Eleni: Little by little, my wages increased. Of course, we had to economise. I was able to save up about a pound a week. ‘One pound,’ as they say. I didn’t know how to communicate when I would go into a shop, for example, to buy meat. How did I do it? I would gesture towards something and would say, ‘This one.’

Interviewer: Were there any Greek shops back then?

Eleni: There were none in Summer Hill. There weren’t any at all. I would go to the Australian shops. The Australians never tried to take advantage of us. They looked after us. They knew we didn’t speak the language. They would ask things like, ‘What do you want?’ And I’d reply, ‘This.’ I would ask my brothers how to say, ‘Thruppence.’ It was shillings. That was the currency at the time. I’d often write what I wanted on my hands and showed them.

Eleni: On the weekend, we would use the train tickets that we had saved up during the week and go to Hyde Park. I remember people saying that they had just laid the foundations for the Opera House. 

Interviewer: You were there? You witnessed those changes?

Eleni: The place was full of young people. We used to jokingly say, ‘The Opera House will have been built, twenty years from now.’ And I replied, ‘Do you really think that I’ll stay here for that long.’ My uncle from Dover Heights would ask me, ‘How much do you like Australia?’, to which I replied, ‘I’ll slowly get used to it.’ I didn’t know the language, you see. We didn’t have money. We had none of the technologies that we have today. No radios, no television, no car, no money. I’d go shopping to buy a single item, not like the excess of today where we fill an entire car with groceries. Nowadays, Australia is a paradise for us.