OLYMPIA AND GOLD COAST: ON DIVINE SISTERHOOD

Upon learning the glorious news that hallowed Olympia and the Gold Coast have become sister cities, one experiences the same satisfaction that attends the discovery that two hitherto unrelated members of one’s extended family are in fact distant cousins, explaining in retrospect a host of otherwise inexplicable physiognomic and behavioural similarities. Certain affinities, hitherto dismissed as coincidence, reveal themselves as manifestations of a cultural relationship almost three millennia in the making. That it has taken so long to formalise the relationship can only be attributed to deficiencies in ancient municipal diplomacy and the failure of the Eleans to establish a properly funded Sister Cities Subcommittee.

The greater mystery is why Pausanias never noticed. In the fifth and sixth books of his Description of Greece, that indefatigable second-century traveller records Olympia with the forensic enthusiasm of a man constitutionally incapable of walking past a statue without finding out who paid for it. He tells of temples, treasuries, altars, athletes, cheats, obscure customs and forgotten wars, while a statue reminds him of a king, the king of an oracle and the oracle of something that happened in Arcadia. Somewhere between the Temple of Hera and the stadium, however, the geographical trail goes cold. Had he continued south-east for another fourteen thousand kilometres, his account might have been considerably enriched.

“Beyond the lands of the Antipodeans,” he could have written, “there lies a land called Queensland, in which lies a sacred coast which the inhabitants call Golden. There are many temples and many images of beings larger than mortal men, among whom are Batman and Superman. The women called Meter Maids appear to be priestesses of Aphrodite, although others say they regulate wheeled conveyances, and concerning this I cannot speak with certainty.” Such confusion would have been characteristic, for Pausanias records competing explanations even when he considers one ridiculous, a scholarly generosity particularly useful in determining why anybody decided meter regulation was best accomplished in gold bikinis.

The sporting connection would reassure him that he had reached the correct place. Olympia gave humanity the Olympic Games, while the Gold Coast hosted the 2018 Commonwealth Games and now resides within the wider sacred geography of Brisbane 2032, meaning that both places understand the peculiar civic alchemy by which running, jumping and swimming become infrastructure, urban mythology and arguments about who paid for everything. Ancient Olympia operated a cheaper awards programme. The victor received a wreath of wild olive, sparing organisers the expense of precious-metal medallions and suggesting that Queensland could address future Olympic budgetary pressures with a pair of secateurs.

Competition on the Gold Coast hardly requires an official festival. Anyone attempting to secure a parking space at Pacific Fair on the Saturday before Christmas has entered an agon worthy of Pindar, involving endurance, feints, tactical positioning and appeals to gods who have otherwise received little devotional attention since childhood. A pedestrian carrying shopping bags becomes an oracle whose every gesture demands interpretation as two vehicles follow at walking pace with the concentrated solemnity of rival charioteers approaching the turning post. The ancient victor received the sacred olive wreath. The modern victor receives P2 near David Jones, an achievement for which nobody has yet commissioned an epinician ode.

Pausanias would probably proceed from there to the beach, where the deeper kinship becomes impossible to ignore. Greek athletes famously competed naked, the disciplined body becoming an expression of beauty and arete, while the Gold Coast has preserved the underlying philosophical proposition subject to sunscreen and Queensland law. Few places since classical Greece have invested comparable cultural meaning in the bronzed torso. If the sculptors of Olympia pursued ideal proportion in marble and bronze, Surfers Paradise has expanded the available media to spray tan, protein powder and tattoos of clocks surrounded by roses. Classical traditions survive most securely when nobody consciously realises they are preserving them, and in this context Schoolies becomes less an aberration than an extraordinary instance of cultural continuity.

At regular intervals large numbers of young people travel considerable distances to a famous destination, gather in an atmosphere of heightened excitement, celebrate physical vitality, participate in contests of endurance and progressively remove their clothing. Whereas Ancient Olympia boasted the stadion, wrestling and pankration, Surfers Paradise has disciplines for which records are less systematically maintained. The absence of the discus is probably fortunate, since bronze projectiles and Cavill Avenue after midnight would require amendments to Queensland occupational health and safety legislation. The Olympic ideal, suitably adapted to local conditions, is apparently alive and well.

All this leads inevitably to the Olympic ἐκεχειρία, the sacred truce permitting competitors and spectators to travel safely to the Games despite the Greek states spending much of their remaining time devising ways of injuring one another. Its genius lay in modest expectations: Athenians and Spartans merely had to stop killing each other long enough to watch the wrestling. The Gold Coast performs an analogous Pan-Australian function during school holidays, when Victorians, New South Welshmen and Queenslanders temporarily overlook disagreements concerning football codes, daylight saving and whether a thin disc of fried potato is a potato cake or a potato scallop. The truce generally survives until somebody attempts to merge onto the M1, whereupon Thucydidean realism rapidly reasserts itself.

The M1 would eventually lead Pausanias towards Q1, where the religious character of the relationship becomes apparent. His benchmark for enormity was Pheidias’ colossal Zeus, fashioned from gold and ivory and so immense that Strabo remarked that, were the god to stand, he would unroof his temple. The Gold Coast solved this architectural difficulty by giving the gigantic object the roof in advance. Where Pheidias employed chryselephantine technique, Queensland employs glass, concrete, strata title and investment capital. Both cultures understand that if something is made sufficiently large, visitors will travel considerable distances, stand beneath it with their mouths slightly open and pay to ascend it.

Olympia’s Temple of Zeus, Heraion, Metroon and innumerable sacred precincts also prepare Pausanias admirably for Dreamworld, Movie World, Sea World and Wet’n’Wild, although the gods inhabiting the latter possess more complicated intellectual-property arrangements. The ritual structure would nevertheless be reassuringly familiar. Pilgrims enter through monumental gates, join processions and encounter beings larger than ordinary mortals while children demand refreshments. Ancient visitors left votive objects; modern pilgrims return with refrigerator magnets and Batman drinking vessels. Given two thousand years underground, a Surfers Paradise bottle opener bearing the inscription “Mick’s Bucks 2026” will inevitably be described by archaeologists as a ceremonial object associated with male initiation rites, which will be substantially correct.

Sacrifice, on the other hand, has migrated into the economic sphere. Anyone purchasing lunch for a family inside a theme park understands the ancient sensation of watching valuable property consumed before one’s eyes pursuant to ritual obligation, while the timeshare presentation offers an even purer survival: the victim is separated from the herd, conducted into a designated precinct and attended by specially trained officiants until an offering is extracted. Ancient sacrificial animals at least enjoyed the consolation of never being asked whether they wished to extend their holiday accommodation entitlement for another forty years.

At this juncture the Eleans may derive considerable comfort from the Gold Coast’s attitude towards prophecy. The ancient Greeks had oracles, seers and diviners who inspected birds, entrails and sundry natural phenomena in order to determine whether an enterprise would prosper. Not to be outdone, the Gold Coast has real estate agents. The methods employed by both are remarkably similar. Both examine signs unintelligible to the ordinary person before confidently predicting future abundance, although the ancient μάντις at least occasionally conceded that Apollo’s meaning was ambiguous. An Elean contemplating the purchase of an off-the-plan two-bedroom apartment in Broadbeach would consequently feel entirely at home upon being informed that the signs reveal strong capital growth, excellent rental yield and an unprecedented opportunity to secure a premium lifestyle precinct before settlement.

The practice of ornithomancy does, however, present a uniquely Australian difficulty. It is challenging to imagine Tiresias deriving anything useful from observing an ibis methodically disembowel a McDonald’s bag beside Cavill Avenue, although Aristophanes would undoubtedly have found employment for it. Since the Australian white ibis has acquired the appellation “bin chicken,” an ancient Greek visitor might reasonably assume that this constitutes some hitherto unknown hybrid creature, rather like the Chimera. If demi-god Heracles required twelve labours, retrieving a kebab from an ibis at three in the morning could comfortably have constituted the thirteenth.

All that remains is to determine which deity should preside over the new sisterhood. Zeus has the obvious historical claim, although appointing a serial philanderer who habitually assumed animal form in order to pursue women may send an unfortunate message about the values underpinning the relationship. Poseidon would seem more appropriate to the Gold Coast, save that his recorded dealings with coastal communities generally involve storms, earthquakes and the occasional sea monster, none of which Tourism Queensland is likely to include in its promotional material. Hermes, patron of travellers, merchants and thieves, offers a more comprehensive portfolio, especially once accommodation prices during school holidays are taken into account.

Aphrodite has much to recommend her, given the amount of exposed flesh, although her appointment might lead the Meter Maids to demand recognition as an established priesthood. Dionysus presents a perhaps even stronger claim. As god of wine, intoxication, ecstatic dancing, altered states of consciousness and people behaving in ways which seem entirely reasonable at the time and inexplicable the following morning, he already exercises something approaching de facto sovereignty over Surfers Paradise after 10 pm. The principal difficulty is that acknowledging him formally would require Schoolies to be reclassified as a religious festival, with consequences for public funding that neither sister city may yet have considered.

Perhaps, then, the most appropriate patron is Hermes. Pausanias tells us that his statues stood in gymnasia, while travellers invoked his protection upon journeys and merchants prospered beneath his gaze. He was also the god of boundaries and their transgression, which seems particularly apt for a relationship that has managed to extend the sacred precinct of Olympia fourteen thousand kilometres into Queensland. Most compellingly, Hermes was the divine trickster, capable of stealing Apollo’s cattle on the day of his birth and then talking his way out of the consequences. There can surely be no better supernatural qualification for navigating a Gold Coast body corporate.

The formalities can then commence. A sacred embassy should leave Olympia bearing an olive branch, cross the Antipodes and proceed directly to Surfers Paradise, where the envoys can deposit it before the statue of the Meter Maid and await an omen. Should an ibis immediately seize the branch and drag it into a bin, the augurs will have their answer. Should it survive, the sisterhood has divine approval and the ancient Olympic ideal may safely enter its Queensland phase.

Pausanias would record the result with his customary caution. “The inhabitants say that Olympia and the Golden Coast are sisters, and in support of this they relate many things which I have already described. I myself saw the sacred ibis take the olive branch, though whether it did so by command of the gods or because there was half a souvlaki attached to it, I cannot say.”

For once, there would be no reason to doubt him.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 19 September 2026

 

HOMER IN SPACE

In 1994, in England, a Czech psychologist and writer sat down and crafted a science fiction epic of some 6,500 lines in Homeric Greek, setting his hero wandering among planets, aliens, robots, computers and strange civilisations. The work was Jan Křesadlo’s Astronautilia, whose full Greek title, Ποιητοῦ ἀδήλου Ἀστροναυτιλία ἢ ἡ Μικροοδύσσεια ἡ κοσμική, describes it as a “Cosmic Micro Odyssey”. It was published shortly after his death.

Jan Křesadlo was the pseudonym of Václav Pinkava, born in Prague in 1926, classically educated, a psychologist by profession and an exile in Britain after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Astronautilia, one of his last works, belongs to a long and now almost forgotten tradition of writing new literary works in Ancient Greek. Křesadlo, however, took that tradition in an extraordinary direction, choosing Homeric Greek for a work of science fiction.

The connection with the Odyssey is apparent from the opening lines. Like the ancient epic poet, Křesadlo begins by invoking the Muses and Apollo, except that the subject he asks them to sing has been transferred from the sea to the cosmos:

“As I begin, I pray first to the choir of Muses from Helicon, and fervently to lord Apollo … that they may tell of my journey through the vast universe.”

The Homeric imitation extends even to the architecture of the poem. Its twenty four books follow the letters of the Greek alphabet, reproducing the familiar twenty four book division through which both the Iliad and the Odyssey have come down to us. Křesadlo is therefore imitating Homer at several levels at once: language, metre, narrative and even the external shape of the epic.

He immediately explains the purpose of the mission. The captain and his companions are travelling in search of “Mandys and the sheep that observes the cosmos.” The solemnity of the epic invocation collides delightfully with its subject, yet the epic form remains perfectly intact. Indeed, the absurdity acquires, through Homer, a peculiar grandeur of its own.

Even the hero’s name is a philological joke. The captain is called Οὐδείς, “Nobody”. Odysseus used Οὖτις, another form of “Nobody”, to deceive Polyphemus, while Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo bears precisely the same name in Latin. Οὐδείς himself explains that he chose his name after the mysterious «Νήμω καπιτᾶνον». In a single name, Křesadlo brings together Odysseus, Verne and science fiction.

At the centre of the story is a rescue mission on a cosmic scale. Mandys has stolen the sheep which, according to the poem’s satirical cosmology, observes the universe and thereby ensures its existence. The joke draws upon the observer problem associated with quantum mechanics: Křesadlo takes the idea that observation is implicated in physical reality and gives the universe a single indispensable observer, which turns out, magnificently, to be a sheep. The fate of the cosmos therefore depends upon the continued gaze of an animal that would have been entirely at home in the pastoral world of ancient epic. Οὐδείς and his crew set out to recover it, travelling from planet to planet through strange civilisations, conflicts and digressions, until the search eventually leads even into time itself.

There is an ancient Greek precedent for this journey beyond the earth as well. In Lucian’s True History, written in the second century AD, travellers are swept into the heavens, reach the Moon and encounter extraterrestrial peoples and a war between the inhabitants of the Moon and the Sun. Lucian is frequently claimed as an ancestor of science fiction, although his purpose was satirical rather than scientific prediction. The resemblance makes Astronautilia still more curious: Křesadlo combines the cosmic absurdity of Lucian with the language, metre and wandering structure of Homer.

This gives Křesadlo the means to reproduce the basic narrative structure of the Odyssey on a cosmic scale. The sea becomes interstellar space, the islands become planets and the strange peoples encountered by Odysseus are replaced by extraterrestrial societies. Οὐδείς is captured, fights monsters, faces mutinies, encounters societies with unusual sexual and political customs, attends feasts, escapes from danger and loses companions as he continues his journey. Křesadlo has therefore transferred something more important than Odysseus himself into space: he has transferred the way the Odyssey tells a story.

There is another, rather unexpected, connection with Homer in the technology of Astronautilia. Robots and artificial intelligence initially seem completely foreign to archaic epic, yet Homer had already imagined machines and artificial beings possessing qualities which, with the necessary historical qualification, bear a remarkable resemblance to automation and artificial intelligence.

The first examples occur in the Iliad. In Book 18, the workshop of Hephaestus contains self moving tripods that go by themselves to the assembly of the gods and return, as well as the famous golden attendants, artificial women who possess intelligence, voice and strength and have been taught their skills by the gods. Homer thus imagines manufactured beings capable of moving, knowing and acting. The Odyssey goes further still. The ships of the Phaeacians require neither helmsmen nor steering oars. Alcinous tells Odysseus that the ships themselves understand the thoughts of men and know the cities and countries to which they are required to travel.

In this way, Homer draws no firm boundary of the kind a modern reader might instinctively place between technology and the marvellous. Hephaestus makes objects that move and act for themselves, and their extraordinary powers belong to his τέχνη, his craft. The Phaeacian ships can think their way to a destination, yet they remain ships. Homeric poetry can therefore accommodate intelligent artefacts without having to explain away their wonder. This helps to account for the curious ease with which Křesadlo can introduce robots, computers and autonomous machines into an Homeric universe: the conceptual space for marvellous technology was already there.

Astronautilia goes one step further by bringing its machines within the conventions of heroic poetry itself. The robotic Ivo and Tonda are more than technological assistants to the crew. The exploits of these robots can even assume the form of an aristeia, the epic display of excellence that in Homer belongs to the great warriors. Technology thus becomes capable of Homeric heroic action, while computers and artificial beings occupy places in the story that ancient epic reserved for heroes, companions and the marvellous creations of the gods.

The language itself is subjected to a similar test. How does one write “computer”, “robot”, “spaceship”, or describe a technological process, in a form of Greek that supposedly belongs to the world of Homer? Křesadlo invents words, transfers modern concepts into ancient morphological forms and uses Homeric vocabulary to express things that lay beyond the horizon of its age. The systematic nature of the exercise can also be seen in the scholarly apparatus of the work, which includes a Greek English glossary of unusual words and a Greek index. The comic effect therefore coexists with a serious linguistic experiment: an ancient language is being asked to invent the future.

The author’s game extends even to the authorship of the poem. Křesadlo presents himself, fictitiously, as the translator of a Greek original by an «ἄδηλος ποιητής», an “unknown poet”. Οὐδείς is supposed to have dictated his adventures to Franta, his universal translator, who recorded them in Homeric Greek, after which the manuscript eventually reached Křesadlo for translation. This chain of narration, transcription and translation adds another level to the Homeric imitation. A work that plays with the antiquity of its language also plays with the question of who is speaking, who is recording the story and who, ultimately, is entitled to call himself the poet.

There is, however, a deeper reason why the Odyssey lends itself so naturally to science fiction. The Odyssey and science fiction share the same basic curiosity about unfamiliar worlds. Whenever Odysseus arrives somewhere unknown, he must discover who lives there, whether they are just or violent, how they treat strangers, what they eat, which gods they recognise and what rules govern their society. Alcinous himself asks Odysseus to tell him about the peoples among whom he has wandered, distinguishing between those who are «χαλεποί τε καὶ ἄγριοι οὐδὲ δίκαιοι», “harsh and savage and unjust”, and those who are «φιλόξεινοι» and possess a «νόος … θεουδής», a mind that reveres the gods.

This is also one of the fundamental possibilities of science fiction. Landing on an unknown planet allows a writer to imagine different ways of organising power, family, religion, technology or sexuality and, through them, to examine our own society from a distance. This is why Astronautilia can remind us simultaneously of Star Trek and the Odyssey. In both, the journey becomes a means of comparison: every new place raises again the question of what it means to be human among beings who live differently.

Perhaps the deepest Odyssean connection lies in nostos, the return home. The wandering acquires its particular significance because there is a place and a time from which the traveller has become separated and against which he continues to measure his distance. Even when Křesadlo extends the search across the universe and eventually into time itself, the possibility of return remains. The companions begin their journey back to Earth, while Οὐδείς follows Mandys backwards through time, again towards Earth. The wandering may be cosmic, yet at its heart it remains Odyssean.

Possibly, this is why the greatest joke in Astronautilia is ultimately directed at the reader. Křesadlo begins with the apparently absurd proposition that Homer can be made to describe a world of robots, computers, spaceships and time travel, and then spends thousands of lines demonstrating how naturally Homeric poetry can accommodate all of them. What at first appears to be an elaborate philological joke gradually becomes something more interesting. Homer had already imagined autonomous machines and intelligent artificial beings, while the wanderings of Odysseus already contain the structure required for journeys through unknown worlds. The supposed anachronism begins to look less like an anachronism at all. The technology may change, the geography may expand from the Mediterranean to the universe and the monsters assume different forms, yet the traveller always remains, trying to understand what he encounters, survive it and eventually return home. Almost three thousand years after Homer, Křesadlo sends another Οὐδείς into the unknown. His journey reaches the stars, yet it remains recognisably, an Odyssey.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

 

First published in NKEE on Saturday 12 September 2026

 

AT THE DIVINE THRESHOLD

 

What is the divine? What is a threshold? And what is it about the human condition that compels us, across cultures and epochs, to approach such thresholds and attempt a crossing? A threshold is liminal, belonging completely neither to that which lies before it nor to that which lies beyond. In the case of the Orthodox icon, the direction of travel across that space remains ambiguous. Are we ascending towards the divine, training the eye through colour, form and contemplation to perceive a reality beyond the limitations of the material world, or are we engaged in the more audacious enterprise of bringing the divine down to earth, confining it within wood, linen, gesso, egg tempera and gold so that it can be seen, touched, kissed, carried into battle and installed in the corner of a home? The persistence of the icon across almost two millennia may arise from its refusal to settle the direction of that encounter.

These questions lie at the centre of the Hellenic Museum’s new Divine Thresholds: Icons & the Orthodox Christian World, an exquisitely curated exhibition of icons and sacred objects spanning the geographical and cultural territory of Eastern Christianity. During its development, Museum Director Sarah Craig consulted widely on the Orthodox tradition and the devotional meaning of the icon. Conversations ranged from the Incarnation, iconoclasm and veneration to Russia, Ethiopia, migration and the biographies acquired by icons as they move between churches, homes, countries and collections. That range is reflected in an exhibition whose historical breadth is matched by sensitivity to the religious world from which its objects come.

For an icon in a museum is already an icon displaced. Its viewer stands at a curatorial distance from an object that, within its devotional environment, could be kissed, incensed, carried in procession and addressed in prayer. Recreating these conditions within a gallery would risk converting worship into ethnographic theatre; ignoring them would reduce the icon to connoisseurship. Divine Thresholds negotiates this difficulty intelligently, treating its objects as historical and artistic artefacts while directing attention towards the relationships that made them sacred.

In doing so, the exhibition immediately unsettles the apparently simple question of what an icon actually is. It is neither merely the material object before the viewer nor simply the person represented upon it. Collapse image into prototype and the distinction upon which veneration depends disappears; sever the two entirely and the icon becomes merely an image. By presenting these objects within the history of the practices, beliefs and relationships that gave them meaning, Divine Thresholds locates the icon precisely within that interval between matter, representation and presence.

From there, the exhibition asks how Christianity came to represent sacred presence in the first place. Its juxtaposition of Christian images with earlier Mediterranean forms makes clear that the new religion did not invent its visual vocabulary from nothing. Christ as the Good Shepherd is placed within a tradition recalling the Greek kriophoros, the ram-bearer associated with Hermes, while the Christian orant preserves a much older religious gesture. Especially arresting is the juxtaposition of a relief of the Thracian god Sabazios with icons of Saint George. Here the argument is made through the objects themselves: across the rupture between pagan antiquity and Christianity, horse, rider, adversary and the grammar of triumph persist even as their theological meaning is transformed. By making such continuities visible, Divine Thresholds complicates any neat division between pagan and Christian worlds and suggests that while religious systems may displace one another, the forms through which human beings imagine protection, victory and sacred agency can prove considerably more tenacious.

The selection of icons confronts viewers accustomed to Western naturalism with an immediate difficulty: why do these figures look as they do? Seen together, the exhibition’s elongated bodies, hieratic poses, altered perspectives, stylised faces and fields of gold establish their own logic. Their recurrence across works of different dates and origins makes it difficult to regard them as failures of naturalism; instead, Divine Thresholds allows the viewer to recognise a deliberate vocabulary for placing the sacred beyond ordinary time and space. Gold backgrounds refuse the familiar coordinates of landscape and atmosphere, while pose, proportion and perspective consistently direct attention away from the incidental appearance of the individual. Through the cumulative effect of the works, the exhibition shifts the question from why icons do not look “realistic” to what conception of reality requires them to look precisely this way.

Through its treatment of iconoclasm and the Incarnation, Divine Thresholds uses the materiality of the icons to open a deeper theological problem: how can wood, gesso, pigment and gold legitimately bear an image of the divine? The biblical prohibition against graven images is set beside the Christian claim that the invisible God became visible and tangible in Christ. The Second Council of Nicaea’s distinction between veneration and worship supplies the theological key, yet the argument is made tangible rather than merely doctrinal. Every painted Christ before the viewer is itself evidence of the conclusion reached: if God truly assumed visible human flesh, matter could represent him without becoming the object of worship. The icons consequently function simultaneously as exhibits and arguments, their form asserting the capacity of matter to mediate sacred presence.

The movement into ordinary life is traced through the choice of saints and iconographic types, revealing a world in which images organised time, articulated particular needs and accompanied human uncertainty. Saint George remains recognisable across widely separated traditions while acquiring local resonances; Saint Nicholas gathers associations with sailors, travellers and protection; images of the Mother of God multiply into types and titles around which histories of place, danger, deliverance and miraculous intervention accumulate. Read together, these icons disclose a sacred geography in which the universal and intensely local overlap.

That geography contracts to the household. The exhibition’s attention to domestic devotion prevents the icon from being understood solely as an ecclesiastical object. The “beautiful corner”, lamp burning before an image, triptych carried on a journey and miniature iconostasis locate the sacred within dwelling, departure, return, illness and prayer. Paul of Aleppo’s astonishment at the profusion of icons in seventeenth-century Muscovite homes evokes a world in which sacred and ordinary space continually penetrated one another. The domestic icon establishes a divine threshold within the home itself, a boundary between everyday and sacred crossed repeatedly rather than only within the church.

Set beside one another, these local manifestations raise another problem: how does a sacred image remain recognisably itself while passing between places, periods and cultures? Across Divine Thresholds, Christ, the Theotokos and the saints recur according to shared prototypes, yet seldom identically. Differences of palette, line, material, costume and composition disclose the worlds through which those prototypes have passed. Brought into the same field, they demonstrate a paradox: iconography depends upon repetition, yet survives through the capacity of repetition to accommodate difference.

The Cretan icons provide the first answer. Products of workshops operating within the Venetian sphere, they belong to a Mediterranean world in which Orthodox and Catholic patrons, Byzantine forms and Italian painting encountered one another. Western elements enter the images, modelling alters and compositional devices migrate, yet the Byzantine grammar remains legible. Their hybridity becomes evidence of the processes by which an ostensibly fixed iconographic language negotiated the cultures surrounding it.

The Russian works test the proposition differently. Within the exhibition’s wider geographical field, they demonstrate how a common Byzantine inheritance acquired distinctive lives in centres such as Novgorod, Moscow, Palekh, Smolensk and Vladimir. Differences of palette, line, local saints and devotional emphasis register regional identities without rendering the underlying language unintelligible. Canon appears more supple than uniformity, establishing the terms within which identity can persist without requiring sameness.

With Ethiopia, North Africa and the Levant, the proposition becomes more complicated still. The objects resist any simple account in which Byzantine iconography radiates intact from a self-contained centre towards passive peripheries. Ethiopian material reveals inherited Christian forms transformed within an indigenous tradition, while the Levantine works inhabit a region where Byzantine, Syriac, Arabic-speaking Christian, Crusader and local vocabularies encountered one another through pilgrimage, conquest and trade. Divine Thresholds instead presents the Eastern Christian world of images as a network of encounters in which influence moves, changes direction and is continually translated.

One of the exhibition’s most eloquent objects makes this materially visible: a Cretan icon that travelled to Ethiopia and was subsequently retouched there, Ethiopian elements being added to the existing Mediterranean image. Is it Cretan, Ethiopian, Byzantine or African? Each description identifies one layer of its biography without encompassing the whole. Its surface becomes a proposition in pigment: an icon may remain itself while accumulating other places, hands and ways of seeing. How much difference can a tradition absorb before continuity becomes rupture? Divine Thresholds supplies no convenient point at which one ends and the other begins.

Movement across cultures is one kind of transformation. The exhibition gives rise to a further question: what is the afterlife of an icon when the devotional world for which it was created disappears? Revolutionary Russia provides the most dramatic example. The Bolsheviks persecuted religion and destroyed sacred images, yet something of their authority survived in the monumental portraits, processions and exemplary lives of the new order. Lenin occupied spaces from which saints had been expelled. Theology could be repudiated while habits of seeing endured.

Divine Thresholds poses the same question through migration. Icons carried to Australia as objects of prayer may become heirlooms, cultural markers or, as their devotional significance recedes, objects found in antique and opportunity shops, private collections, museums or even the rubbish. Yet the icon endures, passing from altar to suitcase, household shrine to marketplace and museum, acquiring new meanings as it goes. Divine Thresholds itself participates in this afterlife, asking what survives these transformations of belief, ownership and circumstance.

Where, then, does sacredness reside: in the material object, in the prototype to which it refers, in the practices performed before it, or in the relationship between image and beholder? Divine Thresholds is at its most intelligent in permitting these possibilities to coexist. Across the exhibition, icons change context without necessarily losing identity: they absorb foreign artistic languages, cross continents and survive persecution. Their surfaces accumulate histories even as the figures upon them continue to look back at successive generations of beholders. Everything depends upon the encounters that take place before it. Divine Thresholds leaves us at that point of encounter, where matter becomes image, image becomes presence, and the visible world seems, for an instant, insufficient to contain everything we ask it to mean.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 5 September 2026

WHEN MULTICULTURALISM BECOMES A MATTER OF PUBLIC ORDER

 

The recent cabinet reshuffle in Victoria contained one appointment with particular symbolic resonance: Paul Edbrooke was given responsibility for Police, Emergency Services, Crime Prevention and Multicultural Affairs. There may be perfectly practical reasons for bringing these portfolios together. However, the way a government arranges its ministries also says something about how it understands the relationship between different areas of public life. The new arrangement therefore invites a reasonable question: does placing Multicultural Affairs alongside policing and crime prevention simply reflect administrative convenience, or does it also reveal a broader change in the way cultural diversity is being understood?

The question becomes more significant when considered against the findings of the Victorian Multicultural Review. Completed in 2025 after extensive consultation with multicultural communities, the Review argued for a stronger institutional presence for multicultural policy at the centre of government. Among its recommendations were a dedicated Minister for Multicultural Affairs, retention of the portfolio within the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and mechanisms requiring major government policies to be considered for their effects on multicultural communities. It also recalled an earlier period when Victorian premiers themselves held responsibility for multicultural affairs, giving the portfolio considerable authority across government.

Ministerial portfolios inevitably bring different policy areas into conversation with one another. Roads sit naturally beside road safety, agriculture beside regional development, and the creative industries beside culture. It is therefore worth asking what relationship the government sees between Multicultural Affairs, Police and Crime Prevention. Equally, one might ask why multicultural affairs are not associated more closely with education, culture, community development, or the Premier’s office, particularly given the direction proposed by the Review.

Consultation presents a further question. The Victorian Multicultural Review drew upon extensive engagement with multicultural communities and produced numerous recommendations about the future of multicultural policy. The association of Multicultural Affairs with Police and Crime Prevention does not appear among them. It would therefore be useful to know whether the new arrangement arose from subsequent consultation with communities, or from the government’s own assessment of how the portfolio can best operate. That distinction matters because Australian multiculturalism has developed most successfully when governments and communities have treated one another as partners in shaping policy.

One of multiculturalism’s greatest achievements was precisely its capacity to move cultural difference beyond the realm of social anxiety. During the closing decades of the twentieth century, multicultural policy became part of a larger project of nation building. Australian identity expanded so that people of different languages, religions and backgrounds could participate fully in public life while retaining their cultural inheritance. Interpreting services, community languages, migrant resource centres, ethnic media and recognition of community organisations were therefore more than accommodations for migrants. They became instruments through which democratic participation itself was broadened.

The vocabulary surrounding multiculturalism has since changed. Social cohesion, community safety, hate speech, extremism, foreign interference and resilience now occupy a much more prominent place in official policy. These concerns respond to genuine developments, and governments plainly have a responsibility to protect synagogues, mosques, churches, schools and community centres. The difficulty arises when the vocabulary of risk begins to crowd out the older language of participation, cultural continuity and belonging. Seen in that light, the new ministerial arrangement brings two understandings of diversity into unusually close proximity: diversity as a source of social and cultural strength, and diversity as something increasingly approached through the structures of security, prevention and public order.

For the Greek Australian community, the issue carries particular historical resonance. Greeks were more than beneficiaries of multiculturalism. Through decades of organised advocacy, they actively helped to build it, campaigning for community languages, interpreting services, ethnic broadcasting, equitable access to government services and funding for cultural endeavours. Greek communities, brotherhoods, parishes, schools and newspapers often performed functions resembling an informal welfare system, supporting people whom public institutions had yet to reach effectively.

That history also explains why the language surrounding multiculturalism matters. The first major generation of postwar Greek migrants arrived in an Australia where assimilation remained the prevailing expectation. Greek was frequently regarded as an obstacle for children, migrant institutions were expected eventually to disappear, and successful integration was often understood as progressive approximation to an Anglo-Australian cultural norm. Multiculturalism represented a profound change in that conception of citizenship. It established the possibility that someone could remain culturally Greek while participating fully and unambiguously in Australian civic life.

Yet the abandonment of assimilation as official policy did not necessarily extinguish the older expectation that migrants continually demonstrate the compatibility of their identities with the national norm. Thinkers George Vassilacopoulos and Toula Nicolacopoulou have explored this more complicated history, arguing that migrants in Australia have often occupied the position of the “subordinate foreigner” and the “eternal subversive”, required repeatedly to demonstrate their loyalty and their compatibility with the national narrative. Their analysis provides a useful caution in the present context. When multicultural communities are increasingly discussed through the language of cohesion, surveillance, prevention and foreign interference, legitimate political advocacy can more easily become entangled with questions about loyalty, connections with ancestral homelands can acquire an atmosphere of suspicion, and vigorous disagreement with government policy can be interpreted through the language of integration rather than ordinary democratic contestation.

There is an internal consequence as well. Community organisations that depend substantially upon government funding may gradually learn which forms of advocacy attract support and which create discomfort. Over time, the temptation arises to shape public interventions around the language favoured by government, particularly the language of “social cohesion” or “unity”, while difficult or politically inconvenient questions receive less attention. Representation then risks becoming increasingly concerned with maintaining access to government rather than articulating the independent concerns of the people represented.

None of this requires us to romanticise an earlier age of multicultural policy. Victoria faces challenges that previous generations encountered in different forms, or scarcely encountered at all, and governments have a legitimate responsibility to respond to extremism, hate crime and racism. The question is how those responsibilities can be met without allowing security to become the organising principle of multiculturalism itself. This is particularly important at a time when, across Australia and other Western democracies, political forces are again promoting versions of national identity that favour greater cultural uniformity, expressed through calls for assimilation, anxiety about migration, suspicion of transnational identities and the belief that social cohesion requires a stronger common culture. This makes clarity about the purpose of multicultural policy especially important. Political movements hostile to multiculturalism have long sought to portray cultural difference as a source of fragmentation, divided loyalties and social danger, with greater cultural uniformity offered as the remedy. If the language and structures of government themselves begin, however inadvertently, to associate multiculturalism predominantly with security, extremism and crime prevention, that argument becomes easier to make. A confident multicultural policy should provide the answer: cultural plurality and social cohesion are entirely compatible, and common citizenship derives its strength from democratic participation rather than cultural sameness. In this political climate, where Multicultural Affairs sits within government assumes a significance extending well beyond the allocation of ministerial responsibilities: it speaks, however indirectly, to whether diversity continues to be understood primarily as a dimension of democratic citizenship or is increasingly viewed through the prism of security, prevention and public order.

This also places a responsibility on those who represent multicultural communities. The presence of ministers and parliamentarians from diverse backgrounds is itself one of the achievements of multicultural Victoria. Representation acquires its fullest value when those representatives participate openly in debates about the future direction of multicultural policy. It would therefore be useful to hear from elected representatives of diverse backgrounds and from the representative bodies of our community organisations about whether they believe the new arrangement strengthens multicultural affairs, how they understand its rationale, and how they envisage the portfolio retaining a broad role across government.

Labor played a decisive role in establishing multicultural Victoria, alongside politicians and governments from other traditions. That history gives the present government a particular reason to explain how the new arrangement accords with the recent Review’s recommendation that multicultural policy should enjoy stronger influence at the centre of government. Such an explanation would also clarify what practical authority the portfolio will retain across departments whose decisions directly affect multicultural Victorians.

Governments are entitled to organise their ministries in the way they consider most effective, and administrative arrangements will inevitably change with circumstances. Multicultural communities are equally entitled to ask what those arrangements signify for a policy that has contributed profoundly to the character of modern Victoria. At its most ambitious, multiculturalism rested on the proposition that cultural difference could enrich a common democratic life without weakening common citizenship. At a time when that proposition is again being challenged by those who present cultural uniformity as the answer to social division, governments and multicultural communities alike have an interest in stating clearly what multiculturalism is for and why it remains worth defending. The question raised by the present arrangement therefore reaches beyond the distribution of portfolios: it concerns whether cultural difference continues to occupy a legitimate and confident place within the political imagination of Victoria itself.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 29 August 2026

DECOLONISING THE AENEID

 

I have reached the inescapable conclusion that the Aeneid should be cancelled. Frankly, I am astonished it has survived this long. Here we have a poem produced by a member of a colonial power that conquered Greece, dismantled its political independence, appropriated its religion, philosophy, literature and mythology, and then presented the resulting cultural package as the foundation of Roman greatness. If this does not qualify as deeply problematic, then the term has surely lost all meaning.

I draw the reader’s attention gently towards a Rome that i. colonises Greece, ii. extracts Greek cultural capital and iii. rebrands Greek civilisation as a Roman achievement. Then Vergil arrives, ChatGPT's Homer with remarkable enthusiasm, changes a few names, inserts an imperial destiny, dedicates the whole enterprise to Augustus and somehow acquires the reputation of being one of history's greatest original poets. One searches the Aeneid in vain for a bibliography, an acknowledgement of Country, a positionality statement, a trigger warning or even a footnote acknowledging that substantial portions of the narrative derive from Indigenous Hellenic knowledge systems generously shared without any apparent benefit accruing to the source community. Homer receives no recognition whatsoever for his emotional labour or intellectual generosity.

Indeed, the entire poem appears to embody the familiar dynamics of colonial knowledge production. The stories of a conquered people are detached from their original cultural setting, curated by representatives of the imperial centre and redeployed in the service of empire. Greek epic becomes Roman propaganda, while Homer is transformed into an unpaid creative consultant whose contribution somehow slipped through the peer-review process. One is left wondering whether anyone sought the informed consent of the descendants of the aoidoi before proceeding with this ambitious exercise in literary extraction. The silence surrounding these ethical concerns arguably constitutes a form of epistemic violence. Indeed, every uncritical reading of the Aeneid today perpetuates that violence afresh. By inviting students to inhabit the perspective of the coloniser while consuming appropriated Hellenic narratives as though they were naturally Roman, the text continually reproduces structures of imperial privilege. Reading, therefore, is never a neutral act. Every page turned without adequate decolonial framing risks reinscribing the original colonial encounter. The Aeneid thus exemplifies extractive storytelling, whereby privileged authors mine the narrative resources of historically marginalised communities while simultaneously receiving grants, prizes and enduring places on university reading lists.

Even the opening line demands scrutiny. Arma virumque cano. Really? Homer had already covered war and covered heroes. At what point does inspiration become unauthorised content recycling? The distinction feels increasingly difficult to sustain, especially when the recycling produces twelve books instead of two. One hesitates to employ the word "plagiarism," although one suspects an anonymous referee might have been tempted. Contemporary publishers would almost certainly have requested a sensitivity reader from Bronze Age Anatolia.

Defenders invariably insist that Vergil was simply paying homage to Homer. This is a generous interpretation. One rarely hears museum curators describe the contents of the British Museum as an elaborate tribute to the civilisations from which they originated. Admiration, after all, has often proved remarkably compatible with appropriation, particularly when accompanied by overwhelming military superiority and excellent public relations. It is extraordinary how frequently empire expresses its admiration through what would today be recognised as respectful cultural theft.

The representation of Greece itself also raises deeply uncomfortable questions. Greek voices remain present only insofar as they facilitate the emergence of what purports to be Roman identity. Their myths become raw material, their literature becomes scaffolding and their cultural authority is carefully absorbed into a narrative whose ultimate purpose is to legitimise Roman imperial expansion. It is difficult to avoid the impression that Greece has been invited to participate in the conversation primarily as source material, while Rome moderates the panel, writes the conference proceedings and awards itself the keynote address. Greek mythology functions throughout the poem as a resource to be harvested rather than a living tradition to be engaged with on its own epistemic terms. Rome, after all, had already carried away Greek spoils, appropriated Greek sacred spaces, dismissed the conquered as Graeculi, and then proceeded to market Greek civilisation as compelling evidence of Roman greatness. The Aeneid is simply the literary equivalent of loading another statue onto a cart, chiselling "Made in Rome" onto the base and applying for UNESCO recognition. The Hellenic voice is simultaneously centred as an object of study and marginalised as a speaking subject, a contradiction requiring urgent deconstruction by scholars who will naturally speak on its behalf, preferably without consulting any actual Greeks.

The educational implications of these larcenous practices, are obvious. Every copy of the Aeneid should begin with an acknowledgement that the poem was composed upon appropriated cultural foundations. Students ought first to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Homeric tradition before engaging with the Latin text. Appropriate trigger warnings would also seem advisable: “This work contains extensive appropriation of Greek mythology, imperial triumphalism, symbolic acts of cultural extraction and repeated assertions of Roman exceptionalism. Reader discretion is advised. Side effects may include admiration for Augustus, internalised Latin privilege and an uncritical acceptance of hegemonic narratives.” Students should also be reminded that they are guests within the Homeric narrative landscape and invited to reflect critically upon the privileges they bring to reading Latin literature before attempting any translation. They should also complete a short reflective statement acknowledging that the very act of reading the Aeneid may unintentionally perpetuate colonial structures of interpretation and cause intergenerational harm to descendants of the Homeric tradition.

One also wonders whether Vergil possessed the necessary lived experience to narrate Trojan identity. Was there no suitably qualified Trojan available to tell the story? Were the Trojans even considered White? Once again, an imperial author occupies narrative space belonging to a displaced community, speaks on its behalf and receives universal acclaim for doing so. The absence of Trojan self-representation reveals a troubling pattern of narrative ventriloquism in which imperial authors continue to profit from identities they do not themselves inhabit. Such asymmetries deserve closer examination, preferably by a grant-funded interdisciplinary research cluster over the course of three years, culminating in a twelve-volume report recommending the establishment of a Centre for Decolonial Vergilian Studies. We can fund it via the savings gained by discontinuing the teaching of Modern Greek at La Trobe.

Predictably, some classicists will object that this entire critique is hopelessly anachronistic, that ancient societies possessed different assumptions about authorship, cultural exchange and literary imitation. That observation is undoubtedly correct, which makes it all the more awkward when precisely the same historical context is denied to almost every other civilisation. Consistency, surely, remains one of scholarship's highest virtues, provided it is deployed with sufficient selectivity.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that Roman “admiration” for Greece was so profound that they simply shop-lifted everything they encountered. Their gods were Greek. Their philosophy was Greek. Their literature was Greek. Their education was Greek. Their mythology was Greek. Their artistic vocabulary was Greek. Pizza and Macaroni were invented by Greeks. Their greatest national epic was Greek, lightly edited, translated into Latin, branded with an Augustan logo and relaunched as an exemplar of authentic Roman creativity. The Aeneid is thus no epic. Rather, it is the most successful act of intellectual property theft in Western literary history. It therefore follows that every modern edition sold without payment to the descendants of the original cultural stakeholders perpetuates this extractive economy. Penguin Classics should immediately enter negotiations regarding retrospective royalties payable to the Greek people, while the Government of Italy ought to establish a Vergilian Reparations Fund as a tangible act of restorative literary justice. Two thousand years of unpaid intellectual property is, after all, a substantial debt, which could fund further Consumer Price Indexed pay-rises for prelates belonging to the Church of Greece.

Accordingly, I look forward to the forthcoming conference, Decolonising the Aeneid: Towards an Ethical, Inclusive and Decentred Engagement with Augustan Epic. The conference will open with a Welcome to Epic Country, acknowledging the traditional custodians of the Homeric narrative landscape, followed by the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Classical Literature to hear the lived experiences of communities affected by two millennia of uncontextualised Vergilian reception. The opening keynote will examine extractive poetics as a manifestation of imperial privilege, after which delegates will attend workshops on creating culturally safe reading environments for displaced Trojans, decolonising the Latin curriculum, and best-practice guidelines for citing Homer without reproducing colonial hierarchies or perpetuating Augustan normativity.

Delegates will then participate in a facilitated listening circle during which the Aeneid will be invited to reflect upon the harm it has caused over the past two millennia, accept accountability for its narrative choices and begin its journey as an ally text. A restorative justice panel will explore pathways towards healing for descendants of Homeric knowledge holders, while another will debate whether continued teaching of Latin without an accompanying Anti-Imperial Impact Statement constitutes an ongoing act of epistemic violence. A further workshop will examine the unconscious bias embedded within dactylic hexameter and develop strategies for creating more inclusive metrical practices that centre historically silenced voices. A separate session will develop trauma-informed pedagogies for readers who experience affective harm while encountering uncontextualised Latin, while another will consider whether the phrase "Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit," should henceforth be preceded by an appropriate content warning, and another still will debate whether: “Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento” can continue to be taught without normalising settler-colonial governance structures.

The conference will conclude with the ceremonial repatriation of the dactylic hexameter to its rightful cultural custodians, the conferral of Certificates of Allyship in Homeric Studies, the signing of the Rome Declaration on Ethical Epic Consumption, and a collective commitment to ongoing reflexive engagement with participants' own internalised Latin privilege. Proceedings will appear, naturally, in a special issue entitled Reimagining Latin Through Decolonial Praxis, accompanied by an open letter inviting Vergil to undertake a process of restorative listening before any future republication of the Aeneid is contemplated, whereupon all copies of the Aeneid will be transferred from the Classics shelves to the True Crime section. Gentle reader, you have been warned: citing Vergil without simultaneously citing Homer now ranks among the gravest anti-Hellenic microaggressions, surpassed only by being required to obtain a document from your nearest Greek Consulate-General. Until the Greek Ministry of Culture funds Nolan's version, that is.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 22 August 2026