In their dining room, in pride of place on top of the sideboard, stands a photograph of a venerable Greek Orthodox priest with a long white beard and black vestments.
‘That’s Uncle Serafim who left home one day and wasn’t heard of again until he became the abbot of an ancient monastery outside Jerusalem,’ she says softly in the distinctively Greek accent with its elongated diphthongs. Byzantine icons with mournful faces hang on the walls, imbuing the home with an aura of spirituality.
A few moments later, Mattie whips out an album and points to an old photograph. ‘This was our Greek group on the Derna ,’ she says. As I scan the faces, she points to a pretty little girl with a shy expression in the front row. ‘That’s me,’ she says. ‘And that girl on my right is the one I used to play with, but I can’t remember her name. She was travelling with two sisters and an older brother.’
‘Was it Vassiliki Fatseas?’ I ask. Mattie claps her hands delightedly, amazed that I know her friend’s name. By now I have discovered that this search is a jigsaw puzzle. The more pieces you find, the easier it becomes to slot in others.
When Mattie’s father George Travasaros arrived in Australia in 1938, he went north to Queensland to work in his brother-in-law’s café in Ravenshoe. After several years, George decided to strike out on his own. He made his way down the coast, looking for a place to settle until he came to Albury which had a small Greek community. By the time Mattie arrived with her mother and sister in 1948, he already owned the Hume Weir Café in the main street, where the ANZ bank stands today.
When Mattie arrived with her mother and sister, Australians still needed ration cards for tea and butter, and the local Ardmona cannery attracted female workers with tobacco and cigarette rations. The front pages of the Albury Banner advertised sales of Hereford and shorthorn cattle and romney and merino sheep at Dalgety’s auctions, while the paper’s women’s columns offered household tips that suggested striking ‘a gay and whimsical note in tiebacks for your curtains this summer’. The town chemist advertised Sterisol liquid antiseptic for two shillings, germicidal soap for one shilling and sevenpence, and Bisby indigestion powder and Blackies Little Liver Pills for one shilling. Mate’s, the town emporium, advertised ‘Milanese slip and scantee sets with matching pantettes’. The total assets of the National Bank of Australia came to 158,044,010 pounds.
Mattie, who has a gentle, giving nature, took her father to her heart from the moment she saw him, but her sister Katina, who was almost two years older, was more reticent. ‘I was twelve when we arrived and after not having a father for ten years, I didn’t know how to react,’ she tells me when I call her in Canberra. ‘I was expected to accept this stranger as the head of the family, but it didn’t happen overnight.’
Although she was docile and loyal, Mattie felt suffocated by the restrictions imposed on her by her Greek parents. On Kythera, all the children had lived by the same rules, but in Albury she was the odd one out. ‘I couldn’t have friends, couldn’t go out, couldn’t wear modern clothes or make-up. I had to stay home and work and that was it,’ she says. ‘It was like living in the eighteenth century. I felt like someone from another planet. No pictures or dances, and no boys. My father wouldn’t let me wear bathers, so I couldn’t even go swimming with the other girls.’
The ban on wearing a swimsuit made such a deep impression on Mattie that she feels uncomfortable about it to this day. ‘When x-rays showed I have osteoarthritis in my spine, my doctor recommended hydrotherapy twice a week at the hospital pool,’ she says. ‘So after all these years, I’ve finally started wearing bathers, but it feels wrong, as if I have broken some moral law!’
Her mother, who could not speak English, worked at the back of the café, while Mattie and Katina helped out after school and during the holidays. ‘I had a very difficult time,’ Mattie recalls. ‘The other girls, they couldn’t understand the way I was brought up. I didn’t want to upset my parents but I wanted to go out so I hid things from them, the school excursions and the pictures.’ She is such a stoic, uncomplaining woman that I can imagine how deeply she must have suffered as a girl.
‘Even after George and I got engaged, whenever we went to the pictures, my mother had to come too!’ she says. ‘My father never smacked me, but when I was getting married, he said, “Just because I’ve never hit you, don’t think I won’t if you don’t behave yourself!” I was nineteen, but he still felt he had the right to treat me like a little girl.’ She says this without any trace of resentment. ‘They were strict but they loved us. My father would have done anything for us.’
George is nodding. ‘The Greek family unit is very strong. It’s a commitment not just between husband and wife, but between brothers, sisters and all the family. Our parents were strict, but they would sacrifice everything for the children. They didn’t spend their time in the pub drinking or running around. And we respected that.’
As I listen to Mattie describe her restrictive upbringing, it occurs to me that to some extent all of us migrant children, girls especially, suffered from the attitudes and expectations that our parents brought with them. The limits of acceptable behaviour which were drawn up in a far-off land at another time were frozen rigid by distance and uncertainty. There was little they could control in this foreign environment except their children, in whom they tried to instil the respect, obedience and morality they had learned at home.
I remember how shocked my father was the day I told him not to be silly. What to me was a playful comment seemed to him the height of disrespect. The day he found some photographs of himself and my mother in the waste paper basket, he was white with anger. ‘You threw away photos of your parents?’ he said in a voice heavy with incredulity and shock. For him, family photos were precious because he had been able to salvage so few. The fact that I had discarded only the blurred ones was no excuse. Playing in the street was forbidden because only common children did that. Going steady was immoral because it compromised a girl’s reputation. My friends couldn’t understand the rules under which I had to live and, like Mattie, I perched uncomfortably on the edge of two worlds, forever trying to explain one to the other.
As we compare notes on our foreign upbringing, the doorbell rings and Mattie jumps up. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you!’ she cries, as two men in their sixties walk in. They are her cousins Stan Travasaros and John Comino who travelled with her on the Derna. John, a portly fellow with an extroverted personality, dominates the conversation with his loud voice and strong Greek accent. ‘My father was already in Australia when I arrived but my mother never came out here. After a while, my father went back to Kythera, but my brother and I stayed,’ he says.
Like the rest of the family, John worked in the café when he arrived. ‘Earned two pounds a week and saved it all. When I started working in the shop, I had to sweep the floor. I didn’t mind it because sometimes I found two bob under the table. Later I found out they put it there on purpose to make sure I did a proper job!’ His hearty laugh fills the room. ‘People were more friendly in 1948,’ John says but Mattie is shaking her head.
‘They called us dagoes, that was an awful word.’
‘We served steaks, eggs, mixed grills. One fellow used to come in from the Hume Weir and every week he ordered steak and twelve eggs! I had to put the eggs on top of the steak to fit them all on the plate!’ John booms.
Stan, who hasn’t got a word in since they arrived, now ventures a comment.
‘We came out here because there we had nothing and we heard that Australia was a rich country.’
That’s all he gets to say because a moment later John shouts him down.
‘If he hadn’t come here, he would have had to go into the army! We didn’t know nothing about Australia, didn’t even know how far it was when we got on that ship. We were young, excited about going somewhere, we didn’t know nothing. We thought that after two or three years we’d go back. Stan, he goes back to Kythera almost every year.’
Inevitably the conversation
takes a sentimental detour to Kythera which has been described as Australia’s seventh state because around 60,000 Kytherians and their descendants live in Australia today. For Mattie and her family, it’s the place of their heart, the eternal spring of their soul. ‘When we talk about Kythera, we think about the way it was, not the way it is now,’ says George and there’s a nostalgic gleam in his eyes. ‘We long for the days when we were close to nature, when everything moved with the seasons and we lived close to the land. Like the Aborigines, that’s how we felt about the land we grew up in. Every scrap of land was cultivated and divided into fields. We had no electricity, fetched water from the well, and ate the fruit and vegetables that the seasons brought. The people who live there now don’t want the old times back when they couldn’t buy anything in a shop and had no electricity or water. But our image hasn’t moved with the times.’
As they reminisce, they see fields dotted with wild red poppies, smell the air perfumed with wild thyme, oregano and wild flowers, and taste the honeyed sweetness of sun-warmed figs and melons whose juice runs down their chins as they bite into them. In this vision of Kythera, it’s their childhood they’re longing for, not the harsh island life.
Like Mattie and Stan, John also married a Kytherian. He went back to the island to marry the girl his father had chosen and brought her back to Australia, but the marriage ended a few years ago. He tells me proudly that his daughter Mary became an acrobat who was part of Albury’s Flying Fruit Fly Circus. Two of his children have visited Kythera, and all three of Stan’s daughters have been there several times. So has Mattie’s daughter Koula who has just joined us. She has organised a late lunch break today at the pathology laboratory where she works as a technician, so that she can meet me. A sensitive girl with thick dark hair framing her face, she has Mattie’s gentle manner. ‘I felt a bond as soon as I got there,’ she says in a dreamy voice. ‘I grew up hearing so much about Kythera that when I got there I recognised everything. I cried when it was time to leave.’
What is it about Kythera that exerts such a powerful pull on its people?
‘I think it’s not so much Kythera, it’s us Kytherians that have a special feeling for the place,’ Mattie says. ‘It’s like Homer’s story about Ulysses. After he’d been away from home for many years, he said it would be enough just to see the smoke from the chimneys of Ithaca. And that’s how we feel about Kythera.’
George says, ‘You live in a small place, you know all the people. Your ancestors have lived there and worked the land all their lives, most of them are family. You hunt for quail and partridge, fish for barbouni and snapper, plant your own vines and vegetables, make your own olive oil and wine, grow your grain, take it to the mill to be ground, and bake your bread in a wood-fired oven. All that ties you to the land. You milk your goats, get wool from your sheep, eggs from your chickens. The animals get attached too. We had a dog that cried every day after we left, and died a few weeks later.’
It strikes me that the things he praises are the very things people today would complain about: how hard the life was, having to haul water from the well, no electric light or radio. ‘When I go back to Kythera I’m not interested in the developments and modern things. I want to find the nooks and crannies that I remember,’ George says. ‘The little white church up on the hill, the myrtle bush, the old olive tree. I’d love to find it all the way I left it, but my little village has been completely abandoned. In those days every house was full of people and the happy noise of children. There was life in the land.
‘I love the traditional food we used to eat. Goats’ milk, game. In the summer during the hunting season when you woke up, it was like being in the front line. Rat-tat-tat! All the rifles going. We made ricotta cheese. The oil on Kythera is the best in the world. It’s that heavy virgin oil, you can’t get it anywhere else. And the honey! No chemical pesticides or fertilisers, everything was natural. We used to make delicious chicken soup—avgolemono—and fish soup too.’ They embark on a heated discussion about the food they used to eat.
‘There wasn’t any refrigeration, so to keep the quail they put it in salt and it kept for weeks like that. My mother used to hang meat and cheese inside the well in baskets to keep them fresh,’ Mattie recalls. Stan’s wife Jenny brings out a spiced honey cake she has baked in my honour and that sets them off in an ecstasy of praise for Kytherian honey, which they claim has the best flavour in the world, because the bees gorge on myrtle and wild thyme.
‘I’ll tell you what amazed me here in Albury a few weeks ago,’ says George. ‘We went to a good restaurant and the first thing they put on the table was a dish of olive oil, coarse rock salt and thick chunks of bread. And everyone says you should eat lots of fish. Just like we did on Kythera years ago!’
Mattie continued working in her father’s café until she and George married in 1957. By the time their three children were at school, George had opened his own Riverina Café and she worked with him until they closed it down in the seventies.
‘The café era ended because life became more sophisticated and affluent. People started going to restaurants, clubs and bistros instead,’ George says.
He spends most of his time these days gardening and trying to keep the Greek community together with dances and social functions. They have a low rate of intermarriage and they’d like to keep it that way.
‘Do the young people come to the dances?’ I ask, glancing at their daughter Koula.
‘Sometimes they come, yes. Do our best,’ says Mattie. ‘Sometimes Koula she comes.’
‘Ah the Koula!’ John roars. ‘She the best. And Mattie’s two sons! I can’t find the words.’
Mattie goes pink, hangs her head and beams and returns John’s compliment. ‘That’s because Koula she has a good godfather!’
Mattie’s mother has never learned English. She couldn’t speak because she never left the house, and she never left the house because she couldn’t communicate. She helped in the kitchen because she couldn’t talk to the customers, and her husband never gave her the opportunity to step out of that role. When I recall that this was the feisty woman who took care of two small children on her own in her village for ten harsh and hungry years, I wonder how she coped with becoming a traditional wife again after being independent for so long.
‘She coped because she was taught from a young age that the husband is the boss, so that’s what she expected,’ Mattie explains. ‘Our way of life has been passed down from generation to generation. She accepted it then, but now she realises how much she has missed in all these years because she is completely cut off from everything. I have to take her shopping and to the doctor. She can’t listen to the radio or watch TV and doesn’t know what’s going on in the world. For fifty-one years she has been living in Greece in Australia.’
As we discuss the issue of ethnic identity, Mattie looks pensive. ‘I like it here but I don’t belong here. When my children were born I knew that this is it, I’m here to stay, but I never stopped missing Kythera. I miss real friends, people who really understand. I miss not knowing everyone. Here I feel a stranger among strangers. I never stopped feeling I’m in a foreign country. I can’t talk to Australians the way I can talk to Greeks. They don’t understand me. I can talk about the weather and general things, but not about things that really matter to me. Maybe being a girl and being so strictly brought up had something to do with it, but it continued after I was married.
‘I only mix with Greeks. I don’t feel comfortable with Australians. They’re good people but I just don’t have any connection with them. It’s partly because I don’t think they accept me, and also I don’t express myself so well in English. If you mix with Australians you have to go to their parties and clubs and I don’t feel comfortable in those places. I’d go back to Kythera and live there for sure if not for the children,’ she says. ‘There the doors are left unlocked and the windows stay open all night.’
Looking fondly at her daughter, Mattie adds, ‘But my Koula, she won’
t accept that. She’s already told me. She is Greek but not fully, not like me or my mother. We didn’t bring her up the same way, it was impossible. Maybe I was too soft, but I didn’t want her to go through what I went through. As for boys, Koula knows what I think. While she was at school, she didn’t go out, but we let her go to college in Canberra. She stayed with my sister Katina. My mother would never have let me go, but I trust my daughter. If I tried to restrict her like I was restricted, I’d lose her and make her life miserable. We have to go along with changes in the world, have to be a bit flexible.’
Before I leave, they show me a video taken on Kythera in 1987. They must have seen it a hundred times but their enthusiasm hasn’t waned as they lean forward to explain the blurred scenes on the screen. ‘That’s Koula walking with her grandfather along the dirt path to the monastery,’ Mattie says. The little whitewashed church where she was baptised comes into view and I can almost smell the incense and feel the heat from the candles burning in the multi-branched brass candlesticks. I can hear the men’s deep voices resonating in the dim interior as they chant the Greek liturgy and feel the wind blowing through the tall dark pines beside the path that winds outside the church. Olive trees, older than time, cling to rocky soil. There’s a well in the middle of the yard, and on the other side, patches of vegetables in rows: beans, zucchini, tomatoes and cucumbers. I can hear the buzz of conversation and the scraping of wooden chairs outside the kafenion where the men sit at small wooden tables and eat their olives and drink their ouzo under the fig trees. I’ve fallen under Kythera’s spell.
37
When Mattie’s shipboard friend Vassiliki Fatseas finally reached Mackay, she was on the point of exhaustion. For the past four months they had been constantly on the move, on boats, planes and trains that had carried her from Kythera to Athens, then Cairo and across the desert to Port Said. With each move, the familiar world had receded even further and been replaced by strange countries where people had skins of a different colour, wore long robes and babbled words she couldn’t understand. Dazed from so many journeys and impressions, Vassiliki had covered her eyes with a handkerchief as soon as she reached Mackay. ‘I was so exhausted, I didn’t want to see another thing!’ she tells me. ‘I’d had enough.’
The Voyage of Their Life Page 43