Renmark Paringa Council

Ραδιοφωνικο ιδρυμα Κυπρου

Ελληνικη Ραδιοφωνια τηλεοραση

Community Life

A distinguished guest visited the Adelaide community during its festivals we reported in the last issue.  He was Dimitris Dollis, a former Labor politician in Melbourne and now Greece’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.  He was especially impressed by the cultural and other achievements of the Greek Orthodox Community of SA Inc.  The GOCSA has quite a lot to show for its eighty years of continuous endeavours in many areas of community life.  We will know more once a new study on its history is published early next year.

Mr Dollis visited other communities and was also interviewed by SBS reporters several times.  He praised the achievements of Greek-Australians generally, reported on Greece’s economic problems and the nation’s inability to maintain programs for expatriate or diaspora Greeks.  One exception is the teaching of the Modern Greek language as happens in Australian schools which Greek governments have supported for decades.

We hope to see more studies on the history of the Greek community organisations.  We have a PhD on regional fraternities by Con Allimonos (Melbourne) titled Australia’s Greek Regional Brotherhoods, 1901-1945, which examines a few dozen pre-war brotherhoods but not the hundreds that are functioning now.

It was also a delight to hear of the 80 year old Greek immigrant completing his Bachelor of Arts tertiary degree.

Among GOCSA’s anniversary activities was a photographic exhibition in its Olympic Hall.  This attracted many visitors.  Some photographs took us back a century or more.  Others brought alive the community’s musicians from the 1930s onwards.

On a musical note, the nine-piece Meraki Big Band performed to a lively audience on Saturday, 27 November, at the Nexus Cabaret (directed by the Greek-Cypriot Dr Noris Ioannou).  Meraki is a Greek music ensemble active in the community since 1990, playing at restaurants, folk dances, multicultural events, Greek glendia and GOCSA festivals.  The ensemble featured the soulful singing of Polixeni Arabtazis and Michael Tyllis and musicians on bouzouki, violin, oud, piano accordion, baglamas, piano, guitar, bass and percussion.  The Meraki repertoire at Nexus was a selection of non-stop dance music from traditional genres such as dimotika, nisiotika, rebetika, smyrneika and laika.  Dancers pleaded for encores and were rewarded with a northern Greek Pimeniko, two Perpiniadis tsiftetelia belly-dances and a Pontian kotsari. Stay tune for more Meraki music in 2011!

The Adelaidean

The Cyprus
 News Agency


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