GENDER, AGENCY AND THE NATIVITY ICON

Among the many images that have shaped the sacred imagination of the Orthodox world, none appears more deceptively familiar than the icon of the Nativity. It enters our homes each December with comforting inevitability and seems to present an uncomplicated tableau of divine incarnation. Yet when examined through the optic of feminist theology, the Nativity icon reveals itself as an intricate field of contested meaning. It is a visual locus where tensions of gender, authority and embodied holiness are negotiated across centuries of artistic and theological tradition. As Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has argued, Christian iconography frequently encodes patriarchal patterns within familiar sacred narratives, patterns that become perceptible only when the viewer approaches the image with critical attentiveness. The Nativity icon is no exception.

A central insight of feminist theology is that women within Christian tradition are often present yet structurally muted. The Nativity icon both conforms to and disrupts this pattern. In its canonical form, the icon places the Theotokos at the centre of the composition. Her reclining body, inscribed within the hollow of the cave, forms the focal point toward which all other narrative fragments converge. Although the image contains angels, shepherds, midwives, Magi and Joseph, the eye repeatedly returns to the serene figure of Panagia. Her centrality is not incidental. It constitutes a visual proclamation of her agency within the mystery of the Incarnation and signals, as Schüssler Fiorenza would suggest, a space in which women’s bodies are recognised as bearers of salvation history rather than passive conduits of divine will. Her silence functions as a mode of knowing, a chosen stillness that counters the kyriarchal silencing historically imposed upon women.

This Marian centrality becomes more pronounced when set against the long history of male anxiety surrounding the virgin birth. The Protoevangelion of James records early Christian unease before the scandalous assertion of a virgin mother. Joseph, reduced in many icons to a marginal and troubled figure, embodies this anxiety. He appears seated at a distance from mother and child, withdrawn in contemplation. In Greek iconographic tradition, he is confronted by an elderly shepherd whose distorted posture suggests an unsettling presence. Although Orthodox theology hesitates to identify this figure explicitly as the Devil, popular Eastern interpretation often does. The whispered accusation Joseph cannot silence is that Panagia’s virginity is an illusion. His diverted gaze registers the fragility of patriarchal certainty when confronted by female autonomy.

The Nativity icon thus visualises dynamics analysed by feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether in her critique of patriarchal suspicion toward women’s bodies. Ruether observes that whenever women become sites of divine action, male structures of authority respond with doubt, control or moral testing. Joseph, immobilised by uncertainty, embodies this response. Joseph’s disquiet contrasts sharply with Panagia’s composure. She reclines with a dignity bordering on the regal, refusing to yield to destabilising doubt. The juxtaposition constitutes a theological claim. Panagia, not Joseph, becomes the stabilising centre of the Incarnation. She embodies, as Kyriaki Karidoyanes-FitzGerald notes, the capacity of the female body to bear divine grace without surrendering agency or integrity. Her posture evokes the hesychastic tradition, locating contemplative authority, so often coded as male, within a woman whose silence shapes the icon’s entire theological space.

The Protoevangelion deepens this reading through the episode of Salome and the midwife, a narrative largely absent from Western imagination yet retained in Eastern iconography and many versions of the Nativity icon. Positioned discreetly, they bathe the newborn Christ. Rather than being merely domestic ornamentation, their presence asserts, against male minimisation, the indispensable role of women in sacred events. The midwife serves as witness and facilitator of the Incarnation, while Salome articulates anxieties projected onto Panagia’s body. Her doubt, expressed through a demand for physical verification, reflects the epistemological violence enacted whenever women’s testimony is distrusted. Her burned hand, healed upon touching the Christ Child, becomes a sign of restored trust in women’s embodied knowledge and questioning models a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion, demonstrating that critical engagement may itself be faithful.

For feminist theology, this episode is pivotal. Schüssler Fiorenza has demonstrated that early Christian texts preserve submerged traditions affirming women’s authority in revelation, later obscured through patriarchal redaction. Salome and the midwife thus function as iconographic survivals of a female apostolicity. They serve, attend and verify, their authority emerging through embodied experience, care and mutual recognition rather than through hierarchty. The icon therefore resists interpretation as a male-centred drama.

Panagia nonetheless remains the axis around which the icon turns. She is rarely depicted gazing directly at the Christ Child, yet her contemplative posture radiates profound inwardness. Feminist interpreters note that this interiority conveys theological dignity, in contrast to later Western sentimentalisation. In older icons, Panagia appears reflective, occasionally distant. This distance in no way diminishes her. Instead, it affirms her role as the one who receives and interprets the Word. Karidoyanes-FitzGerald argues that her stance invites recognition of the complexity of women’s spiritual and intellectual lives. Panagia does not merely bear the Word. She sustains it within a world that persistently seeks to misunderstand her.

The Nativity icon’s structure reinforces this reading. Orthodox iconography collapses temporally distinct events into a single visual field, forming a theological tapestry. Feminist analysis recognises this as an invitation to view the Nativity as a constellation of relationships rather than a linear narrative governed by male authority. The midwives at the margin, the Theotokos at the centre and Joseph at the periphery create a symbolic geometry that locates female authority at the heart of Incarnation, relegating male uncertainty to its edges.

The cave itself carries feminist resonance. It functions as a cosmic womb from which light emerges, a space of darkness transfigured through the Theotokos’s body. Symbolic imagery of this nature aligns with Ruether’s emphasis on regenerative symbolism associated with the female body across religious cosmologies. Consequently, the icon situates Incarnation within a visual grammar of female generativity.

Above, the Magi approach in procession, their depiction shaped partly by Venetian influence upon the Cretan School. Regal and authoritative, their power nonetheless yields to that of the Theotokos, seated in quiet majesty within the cave. Feminist analysis renders this inversion significant. Male authority travels great distances to honour a child borne by a woman. The visual hierarchy subtly displaces patriarchal ordering.

Modern feminist theology also attends to the icon’s historical permeability. Post-Byzantine softness reflects Italian influence following the fall of Constantinople. Icons are not sealed artifacts but living sites where cultural and gendered meanings converge. This dynamism complicates claims that icons merely transmit static patriarchal norms.

At the centre of a feminist reading of the icon stands the question of agency. The Nativity confers upon Panagia an authority that exceeds patriarchal frameworks: she consents to divine initiative and becomes its interpretive ground. Around her, Joseph’s uncertainty, the midwives’ labour, the Magi’s homage and the angels’ proclamation find coherence. Schüssler Fiorenza’s notion of a discipleship of equals is rendered here in visual form, as the icon articulates an economy of salvation structured through relational participation. As an object of veneration, the icon presents this configuration to the worshipper and gradually reshapes the imagination of authority through contemplative encounter. The agency disclosed here does not recede with the narrative but remains suspended within the icon, awaiting recognition each time it is contemplated. What emerges is a theological anthropology in which receptivity, discernment and embodied consent are revealed as authoritative forms of participation in divine life.

Ultimately, feminist interpretation restores depth long present yet intermittently obscured. It reveals the icon as a space where holiness honours a woman’s body and affirms female authority. Through Panagia, Salome, the midwife and the choreography of gesture and gaze, the Nativity discloses an Incarnation carried by women’s endurance, discernment and strength. Beneath the stillness of the familiar Christmas image lies a drama of gendered holiness, quietly reshaping the world.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 20 December 2025

ELDERLY GREEKS HARASSED IN MERRI-BEK

 

For several months now, reports are emanating from the City of Merri-bek concerning the treatment of elderly Greek residents. These come from different households and different streets, yet they describe remarkably similar experiences. Elderly Greeks speak of neighbours, usually of the dominant Anglo-Celtic group, younger and often recent arrivals to the area, attending their homes uninvited, banging on doors, hurling abuse, and issuing demands about how they should live within spaces they have occupied for decades. These accounts do not suggest that all elderly Greeks in Merri-bek are subject to such treatment, nor that hostility of this kind is uniform across the municipality. Rather, they point to a pattern of incidents affecting a growing number of individuals, occurring across different locations and circumstances. Prominent members of the Greek community within the municipality, including individuals with long-standing involvement in community advocacy and local institutions, have independently identified a noticeable increase in this type of behaviour, lending further weight to these accounts. The concern lies not in asserting deliberate or coordinated persecution, but in identifying an apparent increase in similar forms of conduct reported independently by unrelated residents.

The matters that trigger these confrontations are often mundane and long established. They include the use of shared laneways, particularly where carers temporarily park in order to deliver food, the cooking of lamb on the spit on significant family days, the parking of vehicles, the placement of nets on fruit trees, the tending of vegetable gardens and grapevines, the maintenance of fences, and the persistence of habits formed over a lifetime. In some cases, abuse has been delivered directly on the footpath, where elderly residents walking slowly have been told to “move out of the way” or “go back where they came from.” In others, elderly women speaking Greek quietly to one another outside cafés or shops have been ordered to “speak English,” accused of rudeness, and subjected to escalating verbal hostility.
Harassment has also occurred in everyday commercial and public settings. These experiences are not universal and are reported by some, but not all, elderly Greek residents. Some elderly Greeks describe being intimidated in supermarkets while struggling with self-checkout systems, subjected to audible remarks about “old migrants clogging things up,” and publicly hurried or mocked. On public transport, elderly men speaking Greek on their phones have been told to keep quiet or to “speak English in Australia,” with their attempts to explain met with ridicule rather than restraint. In gentrified shopping strips, elderly Greeks sitting outside long-established businesses report hostile stares, comments about “lingering” or “taking up space,” and a palpable sense that their presence is no longer welcome.

Domestic life has not been spared. Elderly couples tending front gardens have been confronted by neighbours objecting to vegetable beds and vines as “unsightly” or “not appropriate for the neighbourhood,” language frequently accompanied by disparaging remarks about “old European habits” and threats to report them to council. Modest name-day gatherings have prompted noise complaints framed as denunciations of “foreign music” and insinuations that “these people are always partying,” even where such gatherings conclude early and quietly. In one particularly stark instance, an elderly resident was told directly that if they did not like the abuse they were receiving, they should move out.

The targeting, again not widespread but increasing, and not always overtly motivated by ethnicity alone, extends beyond behaviour and reaches identity itself. Elderly Greeks wearing visible Orthodox crosses have been subjected to aggressive commentary about “backward religion” and “old-world superstition,” framed as progressive critique yet delivered personally and with evident contempt. Others recount being mocked for their accents when asking for directions or assistance, spoken to in exaggerated, infantilising English, or openly mimicked in public spaces.

For people in advanced age, often living alone or with similarly aged spouses, such encounters carry a weight far beyond the immediate exchange. Many are post-war migrants with limited English and little familiarity with compliance mechanisms, council processes, or legal avenues of redress. When confronted by younger residents who are confident, articulate, and comfortable invoking authority, the psychological impact is immediate and enduring. Fear becomes embedded in daily routine. Anxiety shapes behaviour. Doors go unanswered. Shared spaces are avoided. Ordinary activities are curtailed in order to minimise exposure. The home, once a place of stability, becomes a site of apprehension.

As these incidents recur and remain unchallenged, they begin to settle into the public environment as acceptable conduct. Behaviour that would once have been recognised as harassment becomes normalised through repetition. Older non-Anglo residents come to be regarded as impediments to be managed rather than neighbours to be accommodated. Their age, customs, and vulnerability are recast as inconveniences within a rapidly changing suburb. This process is quiet, cumulative, and deeply corrosive. The significance of these incidents lies not in their universality, but in their repetition, their apparent growth, and their impact on a cohort particularly vulnerable due to age, language barriers, and social isolation.
These encounters also unfold within a broader process of spatial reordering. As Merri-bek undergoes rapid gentrification, longstanding residents find themselves reframed as anomalies within streets they once stabilised. Cultural practices that were previously unremarkable become markers of difference. Pressure is applied through informal means, persistent confrontation, and symbolic exclusion. The effect is a form of displacement that operates without eviction notices or redevelopment plans, relying instead on discomfort and attrition to render older residents invisible within neighbourhoods now marketed as modern, efficient, and culturally streamlined.

This pattern reflects a deeper and well-documented condition of migrant life in settler societies. As George Vassilacopoulos and Toula Nicolacopoulou have observed in their groundbreaking analysis Foreigner to Citizen: Greek Migrants and Social Change in White Australia 1897–2000, migrants are rarely granted full belonging. Even after decades of residence, labour, and civic contribution, they continue to be positioned as perpetual outsiders, tolerated only while they remain quiet, compliant, and unobtrusive. As migrants age, linger in public space, persist in speaking their language, tending their gardens, or occupying neighbourhoods that have since been reclassified as desirable, their presence is increasingly recoded as problematic. Former contributors are reframed as residual and subversive elements. Ordinary practices come to be read as disorder. Within this framework, harassment functions as a disciplinary mechanism through which space is symbolically reclaimed and older migrant bodies are reminded that their belonging has always been conditional. This analysis does not imply that harassment is consciously or uniformly directed at Greeks as Greeks, but that longstanding migrant presence can, under conditions of rapid social change, become newly problematised.

All of this unfolds within a municipality that loudly proclaims its progressive and multicultural credentials. At the level of policy, values are articulated, strategies adopted, and celebratory events promoted. At ground level, however, elderly Greeks report intimidation, exclusion, and sustained pressure in the very neighbourhoods they helped develop through years of labour and restraint. Multiculturalism, when confined to formal declarations and procedural commitments, offers limited protection against cumulative, low-level coercion. Where harm occurs through repetition rather than spectacle, institutional responses often fail to activate. The disjunction between public language and private experience continues to widen.

The persistence of this behaviour is reinforced by regulatory silence. Harassment of this kind rarely triggers immediate consequences. Municipal services appear remote, police involvement feels disproportionate, and legal remedies are perceived as inaccessible. In this absence of visible intervention, intimidation is permitted to continue, sustained by the knowledge that it is unlikely to be challenged in any meaningful or timely way.

Equally concerning is the limited capacity of some of our own community institutions, particularly those that most prominently display aspirations to leadership and representation, to intervene where pressure is actually applied. Public narratives of success, cohesion, and resilience circulate easily through speeches, media releases, and commemorative events, reinforcing a sense of collective achievement. At street level, where elderly people are dealing with intimidation, repeated confrontation, and the steady erosion of security within their own homes, those narratives translate into little practical assistance. There is often no mechanism for rapid response, no visible advocacy with councils or authorities, and no sustained presence capable of restraining abuse or shifting behaviour. The result is that elderly individuals are left to manage complex and distressing situations alone, without language, without confidence, and without protection, absorbing the psychological toll privately while institutional authority remains largely symbolic.

It is precisely because these incidents are neither universal nor inevitable that they warrant early attention and measured response. Steps are now being taken to act at a grassroots level. Mechanisms are being developed to identify incidents, record them systematically, document patterns of behaviour, and pursue appropriate avenues of redress. Elderly members of our community will not be left to absorb this pressure alone, with members of the community scrambling at the grassroots to advocate on their behalf. Every effort must and will be made to ensure that our elderly are treated with dignity and that no one is permitted to push them around.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Friday 19 December 2025

AEGEAN LIGHT: KATHRYN GAUCI’S AN AEGEAN ODYSSEY

Among those Philhellenes who have transformed admiration for Greece into a lasting artistic vocation, Kathryn Gauci holds a distinct and enduring place. An Aegean Odyssey stands as a confession of faith, an elegy of return, and a meditation on artistic rebirth. Through it, Gauci continues the lineage of English-language writers who discovered in Greece the mirror of their own transformation, while offering a vision that is deeply humane and freed from the illusions of spectacle. Her gaze is clear, her affection untheatrical, her attention unwavering.

Born in Leicestershire and long resident in Melbourne, Gauci studied textile design at Loughborough and Kidderminster before moving to Athens, where she worked as a carpet designer for six years. Those years, she recalls, “were among the happiest of my life.” In her youth she absorbed the colour and rhythm of the Greek world, and those impressions became the warp of her creative identity. Decades later she relinquished her prosperous design studio to pursue writing, an act of faith recorded in the Foreword as “a plunge into the unknown.” Through that act she sought to reconcile her craft of texture and colour with the new vocation of language. From that decision emerged An Aegean Odyssey.

The book unfolds as a series of returns. It begins in Athens and moves through Chios, Lesvos, Rhodes, Karpathos and Crete. Each place becomes an intimate space of recognition, the geography of memory reawakened. In Athens she walks through the neighbourhoods of her youth and perceives how the pulse of the city survives through its people, shaped by displacement yet sustained by dignity. In Chios she contemplates the patient labour of the mastic harvesters. In Lesvos she listens to the song of its poets and musicians. In Crete she confronts the grandeur of landscape and myth, and her odyssey concludes with serenity. The progression of the book resembles a woven design, each island a motif, each encounter a strand of continuity between the past and the present.

Gauci’s prose bears the refinement of her first vocation. Every scene is described through pattern, hue and sensation: the gleam of marble, the scent of herbs, the worn weave of a fisherman’s net. She writes with the assurance of one who has spent a lifetime observing texture. The artistry of her sentences is tactile, each phrase carrying the quiet authority of a hand accustomed to material. Her landscapes possess an interior dimension, for the human figure is always central to her vision. When she describes a village feast, she observes the hands that pass the bread, the laughter that binds strangers, the movement of generosity within daily life.

The narrative reveals a continuing dialogue between art and life. Gauci’s transformation from designer to writer is the book’s underlying theme. The act of travel becomes a passage through artistic evolution. The language of colour that once informed her textiles becomes the language of emotion and rhythm in prose. Through this metamorphosis she affirms that creativity is a single continuum expressed through changing forms. Her artistic self, far from being discarded, is absorbed into her new vocation. The threads of design reappear as sentences of texture and cadence.

From the first pages, memory functions as both subject and structure. The epigraph declares: “We can never shake ourselves free of what once was, for the past comes with us like our shadow.” That principle animates the entire work. Each island visit awakens recollections that flow into reflection, creating a palimpsest of time. Memory is not a nostalgic retreat but a living current through which the present gains density and meaning. Gauci treats recollection as an act of continuity, the means by which identity preserves coherence amid change.

The ethical power of her memoir lies in its restraint. Where earlier generations of travellers often sought to impose meaning upon Greece, Gauci allows Greece to reveal itself. Her perception is grounded in intimacy rather than distance. The Greeks she encounters are individuals, not representatives of an imagined essence. The voice of the observer merges with the voices of those she meets. This equilibrium between self and other lends her work moral clarity.

In her Foreword she confides that the journey arose from a desire to follow her heart “wherever it may take you.” That sincerity permeates the book. The hospitality she receives becomes a metaphor for the openness of her method. She enters the world of her hosts with humility, allowing their customs, speech and rhythms to shape her perception. The result is an account free of the distortions that once characterised travel writing about the Mediterranean. Her Greece is lived, not observed from a distance.

This sensitivity gives her work significance beyond literature. Edward Said’s reflections on the Western construction of the Orient remind us how easily the gaze of the traveller can turn possessive. Gauci’s narrative offers the opposite tendency: a literature of reciprocity. Her writing exemplifies what Homi Bhabha has termed a “space of translation,” in which identity is negotiated through exchange rather than hierarchy. The relationship between visitor and host becomes a shared act of interpretation. Through this ethical stance, Gauci contributes to a more mature phase of Philhellenism, one that affirms equality rather than idealisation.

Her work also offers a distinctly feminine voice within a genre historically dominated by male adventurers. She situates herself within domestic and communal spaces: markets, kitchens, courtyards, ferry decks. The knowledge she acquires comes through conversation, taste and touch. In these scenes she restores to travel writing the dimension of care. The Greek women who welcome her, teach her recipes and share stories of endurance become her teachers. Through them, she enters a tradition of feminine observation that transforms the ordinary into revelation.

Throughout the narrative, the Aegean itself functions as a metaphor of unity. The sea links islands, memory and imagination. It serves as the visual and moral centre of the work, a symbol of continuity that embraces movement rather than permanence. Gauci’s sentences echo the rhythm of waves; her reflections on change and endurance mirror the tides. The sea becomes an emblem of identity that adapts without losing form, a vision deeply consonant with the experience of the diaspora and the porous boundaries of modern Hellenism.

The closing chapters embody reconciliation. In Crete she writes: “When I started out on this journey, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. I followed my heart and learned to let go – to surrender, and in the end to feel as free as the majestic vultures that fly over Milia.” Later she adds, “The relationship with yourself is one of the most important relationships in your life and I rediscovered it on this trip.” These words articulate the moral centre of the memoir. The voyage is a restoration of balance between discipline and freedom, solitude and belonging, art and life.

The book concludes with a series of traditional recipes, a gesture that may appear simple yet completes the circle of experience. The act of recording taste and fragrance joins the intellectual to the sensual, the transient to the enduring. Food becomes a language of memory and continuity. In those closing pages Gauci affirms that culture survives through the rituals of daily generosity.

Within the broader tradition of Anglo writing on Greece, An Aegean Odyssey marks a turning point. Byron celebrated Greece as the theatre of liberty, Durrell as the paradise of sensual beauty, Leigh Fermor as the arena of heroic endurance. Gauci’s Greece belongs to the heart’s interior geography, a place of hospitality, resilience and rebirth. The grandeur of her vision lies in its composure. She does not seek to conquer experience, she enters it with gratitude.

In Melbourne, where she has lived for many years, Gauci has become a beloved presence among those who cherish Greece. Her fiction and memoirs have contributed to the cultural conversation of the Greek diaspora. She stands as a reminder that love of Greece transcends origin, that Hellenism is a moral and aesthetic inheritance available to all who approach it with reverence.

The serenity of An Aegean Odyssey conceals its quiet profundity. Each page invites the reader to dwell in attention. Gauci restores to travel the dignity of listening. Through patience and humility she discovers revelation in the ordinary and grace in the familiar. The Aegean that emerges from her pages is not a stage for legend but a living presence whose rhythm endures through those who honour it.

Kathryn Gauci’s An Aegean Odyssey is therefore a memoir and an offering; a tribute to the land that shaped her and to the community that has embraced her. The reader senses throughout a truth born of experience: that the love of Greece, when expressed through gratitude and fidelity, becomes an art of living.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 13 December 2025

DEMOS AND DECLINE? ON THE DEMOGRAPHY OF GREEK SUBURBIA

 

A few years ago I was participating in a mediation in town. Throughout the morning I found myself submerged in the murk of abstruse case law, navigating labyrinths of interpretation and poring over sheaves of data whose columns blurred before my eyes. The atmosphere of the room felt airless, as if the combined density of precedent and argument had displaced all oxygen. During the break I rose from the table and walked toward the window. The glass, cool beneath my fingertips, framed a sudden vista of sky and stone that seemed impossibly liberating after hours of cognitive confinement. “This is a lovely view you have here,” I remarked, allowing myself a moment of estrangement from the papered world behind me. “I can see Saint Paul’s Cathedral.”

The opposing barrister looked at me with an expression of benign perplexity. “That’s not a Greek church,” he replied.

“Neither are you, yet I can still see you,” I responded.

The Greek-Australians who are responsible for constructing our churches and the communities around them now inhabit a liminal space between being seen and unseen. On any given day, you can observe them walking past the church or leaving it after attending a funeral or a service. They then make a purposeful journey to the shops which are invariably located nearby. While our communities and parishes were formed to serve the needs of a Greek-speaking population that required its own spaces in which to relate to itself and to broader Australian society, they have always been profoundly embedded within the local landscape. The parish priest walks to the council office for a discussion about community events. Local youth run to get a pizza at the local shops. Tradesmen come in and out to effect repairs. Teachers hold language classes. Seniors gather for companionship. Younger parishioners hazard a parking fine so that they may light a candle on their way to and from daily tasks.

This activity is visible to anyone who allows themselves to see it. For certain municipal officials, visibility appears to require an effort that they are unwilling to expend. The existence of Greek-Australian migrants, who fashioned communities before multiculturalism was formalised and who did so without grants, without consultants and without external validation, appears to them as a mystery. Once acknowledged, it becomes a nuisance.

In Merri-bek this irritation has manifested starkly in recent months. Parishioners at Saint Basil’s in Staley Street, Brunswick have been distressed by the proposal to permanently close the street for traffic-calming purposes. The measure is framed as enhancing walkability yet for a community reliant on proximity parking for funerals, elderly attendance and evening services, such closure functions as an impediment. The community has voiced concerns about safety, congestion and the erosion of long-established ways of accessing the church. These concerns are interpreted as resistance to renewal rather than a plea for respect for the rhythms of collective life.

Around the Church of the Presentation of Our Lord in Coburg, the developments proposed are more elaborate. The Council has signalled openness to significant densification around Victoria Street and Church Street. Developers have floated visions of tall structures that will overshadow the precinct, reduce breathing space and hem the church within a vastly altered environment. Reduced setbacks and altered access points threaten to constrict processions, gatherings and the subtle choreography of parish life that relies on openness and air.

Although dressed in the language of progress, such measures reveal a deeper assumption: migrant institutions occupy conditional space. They are tolerated only insofar as they conform to new urban imaginaries that privilege density and abstraction over memory and lived significance. The manner in which these decisions are justified echoes the insights of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja. Space is political. It emerges through the priorities of those who control its design. When councillors redraw neighbourhoods without the active involvement of those who inhabit them, migrant communities become peripheral. They experience spatial injustice, a displacement enacted through planning overlays rather than through direct decree. Homi Bhabha describes similar processes in his analysis of the interstitial. Minorities are permitted existence only within silent corridors of tolerance. Migrant voices that are accented or shaped by memory are expected to acquiesce to the dominant idiom and relinquish claims to the civic realm. Such expectations function as a contemporary form of neo-colonialism that disciplines the migrant presence through cartography.

Hannah Arendt reminds us that communities exist fully only when they can appear in the public realm. When planning decisions make such appearance difficult, a community is pushed from civic visibility into private marginality. Foucault would recognise in this a technocratic management of populations, since modern power operates through zoning, metrics and spatial classifications that reshape neighbourhoods while claiming neutrality. Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of belonging further explains how obstructed access produces disorientation. When movement toward a place becomes strained, the place itself begins to feel less like home. These frameworks clarify that the issue in Merri-bek is as much civic as it is spatial.

Amid these forces, municipal rhetoric often invokes the elderly as its preferred point of reference, yet this emphasis serves a strategic purpose. Elders are positioned as the sole face of the Greek community so that their concerns may be framed as nostalgic remnants of a fading world. Younger Greek-Australians vanish from the conversation altogether. The narrowing of the community to its oldest members creates the illusion of consultation while ensuring that both generations remain unheard. What appears as care becomes a method of silencing, a way of reducing a living community to a demographic that can be politely ignored.

Consequently, Greek-Australian parishioners are framed as impediments. They have lived too long. Their way of life is allegedly at odds with the future. They are portrayed as sentimental, clinging to the remnants of a community that is said to have receded.

It is trite to mention that the communities within the municipality deserve dignity and consideration across the generations and that long-standing traditions and continuous use of areas actually mean something that should never be swept away. What is urgent however, is recognition of the spectre looming over our community that will affect the way we relate to each other and to our institutions: demography and town planning. My own parish observed the consequences of such forces long ago. When I was young, the parish was situated on a street whose inhabitants were predominantly Greek. After the Australian Tax Office compulsorily acquired their homes to construct its building, those Greeks dispersed and the parish has carried the effects of that rupture ever since.

Demographic change is inevitable. Most of our churches and clubhouses stand within what we now term inner-city areas. Many young people cannot afford to live there. Parking is increasingly scarce. Distance and inconvenience create reduced participation. Town planners who no longer see the purpose of ethnic institutions begin to treat them as remnants of a prior age. As populations shift outward, the message delivered to us becomes clear: our time is perceived to have expired and our structures are seen as obstacles.

Sociologists describe this movement as a second dispersion. The first generation congregated around factories and tram lines, forming enclaves that supported churches, clubs and schools. The current generation disperses without institutions following them. Identity is transmitted vertically through family yet also horizontally through participation in shared spaces. Children require proximity to a community for cultural continuity. When the nearest Greek church or school lies far from home, transmission weakens. A community that loses proximity loses cohesion.

This phenomenon is intensified by the ageing of the first generation. Elderly parishioners depend upon ease of access. They require nearby drop-off points during funerals, unimpeded ramps and clear pathways. When councils close streets or allow towering developments to dominate the area, they disregard the ethics of care. To render the elderly invisible through planning decisions is a dereliction of civic responsibility.

Another complication arises from the ambiguous place of Greek churches within the heritage landscape. They are culturally significant yet often lack formal protection. Their value lies in continuity of use rather than architectural majesty. This leaves them exposed to overshadowing by large-scale private developments. A city that honours its multicultural foundations respects such spaces as embodiments of social history.

In such an environment, urban amnesia flourishes. Planners speak of activation and optimisation yet overlook the memory that saturates particular precincts. A church that created vibrant sub-communities becomes, in planning documents, a generic place of gathering. Its historical purpose disappears from the civic imagination. It is time we assert that while memory also deserves spatial rights, we have not quite vanished yet.

It is also not our fault that we placed all our eggs in one basket. I live within a twenty-minute radius of eight Greek churches. At the time the communities were formed to construct them, most people used public transport and the world felt far larger. It made sense for people to congregate close to home. With the decline of Greek populations in those areas, a further dilemma appears: what institutions exist in the outer suburbs where young families now purchase homes? Away from established centres, how are their identity, educational and spiritual needs being met?

We should fight tooth and nail to preserve the edifices we have created. We should resist all those who would render us and our communities invisible. Yet we must also rethink how our future structures will function in an era when demography shifts with unprecedented speed. Perhaps permanent buildings cannot always anchor us. Perhaps temporary ones can. Kit churches. Portable clubs and schools. Structures that can be set up wherever young families cluster and later moved when demographic patterns change. Such flexibility responds to those who claim that institutions lie too far away and promotes deeper engagement. It also resists the efforts of those who would silence us or wall us out of the civic sphere through planning decisions that aim at rendering us invisible.

The future is not one of empty buildings moulder­ing away in cul de sacs. It is one of vibrant Greeks, confident in their identity, able to assert it and weave it within their local environment. To achieve this, we must approach those who wield planning authority as custodians of a long and venerable Australian tradition. We walk into those offices as builders of communities that have shaped Melbourne for generations, never as perpetual foreigners.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 6 December 2025