While the Danes were arguably the first non-British settlers to displace the Australians in the Tweed-Brunswick district, the main players in this book are the Greeks, with the South Sea Islanders, Indians, Chinese, Italians and Finns selected for the reserves.

These ‘Aliens’, as they were referred to generally in Australia through to the 1950s, or The Riff Raff of Europe, Dagoes, The Hindoo Horror, The Yellow Agony or cullud pussons, to use some of the kinder words of the local rags, had a presence in Australia, as either convicts or in/voluntary immigrants, from the earliest days of white settlement. In the Tweed-Brunswick district noteworthy settlement began with the South Sea Islanders in the sugar industry in the 1880s, the Punjabi Sikhs and Muslims in the dairy industry from the 1890s, the Chinese in the early banana industry, and the Greeks, Italians and Finns in the revitalised banana industry. By the mid 1950s the Greeks were major players and, notwithstanding the whim of the author, have won the starring role in this story. But expanded parts on the nefarious activities of the support cast are crying out to be written.

The district’s indigenous dynasty, The Methocathbyterians, easily contained the menace from these invading tribes of Indogreeketceteras. Yet while they won the battle they may have lost the war, for today the insidious infiltration of new home-grown heathen races, The Alternates, The Ferals, The Gough Disciples, The Colonic Irrigationists, et al, poses a greater threat, and the district’s survival as a bastion of the ol’ time religion looks like a lost cause. But that’s another story crying out to be written (if the principals can ever agree on who was responsible for what.)

The Greeks

By the turn of the 19^th century there were about 1000 Greeks in Australia, almost half of whom were living in NSW where the majority congregated in Sydney. Most were young single males from Kythera and Ithaca in the Ionian Islands, which were under a British Protectorate between 1815 and 1864, and Kastellorizo in the Dodecanese group, which remained an Italian possession until 1947. Migration accelerated from about 1900, so much so that by the start of WW1 numbers had doubled to just over 2000. On the eve of the second innings over 10,000 Greeks had settled in Australia and the Kytherians, who had been diluted to about 22% of the total, were still by far the dominant regional group.

The Kytherians predominated in Sydney, country New South Wales and southern Queensland, while in Victoria the Ithacans claimed the state as their own. The Kastellorizans became the largest regional group in Perth, Darwin, Port Pirie and North Queensland, and made up 13% of the Australia-wide Greek born population by 1940. The Macedonian Greeks started to arrive in 1923 and because of their agrarian background chose to bypass the cafe game and settle in the hinterland of WA and VIC. It wasn’t until the Depression years that internal migration brought them in small numbers to NSW. Post WW2 however, most of the Greeks entering the country were Macedonians.

The Kytherians remained the most prominent Greek regional group in NSW as they dispersed into almost every country town through the rapid spread of the Greek cafe. Moreover, while the Kytherians made up about 50% of the Greek population of NSW in the early days, Greek settlement of northern NSW was well over 75% Kytherian. Their numbers built through the process of chain migration, making settlement around here very much a family affair into the 1950s; everyone was connected in some way, or became connected.

The fact that the vast majority entered the catering game and entrenched the cafe image of the stereotypical Greek is claimed to be due mostly to the power of the Australian Unions. By the late 1800s Australia's workers had become well-organised, restricting competition in their controlled labour market and exercising political muscle to have immigration restrictions imposed on ‘aliens’. The Greeks found self-employment in the unregulated catering industry to be the best hassle-free option, notwithstanding that they were drawn to the kafeneion (cafe/coffee house) anyway; that part of the traditional agora (market/meeting place) where the Greek males loved to argue politics.

In the Northern Rivers region the move away from this cafe stereotype began with the Ithacans in the banana industry. They eventually became the dominant regional group amongst the Greeks who, by the mid 1950s, were also the largest ‘alien’ group in the Brunswick district. By this time the Italians had slightly bigger numbers on the Tweed (while still retaining their leading position in the Richmond district.)

The first Kytherian into the Northern Rivers region was Athanasios Dimitrios Kominos (Skordili) who acquired oyster leases at Evans Head in 1884. His success in the seafood retailing industry is credited with stimulating the initial wave of Kytherian migration. In 1903 his compatriot, Peter Emanuel Comino (Gialdelis), established the region’s first Greek oyster saloon in Lismore.

The jury is still out on the first Ithacan in the neighbourhood, but a contender is Matthew Perry who became a farmer at Emigrant Creek near Alstonville in 1882. He was born in the Ionian Islands in 1833 and the odds favour him being an Ithacan seaman who jumped ship in Melbourne in 1868. The first clearly identifiable Ithacans however, were George Alidenes and Athena Andrulakis, who turned up from Brisbane in about 1904. Athena is believed to have sponsored many rellies, but Con Vlismas, who established himself at Murwillumbah in 1919, was certainly the most influential in initiating the flow of his fellow villagers from Perahori.

While the Ithacans mostly settled in Victoria, those who chose NSW mainly congregated in Sydney and Newcastle. It wasn’t until the mid to late 1930s that they came in significant numbers to country NSW, mainly on the Far North Coast, where they worked in the banana industry alongside the Macedonians who also had started to arrive through internal migration at this time. The majority of the Cypriots and Rhodians, the predominant groups amongst the other minor Greek regional players in the local banana industry, started to arrive post WW2.

Peter Kitsos (Pazoff), who landed in 1928 from the village of Melas in the polyglot region of western Greek Macedonia and made his way to the Brunswick a few years later, was largely responsible for the growth of the Macedonian community.

The Macedonians also comprised Yugoslavs, Albanians and Bulgarians, while those from Greece were predominately from the ‘Slav’ enclaves of Greek Macedonia and didn’t regard themselves as ‘ethnic Greek’ simply because of some redrawn national boundaries after the Balkan Wars of 1912/13. [A lot of the early Kytherians and Ithacans were similarly inclined and placed their islander identity ahead of their Greek ethnicity.] The only other large Macedonian presence in Northern NSW was in the timber industry around Dorrigo, Grafton and Coffs Harbour. Greek Macedonian migration stepped up after 1936 with the advent of the Metaxas fascist regime, and through to 1960 almost 90% of Macedonians who settled in Australia continued to be Greek Macedonian. Larger groups of Yugoslav Macedonians, especially from around Bitola and Ohrid, started to arrive post 1960.

In 1921, when migration restrictions were lifted, there were almost 700 Greeks in Sydney and about 800 in rural NSW. By the early 1930s numbers had doubled, with half still living in the regional areas of the state where the 'Greek Cafe' had become a quintessential part of the rural fabric. On the eve of WW2 an estimated 2000 to 3000 Greeks, still mainly islanders, lived in Sydney, which by the late 1960s had become home to the vast majority in NSW as social change made the country cafes unviable and a range of factors caused the collapse of the banana industry.

Australia’s post WW2 mass migration policy brought Greeks from all regions of their devastated country, particularly Macedonia, displacing the earlier islander migration chain. By 1954 the number of Greeks in Australia had doubled to 26,000, and by 1961 had increased another threefold to 77,000, but by the late 1960s only about 10% of them could be found outside the metropolitan areas. Numbers had peaked by 1971 when the total stood at 160,200, 35% of whom were Greek Macedonians, making them the dominant regional group by far, while the combined islander group had shrunk to 15% of the total. Today Melbourne, where almost 50% of Greek-Australians now live, alleges it is the largest ‘Greek’ city outside Greece.

In northern NSW the days of the stereotypical Kytherian cafe and milk bar are long gone, as is the image of the typical banana growing Ithacan and Macedonian, and today their descendants, in some cases 5th generation mainstream ockers, can be found in all levels of society and in all professions, a lot supporting restrictive immigration and refugee policies to keep the riff raff out.