The Greek in me
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tony Maniaty
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Tony Maniaty's biography and other articles by this writer
My father is George, a Greek refugee from Turkey. That requires some explanation. Until 1922, the western coastline of Turkey was occupied not only by the Turks but by several million Greeks, Turkish citizens of Greek descent to be precise, who lived lives of occasional conflict but mostly of commerce and industry. In the town where George was born, Ayasalouk, this meant a world of figs, sultanas and tobacco. His father owned some estates and enterprises of middling value: fig orchards, vineyards, the local bakery, a hostelry. The crumbling ruins of Ephesus were within sight. All far removed from the Levantine hyperactivity of Alexandria, or Beirut, where wealthy French opera stars mingled with cool German spies.
To cut a long story short, as George would say, the mainland Greeks invaded Turkey in 1919 to reclaim the Holy Grail, the city of Constantinople, but got only halfway before the Turks pushed them back into the sea. This was the world after the Great War: shuffling boundaries, staking claims, losing and winning, and the ragged millions who weren't consulted.
One of them was George Maniatis, aged two. Fate threw George into the Aegean on a fiery summer's day in September 1922, in the burning port of Smyrna; and, scooped onto a ship, he ended up in a League of Nations tent camp in Piraeus with his bewildered mother and sister and older brother. He'd lost his father, whom he would never know, to the Turks.
Between 1923 and 1937, George developed into a handsome young ox, living in the northern Greek seaport of Thessaloniki, wider family spread from one end of the globe to the other: America, Australia. His fraught life was enriched by Jewish kids who spoke Spanish, and challenged by other Jews who traded the family's remaining jewellery for coins. Weed soup, lugging coal for a hardware shop, reading Marx: interesting times.
To the north, the Nazis impressed and repelled; to the north-east, the Soviets impressed and repelled; to the west, Mussolini was a joke. When the call came from his Uncle Tony to make some cash in Australia, when the war clouds grew so thick they were choking half of Europe, what else would a smart, ambitious and adventurous young man do?
Like millions in my century, I left home.
Where I began was pretty lousy, so I believed I was going somewhere better – a refugee with nothing much to lose. That's how they seduce you, how they lure you like some houri into the Afterlife – or in my case, onto a rust bucket to cross the curve of the world. And being only 17, with energies I didn't understand, I fell for these dubious offerings. I fell. You do not suggest such impossibly hard things to yourself; a new life filled with complications. You dream only of the goal, of the shining glory. So I fell. In not having a father alive, I was a moral orphan of sorts. I left a Europe ravaged by the Depression and clouded by racism and came to the earth's farthest point. Hot and barren. I was nudged into taking Tony's offer of work in Australia; the long chain of migration had, of course, found itself another hapless link. And I had found myself a guardian, if not exactly an angel. I planned to make a "fresh start", work hard for a couple of years and save money and go home. But that was five years ago. Now I am 22 and there is no way I can go back. I'm trapped.
HIS PASSPORT SITS IN CANBERRA, STILL. We Australians are great organisers, and our obsession with keeping records now seems a colonial gift as I hold the photocopy supplied by the Department of Immigration and stare into George's probing teenage eyes, themselves staring into a brass-rimmed lens in a Greek photographic emporium in 1937. He is Apollo come down from the mountain, garbed up in European splendour, set to conquer the New World. And the journey his prewar passport describes! Bustling ports that seem far too exotic now, in these hermetic times: off he went from Thessaloniki, down to Athens and Piraeus, thence to Alexandria, Port Said, Suez, Aden, Colombo, then the long haul across the Indian Ocean, dropping off fresh migrants to Perth, Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane.
I arrive late at night, Uncle Tony in his American Buick whisks me around the fringes of the city, lest I be seduced into Brisbane, a hole of a place but less of a hole than where he's taking me, which is a pinprick on the English-lan-guage map called Wondai. Tony has the cafe there, the Busy Bee, and he has a pile of dishes that need washing in boiling water.
The day George reached Australia he was no longer a Maniatis, but a Maniaty. This subtle and slightly ridiculous alteration meant nothing to him, believing it was the Australian way, but was to plague me for 20 years and sits at the core of this story. It's about the Greek in me.
I have always been a Maniaty, of course. My birth certificate in Brisbane (1949), my marriage certificate in Sydney (1996), my Australian passports (1968 and ongoing) and a dozen other well-flourished paper scraps testify that I was named, at birth, Anthony Emanuel Maniaty. That is still who I am officially when I am not being Tony Maniaty, the real me who takes out the garbage on Thursday nights, one more Australian with a wife and kids and mortgage who dreams the Australian Dream – large steady income, decent late-model car, beach house, living in peace – and dreams bigger dreams too, about unexpected creative explosions. That person is both alive and fantastic, a creation of many things. But this story is about the other me: Anthony Emanuel Maniaty, the official me at birth.
A half-Greek, two-dimensional entity; buried away in some file.
The shed was mine. And I had my books, in English but that was all right. In fact best, the language of getting ahead! For seven hours a night, I was distant from the kitchen, away from Uncle Tony. In my shed, separated by a patch of weeds, I could read my books, delving into the Russian literary works that seemed at times far more ordinary than my own bizarre life.
Tony lived right above the cafe, in a warren of untidy timber-lined rooms. There was nothing hidden up there, no embarrassment, no leanings to the sad or glorious past; it was just space, almost devoid of furnishings and certainly of love. Tony didn't discourage me, but I understood his need for retreat. After those long days downstairs, the privacy of Tony's night space seemed to be all he had in this world, in his new Australian life. Maybe he was plotting his unlikely success up there. In five years I had climbed those rickety steps no more than a dozen times, and in the last year not once.
I WAS NAMED AFTER MY FATHER'S UNCLE, ANTHONY EMANUEL MANIATY, who ran the cafe in country Queensland that was George's first destination in what he regarded on arrival as a dry, inhospitable antipodean hellhole; though in the spring of 1937 it carried one substantial plus, or an attractive minus: no looming threat of Nazi invasion, which the people of Greece five years later would challenge with horrific consequences. Of course, the Japanese were waiting in the wings, but George didn't regard anyone outside of Europe as a threat. His enemies were back there.
George's Uncle Tony had already been in Australia since the mid1920s, linking up with brothers who'd come even earlier: two in 1910, to the warm dairy lands of south-east Queensland, running country cafes, in what now seems like almost a parody of chain migration. One struggled in Southport, cooking passable fish and chips until he got the call, went back to fight the Turks in 1919 and ended up dead in a trench, for the glory of Greece, the homeland. Others took his place on the battlefield, and in Australia.
Tony got up early, no reason to sleep in. Pots clanged, and furniture scraped about with Tony's insistence on mopping the floors every day. The old blokes had come out to make money, to break that endless Balkan poverty cycle with assistance from migrant offspring, and then return as rich men do. They never did, of course; they planned with Athenian clarity, but what happened was always messier.
Peter Pappas at Nanango had turned an abandoned shop into a palace, redolent of distant Manhattan with glass and mirrors, and Vic Marinakis tried the same in Murgon, in what should have been a goldmine and looked like a jewellery store: all mirrors, cedar panels and a cheap lino floor that passed for Grecian marble.
To impress his peers, Vic had splurged 50 quid on customised Royal Doulton, to be shipped from England. While on order, in Vic's imagination, the crockery bearing the swirling initials VM dazzled his patrons: a ritzy scene from the latest Fred Astaire movie.
But always, the war: somewhere between Southampton and the Cape of Good Hope, a prowling German U-boat sent Vic's embossed plates to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He never recovered; paying for the plates that refused to surface, in a cafe that couldn't live up to its pretensions.
George headed off to Brisbane in 1940, tried to join up and failed, and worked the wartime cafes in that city of sex and soldiers. The Greeks ran their cafes, they ran their staff into the ground, some ran black markets, they went to garden parties at Government House to honour the brave Greeks' battle against the Nazi onslaught, they remained a swarthy clan at the periphery of what passed for Brisbane society, a clan of cooks mainly, and George hovered, neither in their world nor in ours. He said to me, years later, "I was a lost soul, you'd better believe it. I wasn't an Asia Minor Greek because I was only two when they kicked me out, not a mainland Greek because they didn't want prosfyges – refugees – there, I wasn't really one of the Greeks in Australia because I didn't want to be, I wasn't an Australian yet because I was a dago and the Australians didn't want us here. So I wasn't anyone. I was a stateless person."
As he said this, he was sipping Greek coffee and twirling his Greek worry beads and dropping earthy Greek swear words into his assault on a thankless world that didn't want him, and generally waving his thick hairy arms around and behaving, despite his King Gee boxer shorts and Woolies thongs, like a Greek. I believed in my soul that he was, had always been, Greek. And his Australian wife Phoebe, my dear mother with her hazel-green eyes, would stand at his side, accepting with a confusion of pride and awe this package of humanity that had appeared suddenly at a Brisbane City Hall dance and torn her from the cultural desert of south-east Queensland into the maelstrom of south-east Europe; though they'd never shifted from Brisbane, where they'd fallen hopelessly in love. It happened so fast, not without considerable pain and doubt on her side; like many wartime brides, Phoebe never quite knew what she'd got herself into. But the overpowering reality: George was Greek, and as drop-dead handsome as Clark Gable would be if he were Greek, hot
as hell.
My father sits in a Brisbane tram, it's wartime and there's a soldier in a slouch hat behind him, and Dad's about 25, in a sports coat and open-necked white shirt and resting his elbow on the tram window. He's wearing his gold watch, you can see it and also that big American car overtaking the tram, right behind him.
But most of all his face, you can see his eyes: so dark and yet full of light, of radiant hope. He's going to retrieve his fortunes, the ones his family lost in Greece and Turkey 20 years before. He's on a tram, but when the war is over he'll be driving that big American car, and he'll be a winner too.