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Speaker Profile Προφίλ ηχείου
Stefania Angelou
| Language: Greek
A smiling person sitting at a table

Speaker background

Occupation: seamstress, salesperson, Greek teacherYear of arrival: 1963

Stefania Angelou was born in the small village of Sykounta, Lesvos in 1939. In part to pave the way for the rest of her siblings, Stefania’s father encouraged her to migrate to Australia. In 1963, she left her village for Athens and was part of the ICEM program, which involved 6 months of learning English and domestic skills. After arriving in Sydney, she rented a room in a house in Marrickville. The woman who owned the house was the aunt of Stefania’s future husband, Vasili Angelou, a Greek from Egypt. They married in Paddington at Agia Sophia church and had 5 daughters. She worked at the David Jones factory in Surry Hills as a seamstress, but when she had her first child, she stopped working. After her husband sustained an injury that prevented him from working, Stefania returned to work, initially as a kitchen hand and then as a cook at Woollahra Eating House. Alongside a series of other jobs, for forty years Stefania worked as a Greek teacher at St George Church in Rose Bay. There, she started the ‘Papakia’ playgroup for pre-kindergarten aged children and mothers, which ran for 12 years. 

Location in AustraliaSouth Coogee

Interview summary

Stephania discusses her life growing up on Lesvos, and her father’s decision to send her to Australia. She talks about struggling to find a job, then working multiple jobs to support her family after her husband’s accident which left him unable to work for years.

Interview highlights

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Stefania talks about her first impressions in Sydney, and her short stay in Cronulla, where she struggled to find a job.

Stefania: Cronulla then seemed to me like a village. I didn’t like it, because I had been in Athens for 6 months, and I liked it there, especially the climate. And when I got here, I arrived on the 15th of August, the Feast Day of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, and I left Greece that was hot and arrived in Australia that was windy and cold. I was afraid, because I had left my country and all my loved ones. [ … ] The government sent us to Cronulla. We lived in a hostel with other girls that had come. We didn’t wake up for breakfast because we had jet lag. We were upset, crying. We didn’t understand. We were afraid since we had left Greece, and Australia wasn’t as we’d expected. They had promised us a lot, but we didn’t see that. They had promised us they’d have jobs for us, that everything would be the best and we found ourselves in a hostel, unable to wake up from jet lag. I had a bit of bad luck because I looked thin. So, when people would come to look at the girls, to employ them, they saw me thin and ‘bad’ looking with long nails and they thought ‘What would we do with her,’ and no one picked me. 

Timecode 10:02 - 12:14
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Stephania talks about walking down Cleveland Street looking for a job and becoming a seamstress for David Jones.

Stefania: I found myself on Cleveland Street. And I saw a sign that said ‘David Jones’ and I read it ‘David Lollies’ and I felt that this would be a good job so I could eat lollies. But unfortunately, they weren’t lollies, it was a factory for David Jones. On Marlborough Street, off Cleveland Street. I knocked and a man opened the door and asked about my qualifications. I told him ‘I’m not uneducated. I’m educated, and I have a craft.’ He asked me what I could do, and I told him ‘dressmaker.’ Then he said, ‘Wait, we need girls for this job.’ And I said ‘no, no, I don’t want it,’ because at my previous job, the noise from the machines gave me a headache and I didn’t want to do sewing again. But he insisted so much, this man, that I felt embarrassed, and I waited. 

Interviewer: Was he Australian?

Stefania: Yes. So, he called the manager, she came, a lovely lady. And she says to me ‘Come. This is a big factory, and the space is big, and the machines don’t make a lot of noise. Maybe the other factory was very small?’ And she told me to sit down. She got me to sit at a canteen of this factory. She brought me lunch, and she brought me coffee. She shouted me, and she told me after you eat, someone will come to take you upstairs. And when they took me upstairs, they got me to try, and I was a good seamstress. They asked me to do the samples. And when I did them, they were so pleased that they immediately hired me.

Timecode 22:55 - 25:32

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