Bits and Pieces from a now defunct blog

An Explanatory Note

 Anzac Day

The Anglo men I’m living with are my beautiful husband and son. As I didn’t give birth to my son, he is fully Anglo. Both of them are an exotic mix of English, Irish, Welsh with a bit of Scandinavian and Western European. There’s English, Australian and New Zealand history spanning back to the 1600’s in my husband’s family. 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 into a kiwi, complete with the phonetically different vowels our cousins across the ditch are so well known for. My son on the other hand is confused, 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 a group of Europeans who have roots from the ethnic Greek families of Asia Minor. I have a great-grandmother on my paternal side whose ancestry is from Sparta. My grandmothers on both sides of my family tree were warriors, war widows who worked extremely hard to raise their children.

At this point you are probably thinking I have digressed.

Growing up in a Greek household in Melbourne ANZAC day was always a day to reflect and hear stories about the Battle of Crete, which took place in the second world war. My mother who was a child then remembered the horror of if it well. And my father’s stories of war in Patra, Greece where he grew up, were full of searching for food to take to his mother and siblings, often risking his life. So, for me based on my parents stories about World War II, war was about hunger, enemies, parachutes, tanks, bombs, fear, the black market, and death. War was also about the woman across the road whose sons had been sent to Vietnam. It was also about the first war, when my ethnic Greek grandmother as a young girl had to leave her comfortable home in Asia Minor, Turkey,  and enter Greece as a refugee.  War was also about displacement. War meant that you had to move countries, either as refugee running for your life, or as an economic refugee wanting to build a better future.

My grandmother was born in a town called Alatsata (modern day Alatcati), my mother in Chania in the Greek island of Crete and I in Melbourne Australia. The fact that each generation has a different place of birth hasn’t come about because our family has an adventurous spirit. It has come about because of war. Am I grateful to Australia? Yes, I am very much. Do I love Australia? Yes, I do. But my heart is in fragments when I think of how war has affected my family. My grandmother never forgot her homeland and always wondered about her house and the land her family had for generations. My mother who probably suffered from some form of post traumatic stress disorder all her life, in her last days thought she was in Chania. Dementia it seems can take you anywhere you want to go. And I? My heart is in fragments, I always feel like a visitor everywhere.

Nowadays for me war is about loss, and ANZAC day is about the young Australians who died fighting a war that was so far away from home my heart breaks. I think of their parents, siblings, sweethearts, and the incredible loss they must have felt. Yet somehow you have to go on, which is what as Australians we do so well. We go on and we forgive. We welcome people from every part of the world;  the majority of us believe in giving people a fair go. Nowadays it seems we have a constant influx of people coming in from wars we have barely even heard of, we have communities with social problems caused by war spilling into our society. It seems war, even when it’s not your war leaves its mark.

In the year 2000 when I was in Chania and visited The Nautical Museum of Crete, tears rolled down my face when I saw the display of The Battle of Crete. What made the tears trickle even more was the Australian Army uniform on display. What were those boys doing in Crete? How senseless is war? As Boy George once sang ‘War is stupid’.

What I felt that day for the first time is that I had roots. As a Greek Australian I had a shared history here with both the Greek and Australian side of me. This is where my history takes on a different trajectory than what my relatives,  who have remained in Greece. In 2008 I took my husband to the same museum. When tears tricked down his face, I thought it was because of his father’s involvement in the second world war, and the effect it had on him growing up. I was wrong it was a picture of Maori Men in a boat that got him going. How senseless it all was he said.

I was in Chania Crete in 2018 with two of my second cousins. We were looking for a place to have dinner. I suggested that since I was the foreigner that they should find a place. Both of them looked at me and said we may still be in Greece, but we are now foreigners in Chania too. They now live in other parts of Greece. The difference is that they moved because they went off to study and eventually married a non-Chanioti and settled elsewhere. I was born in Australia, the decision was made because of the effects of war, long before I came into this world. What binds us together is our DNA, we are all descendants from Alatsata. Chania is now our spiritual home, where our ancestors came as refugees as decreed by the Treaty of Lausanne.

ANZAC Day for me is about pain and sacrifice, the loss of innocence and opportunity and the sacrifice made to make Australia the place it is today.  It is also a day to be thankful of everything I have in my life, mainly my husband and son who are my modern-day heroes. ANZAC Day is also about survival and honouring our dead. It’s not about war, ‘war is stupid.’

Lest we Forget.

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The Special Registry Office of Athens

Mitropoleos 60, Athina, Greece

Ειδικό Ληξιαρχείο Αθηνών

The Special Registry Office of Athens is where deaths, births, and marriages of the Greek Diaspora are registered. It is where I spent my fifty-second birthday. I waited patiently all day, and from memory I was number fifty-eight. I just sat there, I didn’t even get up to go to the rest room, for fear of missing my turn. 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 lovely lady who translated the Australian issued death certificate into Greek at the Greek Consulate in Melbourne congratulated me for having everything in order. She recommended that since I was travelling to Greece the following month that I should lodge the death certificate myself. She told me to go early around 7 a.m. as they give out numbers and they only give out sixty a day. If you miss out, then you must go back again the next day.

Going to the registry on the day of my birthday was fitting don’t you think? Instead of getting uptight and angry at having to wait at the registry for 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 to her only child, me. She had a long wait that day and I had a long wait fifty-two  years later.

That day I learnt many things. I learnt that Hellenes from all over the Diaspora react exactly the same way in certain situations. As an ethnic group we do not like to wait. We do not want to stay quiet; we like 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, the Anglo influence?

I pitied the old guy working there signing certificates who was very much the old guard. He was rude, limping, tired looking and angry. His whole demeanour was that of ‘I should not be here’. He shouldn’t have been there, he looked over it. He was pathetic really. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. No not this guy!

Once my number was called and I was at the front counter the customer service was great. The lady gave me copies of my birth certificate, submitted my mother’s death certificate, and asked me if there was anything else that I needed. She was very professional and knowledgeable, part of the new guard.

A few weeks later in Chania I attended an appointment at the local police station and was issued my first Greek identification card. It only took fifty-two years, but I got there. When the policewomen congratulated me on attaining my ID, I said ‘you don’t know how much this means to me!’ I may have been born in a land ‘down under’ have married a ‘kseno’ (foreigner, a Kiwi), but each time I look in the mirror I see a Greek woman. There is no doubt from which tribe I hail from.

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 to me. It’s the sense of accomplishment I felt, not only for my late mother but my late father as well. My father may not have been perfect, but his moral compass was just that, perfect. This sense of doing what is morally right, so in life’s chaos there is order, is something I remember so vividly in him. He would have congratulated me on putting our affairs in order.

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Soullessness

It’s been a long time since I stopped considering myself anything close to a writer. Something just stopped. The internal monologue continues, but the need to write and then to edit and complete a piece vanished.

The motivation behind this piece is to attempt to answer why this happened. As humans we have the capacity to accomplish complex tasks with complex thought patterns and we have language to communicate these thoughts to others. So why did that very important complex task of wanting to communicate through the written word shut down within me? Great question. My late mother used to say, ‘κάθε εμπόδιο για καλό’, in other words, roughly translated it means every obstacle presents a new opportunity. In my case I wondered what the obstacle was and what was the opportunity that came from it?

In the past, I remember wanting to edit my work to the point where I would strike out half the page and then I would rewrite and edit and edit some more and then have nothing left, except for a screwed up piece of paper on the floor. As my friend of mine said to me the other day one can edit to the point of being soulless. It’s not until that was said to me that, I realised quite possibly why I stopped. It’s because my stylised writing had become soulless. My absence from writing wasn’t because I didn’t have anything to say it was because I had an abundance of things to say and unlike the tripe I was attempting to produce, what I have to say is not soulless.

After my mother died, her front room in our house lost its original function. Whilst in some ways it will always be my mother’s front room, in essence, it had become a soulless room. My son called it The Waiting Room. A designated zone in the house, for visitors to wait in when you don’t want them to enter the rest of the house. Quite possibly because the rest of the house is filled with the unedited signs of our existence and we just don’t want to expose ourselves by letting just anyone in. A bit too profound maybe?

On the weekend I decided that I wanted to move the existing furniture out of The Waiting Room and make it into my office. I asked my husband and son to just humour me, to do as I asked because if I live to one-hundred and six then this is a mid-life crisis (I turn fifty-three this year). So, they carefully carried my solid wood desk down the stairs and placed it in The Waiting Room. Over the next 24 hours after going through the many possibilities, we placed it in the correct position, with the correct furniture. The Waiting Room is no longer, the room is now the Office.

It’s time that the internal monologue sought out an audience otherwise what is the point? No, I’m not talking about the point of the Office, I’m talking about the point of this that I’m sharing with you now.