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