The trip of a lifetime

No one said it is easy to change but I don’t believe in giving up on something that can make a difference or it can make other peoples lives easier. The immigration story goes back a long time  and especially the Greek immigration to Australia has set her starting day back in the early 1900.

By the turn of the 19^th century there were about 1000 Greeks in Australia, migration accelerated from about 1900, so much so that by the start of World War 1 numbers had doubled to just over 2000. On the eve of the second innings over 10,000 Greeks had settled in Australia. The first to come here were the Kastellorizan who 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. Later on it was the Macedonian Greeks that started to arrive in 1923 and because of their agrarian background chose to bypass the café 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. After World War 2 however, most of the Greeks entering the country were Macedonians. Moreover, in the 1950s the Kytherians made up about 50% of the Greek population of NSW while the 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; everyone was connected in some way, or became connected. Australia's post World War 2 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.

Years later Greek migration to Australia had been negligible since the post-war wave ended, indeed most traffic had been the other way. But since 2010, there has been a significant surge in the number people arriving in Australia from Greece on temporary and permanent visas, including a seven-fold increase in people on student visas and a four-fold rise in family migration. There is an estimated number of about 8,000 people that have arrived in Victoria since 2010 according to a report released by the Australian Greek Welfare Society. Apparently it is the largest steam-about 60%- has been returning Greek Australian expatriates and their families, including many who left as children or are Australian citizens by descent. In 2011 another report form Census recorded 99,937 Greece-born living in Australia and 378,300 Australians claimed Greek ancestry. Right now the Greek population is concentrated in Victoria (42,8%) and New South Wales (33,5%), particularly in the greater metropolitan areas of Melbourne and Sydney. Melbourne, sister city to Thessaloniki, is often described as the third largest “Greek city” in the world and is an important overseas centre of Hellenism.

These waves of migration to Australia helped a lot the economy on both sides. Greece is Australia’s 70^th largest merchandise trading partner and now with the new wave of migration it is going to help it even more. Two-way merchandise trade in 2011-12, totalled $188 million; exports to Greece totalled $30 million, while goods imported from Greece were worth $158 million. Two-way services trade between Greece and Australia is heavily weighted in Greece’s favour. Services exports from Australia were worth $48 million in 2011-12, while services imports from Greece totalled $307 million. Our services trade consists mainly of personal travel excluding education, government services and business-related travel. Greece has a population of 10,7 million and GDP of US$ 255 billion (2012 IMF forecast). The Greek economy grew on average by almost 4% per year between 2003 and 2007, but has almost a quarter of GDP in the prolonged recession which followed the global financial crisis since 2009. Based on statistical reports 30% of the Greek population lives below the poverty line (less than 6,000 euros income annually) and unemployment rose to 26,8% in March 2013.