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