Vasilios Psarologos

Story

There are a handful of elders left that know how to speak the ancient Greek dialogue where my father was born. This was Tyros in December 1921. When my father left the town of his birthright he cast a stone over his left shoulder, this meant he would never come back. In Greece the word ‘homeland\’ is a very powerful one. The Greeks fought many invaders over centuries for their homeland. To leave it and never return is an enormous price to pay for a new life. However, there was no future in this village by the sea, just land that my grandfather would bequeth as dowry to secure suitors for his many unwed daughters.

As a child I remember my father as an immensely proud man. He carried his identity deeply within his being no matter what experiences befell him or the environment he was in. He would state his name with absolute pride and conviction. ‘Vasilios Psarologos’ he would say standing tall and in a manner that would befit the origins of his Christian name Ð it means ‘King’. In Australia however, he was called ‘Bill.’

At 37 he married a woman some ten years his junior who he had only met possibly twice. It was 1958 and my parents like most Greeks lived in Richmond. My father worked at Carlton and United Breweries (CUB) on the assembly line and my mother worked in a ribbon factory. They bought a simple 1950s weatherboard home and rented rooms to other family and friends as they too arrived on their life\’s journey to Australia.

My father tells me that many years later he discovered the house had a basement concealed under the living room. How lucky they were to avert near catastrophe he says, because no one knew it was there when 30 or 40 Greeks stomped and danced on the hollow floorboards with typical ‘Zorbaesque’ abandon on my parent\’s wedding day.

‘Kala (lucky/good) the floor didn\’t cave in and take us all with it,’ he says waving his hands about in the air with a true innate sense of Greek drama.

In 1972 my father threw in his job at CUB and packed up his family to join his brother, Antonios in a soldier settlement town in North-West Victoria. I grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Hattah Kulkyne National Park. I remember local Aboriginals made damper for us to eat during a school excursion to ‘the bush.’

As kids if we ever caused trouble it wasn\’t the police paddy wagon that was used to threaten us, it was being left somewhere out there in miles and miles of Mallee scrub.

Which was fine I thought because I knew how to cook damper.

These are my memories entwined with his.

He remembers the supervisor from CUB turning up one day after a six-hour drive from Melbourne to find him working on the farm. ‘Hey Bill, yasou’ I imagine he said. He was driving through on a family holiday and thought he mind find him if he looked hard enough and asked a few questions of the locals. He might even have bought a few cans with him. ‘Good person,’ said my father.

He remembers our neighbour, a World War Two war veteran, who he called Captain. ‘Captain’ Jim Kempton was one of the early town settlers in Robinvale. Although he has since passed away, my father still holds him in high regard. It was the Captain after all that lent us his farm equipment and taught my parents how to prune 26 acres of grapevines.

In the 80s my father remembers the new wave of immigrants coming through as itinerant workers and they were mostly Vietnamese. My parents had a photo on the kitchen sideboard (my dad the landholder) taken with “John” and his co-workers at their request. They are arm in arm and smiling as they stand beside a tractor.

My parents are retired now and live in the outskirts of Melbourne. They are 86 and 75 respectively. They have been inseparable for most of their married life. My father did not retire until he was 75 and says he saved John Howard quite a bit of money from his pension entitlements.

I was nearly 30 years old before I visited my father\’s village.

The stone built house is abandoned, a relic used to house goats in winter. I crept into the room that all the siblings must have shared both as living and sleeping quarters. My grandmother, whom I never met, must have painted the kitchen cupboard doors in a star-crossed pattern of green and yellow. I am told she liked to paint, sing and was very generous by nature. I am one of possibly four or five girls named after her in our extended family. Along one of the walls in the old house I recognise a photo all dusty and worn. It is my parents’ wedding photo. I am not sure who placed it there, why or when. It could very well still be there today.

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