Walking in the Melbourne CBD in late February, it might seem as if a piece of Greece has been teleported to Australian shores. Beautiful food, dances and music fill every corner of Lonsdale Street as Australia’s largest Greek festival, Antipodes Festival, takes over the area, temporarily silencing the issues the community faces.

Greeks began coming to Australia in the early ‘60s, when the White Australia Policy wasn’t yet considered racist, and any immigrant without a perfect Australian accent wasn’t welcomed. Hostility made the new immigrants hold tight onto each other. They dwelled in the same suburbs, did business together. They hired each other for work.

Father Theophilos Dellaportas was invited to Australia in 2018 to serve as a priest in St. Gregorios Orthodox Church in Bentleigh. He has lived in Greece his whole life, and he tells upstart the Greek culture in Australia is “stuck in the ‘60s”. He thinks younger Greeks follow the “superficial traditions” like dancing and souvlaki, but doing so doesn’t provide them with understanding “of the problems of life”.

Father Theophilos Dellaportas.

The RMIT United Society of Hellenes (RUSH) is one of many student-led Greek communities uniting youth. It organises picnics, night parties and lectures.

Even though he was born in Australia, Panos Stamatopoulos, president of RUSH, has visited Greece many times and thinks the culture Greeks have in Australia is different.

“Because we’re three generations away, we’re living in a diluted version of the ‘50s to ‘80s Greek culture,” he tells upstart.

Some immigrants can get stuck in their home country state at the time of their departure. Time flows in their motherland, and people there change, but immigrants preserve the old culture and traditions, like they’re a time capsule. This has been described as the ‘time warp’ or ‘the time capsule’ effect.

Now, Australia is one of the biggest hubs for immigrants from all over the world, and children of people who came from Greece, devastated by civil war 70 years ago, can now call themselves Australians without anyone doubting that. But some prefer not to.

Andreas Papadopoulos, secretary of RUSH, tells upstart that when the Greek community was newly formed in Australia, Greeks were holding closer together. These days, he feels, community connections are weaker, as well as the connection to the motherland.

“I would say to people I’m Greek. But when you look at people that were born and raised in Greece, they are, I would say, not the same as people born in Australia, but are Greek.”

The time capsule effect can also mean that many don’t have a strong sense of reality of life in Greece today.