring the dead.
It is not about war.
Because war is stupid.
More about me.
The Special Registry Office of Athens
Mitropoleos 60, Athens, Greece
Ειδικό Ληξιαρχείο Αθηνών
The Special Registry Office of Athens is where the deaths, births, and marriages of the Greek diaspora are registered.
It is also where I spent my fifty-second birthday.
Waiting
I waited patiently all day. From memory, I was number fifty-eight.
I didn’t even get up to go to the restroom, for fear of missing my turn.
A Mission
I was there on a mission. I wanted to submit my mother’s death certificate.
After all, it was only right.
She was born in Greece, so Greece had to know she was no longer on this earth. The cycle had finished, and I, as her only child, had to tie up all the loose ends of her life.
The Advice
The lovely woman at the Greek Consulate in Melbourne who translated the Australian-issued death certificate into Greek congratulated me on having everything in order.
She suggested that since I would be travelling to Greece the following month, I should lodge the document myself.
“Go early,” she said.
“Around 7 a.m. They only give out sixty numbers a day. Miss out, and you have to come back tomorrow.”
A Birthday at the Registry
Going to the registry on the day of my birthday felt fitting, don’t you think?
Instead of getting uptight and angry about waiting so long
(don’t go at 7 a.m.—go at 6 a.m. and wait)
I took a philosophical approach.
It was the fifty-second anniversary of my mother being in labour with her only child—me.
She had a long wait that day.
I had a long wait fifty-two years later.
Observations
That day, I learned many things.
I learned that Hellenes from all over the diaspora react exactly the same way in certain situations.
We do not like to wait.
We do not like to stay quiet.
We want to know everything that is going on, and we like to comment on it.
We are also claustrophobic. Sitting somewhere for more than thirty minutes gives us the heebie-jeebies.
Yet I was strangely calm that day, resigned to my fate.
Perhaps the Anglo influence.
Old Guard, New Guard
I pitied the old man working there, signing certificates.
He was very much old guard—rude, limping, tired-looking, and angry. His whole demeanour said, I should not be here.
And perhaps he shouldn’t have been.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
Not this guy.
Once my number was called and I stepped up to the counter, the customer service was excellent.
The woman helped me obtain copies of my birth certificate, submitted my mother’s death certificate, and asked if there was anything else I needed.
She was professional and knowledgeable—clearly part of the new guard.
What Mattered
I don’t remember what I did for my birthday that night.
It’s not important.
What I did during the day is what mattered.
It was the sense of accomplishment I felt—not only for my late mother, but for my late father as well.
My parents may not have been perfect, but their moral compass was.
This belief in doing what is morally right—so that amid life’s chaos there is order—is something I remember vividly in both.
They would have congratulated me on putting our affairs in order.
Ari Talantis 