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A older person sitting at a table
Speaker Profile Προφίλ ηχείου
John Dimitriou
| Language: Greek
A older person sitting at a table

Speaker background

Occupation: DentistYear of arrival: 1964

John was born in the Epirote village of Konitsa situated on the Albanian border. His father made ends meet by working in West Germany, but his mother was convinced that the family would have a better future in Australia, where she had relatives. John had just finished high school when his whole family migrated to Sydney and settled in the Parramatta area. Despite his limited English, John was determined to qualify for university and enrol in either dentistry or medicine. After finishing dentistry at the University of Sydney, he set up a practice in Harris Park, where most of his clients were either Greek or Lebanese. He married a Greek-Australian woman and spent much of his free time involved in Greek associations.

Location in AustraliaHarris Park

Interview summary

John’s interview deals mainly with his education in Greece and his efforts to enter university soon after his arrival in Australia. He also discusses his involvement in Greek associations, especially the Epirus Brotherhood that he helped establish in Parramatta, where most of his relatives and fellow Epirotes happened to live.

Interview highlights

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John’s ambitions to study at university were thwarted when his family moved to Australia. After his first day working in a factory in Sydney’s western suburbs, John explains how he felt.

John: I had just come back home from the factory, and I was in tears. I said, ‘I am going back to Greece. I am not staying here.’ I had just received a letter from my friend, John Kotsinoglou, who I sat next to in my last year at high school, and he said everyone had qualified for university. One got into Arts, another got into Medicine. I was crying. ‘I am going back to Greece!’ My uncle said, ‘Here there is nothing else. Here it’s home to factory, factory to home. That’s it!’ It was difficult.

Timecode 07:40 - 08:12
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John explains how he did a crash course in English to prepare for entrance exams for either medicine or dentistry, and then describes his language difficulties in his first year in dentistry at the University of Sydney.

John: There was a college in Circular Quay, and with me was another person named John (Psaromatis) who also wanted to do medicine. We did English classes from 8:30 in the morning to 5:00 in the evening. The teachers knew we wanted to get into university, so each day they gave us one hundred new words to learn. Every two days they made us write essays and many things to help us improve our English. In fact, we did learn a great deal, but our English proficiency was not yet good enough for university education. That is, enough to understand our university lecturers.

[…]

In first year, it was very difficult because I could not understand the lecturers. Of course, they spoke quickly because they were catering to an English-speaking audience and were unaware that some of us had limited English. So, in my first and second year I only managed to get pass marks. In other words, I only just managed to pass. In the third, fourth and fifth years, however, I achieved distinctions and high distinctions, so I was very happy and they [the academics] were very happy with me.

Timecode 11:51 - 13:36

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