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Athina Stavrellis
Speaker Profile Προφίλ ηχείου
Athina Stavrellis
| Language: English
Athina Stavrellis

Speaker background

Occupation: TeacherYear of arrival: 1968Method of transport: Ship

Athina Stavrellis was born in Nigrita, Serres in Macedonia in 1938. She spent her formative years on the island of Mytilene, where her father worked as a public servant. When height restrictions forbade her from entering the Teacher’s Academy on the island, she moved to Athens to enrol in an educational college for young girls. Athina married in Athens. Her first child was born a few months prior to the right-wing military junta taking power in April 1967. In Australia, she worked, initially, as a Greek afternoon school teacher and, later, as an Early Childcare teacher.

Place of birthNigrita, Central Macedonia
Location in AustraliaFive Dock

Interview summary

Athina talks about her early years in Mytilene and her desire to become a schoolteacher. When she was rejected by the Teacher’s Academy due to her height, she enrolled in a special educational college in Athens, established by the Royal family. She recounts the problems some of the girls at the college faced. Athina also recalls how she and her husband, who was still in the military, overcame a number of obstacles during their migration process. She reflects on the years it took to have her qualifications recognised In Australia.

Interview highlights

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When Athina was on board the 'Australis' she attended English language classes but was feeling apprehensive about coming to Australia, up until she spotted something familiar during her stopover in Perth.

Athina: I don’t think I was very optimistic. I had relatives in Melbourne . . .  We wrote to them asking to give us, some kind of . . . you know . . . 

Interviewer: Support? 

Athina: ... a way of life in another country. They never answered the letter. So, coming to Perth, though, they took us on a tour, and we passed the university and out [front] of the university was a bust of Socrates and I thought, 'Oh well, we’re coming from another end of the world and here it is, so really and truly it won’t be that bad as I thought'. It was kind of, you know, a feeling that everything is going to be fine.

Interviewer: You saw something familiar. A Greek philosopher?

Athina: Yes, something familiar. Something out of our history. Wow. I’m coming to a country who knows our history, at least.

Timecode 38:16 - 39:29
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When Athina went searching for job opportunities soon after her arrival, an official told her she was living in the wrong neighbourhood if she wanted to learn English

I sat down. He said to me, ‘First, where do you live?’ I said Marrickville. ‘Well, I don’t think you should live in Marrickville. You’re never going to learn English.’ I felt so humiliated and angry [even] before I opened my papers. I took them, and I walked out. I thought it was really humiliating because, alright, I lived in a neighbourhood where there were Greek people and, I think, at that time, if you ask me, if they were new and they needed that area. They needed the shops. They needed to listen to their language, and eventually these people do learn English and they do have children who are professional today and they did whatever they could to help others and accommodate and I felt really proud of myself. Not so much because I was living in Marrickville, but because I can turn to somebody and say thank you for helping me. I speak Greek, you speak Greek, and I know what I’m doing. So, later on, I thought about it. I philosophised the thing, and I thought, yes, I think he had a point. He had a point that the language was the first thing. But I was doing something about the language. I hadn’t started, then, to learn English. [But] I was already enrolled.

Timecode 52:16 - 54:02

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