A Long Way Back

A Long Way Back

There are two big problems that will face anyone in Australia who wants to return to Europe for a short or long term visit.  One is that you are now no longer ‘English’ or ‘Greek’ you are a hyphenated citizen. The second is that, living in Australia, you are almost as far away as you could be from Europe. That last problem was the one that first loomed large.

I am English born. I flew to Adelaide in South Australia as a young teacher as ‘ten pound Pom’. This was a scheme put in place to encourage skilled workers to emigrate from Europe to Australia. It meant that I travelled to Australia for just ten pounds, and two days after landing I was teaching in a secondary school in that city. My grandfather, who had been a merchant-mariner, had sailed the clipper ships that brought wool to England from ports South Australia. It surprised him to see my wanderlust taking me to some of the places in Australia he’d visited as a young man.

At first I was often homesick for England I found but I found it wasn’t easy to return, especially once I married and had children. I was not to see my grandparents again. After a divorce I moved from Adelaide to Melbourne with my three children and, with over half a million Greeks living in that city, it wasn’t surprising that my new partner was a Greek.

Population of Melbourne – 3.5 million

No of Greeks in Melbourne – 600,000

My second husband, like me, is a hyphenated Australian. He thinks of himself as a Greek-Australian though he has a more complicated relationship with his native country. The problem is that he was born in Egypt of Greek parents so Alexandria is his birthplace. He holds special memories of his place of birth and he’d love to return to the bustling and cosmopolitan city of Alexandria – as it was in his day.

He’d love to visit again the French and Italian bakeries, at whose windows he once stood drooling over pastries. However he knows that conditions have changed so that the place he once knew no longer exists. Now most foreigners have left Alexandria and the local population has grown from one to five million. It is probably because of the impossibility of returning to that past that his nostalgic longings are stirred by the country of his parents, the Greece of their stories and memories.

This longing was not so obvious when I first met Takis for we were both busy working. He was an Australian businessman and enjoyed life in Australia, with occasional travels back to Europe for business purposes, and I was an academic.

When I did find out that he harboured thoughts of retiring to Greece (where ‘the sun shone all year, the sea was warm enough to bathe in without any shivers, and there was always a plate of fish cooked in olive oil in a tavern nearby’) it came as a bit of a shock.  For now our combined family included six children and six grandchildren, and because we were all living in Australia I had not even contemplated that Takis and I might go to live half of every year on the other side of the world.

                            

Nowadays travellers don’t have to suffer in the manner of early travellers, like my grandfather sailing in a merchant ship for three months, however to cross the globe by plane is still not an easy feat. (And, if you have a house in one country and family in another, as we do now, you do quite a lot of flying back and forth.) So Takis and I have found the trip needs a lot of mental and physical preparation, to cope with what is still for us a long and cramped journey.
The trip from Melbourne to Athens takes over 24 hours when you include the stop-over time in Singapore or Dubai. It also involves joining hundreds who waiting to enter the same plane and, when on board, enduring on-flight meals and planned toilet trips. Of course many take the trip from Melbourne to Athens every year so it is not a Herculean task, however...

No of kilometres between Melbourne and Athens: 14938

No of miles between Melbourne and Athens: 9282

No of hours’ flight from Melbourne to Athens: approx 20 hours plus

Surfing the Globe

To surf the globe from Melbourne to Athens you cross the whole of Australia, much of Asia, cross the top of India and fly over the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean.

And then of course there is for us another hour, flying to the island of Lemnos (12 hours by ferry)

                                                                 Lemnos Island

Having once made the decision to take up this lifestyle, to mitigate the fatigue, we have tried various routes and timetables. We found that on Emirates Air the amount of flight and wait time was approximately 28 hours. On Singapore Airlines the amount of flight and wait time was approximately 26 hours. This sounds a though Singapore offered a better deal. BUT in recent years Singapore airlines decided to travel to Athens via Istanbul, adding an extra hour onto the journey, and then the airline decided not to go to Athens at all!

We have also tried going to Athens via London, but this route meant we had stop-over waits in Singapore and Athens, and the amount of flight and wait time for the journey from Melbourne to Athens was about 32 hours

However one of the advantages of being retired and taking up a roving lifestyle is that we have been able to take our time and explore various options. So we have also tried breaking the journey.

We’ve enjoyed staying for one or two nights in Singapore. And another time we took nearly a week to arrive at our destination with three stopovers. This was not a bad idea as stopovers offer not only rest but the chance for further adventures and it’s good to find out more about a country than just the dimensions of its main airport (like  walking through the orchid gardens in the Singapore National Park).

      Singapore Botanic Gardens

We also now prepare ourselves and get through the ordeal moderately well (ear plugs and ipod for me, noise cancelling earphones for Takis, as he watches all the films; nuts and dry biscuits for me, and all the meals being offered for Takis). And travel by air, though seemingly unending at the time, is a short term problem and after a week you tend to forget it even happened.

There is, however, that other overriding problem for, whether you have come back to your home land as a returnee or a retiree, that does not go away. You are still a hyphenated citizen. Thus you find (as Takis has found in Greece and I have found in England) that you are not quite as ‘at home’ as you might have expected to be.

Some Books...

Here are three books written about the Greek Diaspora – past and present.

Arnold Zable, Sea of Many Returns (Text Publishing, Melbourne Australia,  2010) In this book the author discusses the seagoing life of many who live on Ithaka. He draws on his own experiences of returning to Ithaca with his Greek wife over the years. Although this island is far from Lemnos, and set in another sea, this story reveals how many Greeks journeyed past Lemnos on their way to trade around the shores of the Black Sea.

John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas (Penguin Books Pty Ltd, Australia, 1964). This book offers a very precise and functional history with references to the artefacts, language and archaeology of the areas around the Mediterranean where the early Greeks settled. 

Dominique Francoise De Stoop, The Greeks of Melbourne (Transnational Publishing Company Pty Ltd., 1996). The author writes about immigrants from Greece who settled in Melbourne and includes lists of those who came after World War 1, between the wars, and later.