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Eric Metaxas, author of Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (Viking) greets me over the phone with “Yiasou Patritha” (health to your homeland). We Greeks carry ‘homeland’ on our shoulders. The New York based writer of Greek German background says, “I loved your An Atheist in Greek Easter,” about an old piece I sent him
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Tomorrow, voters in the Melbourne federal electorate of Batman go the polls with Greens’ candidate Alex Bhathal squared off against the ALP’s Ged Kearney in what has been an intense and unpredictable campaign. The 66 square kilometre seat in the city’s northern suburbs has always been a Labor stronghold. Migrants and the children of migrants, such as writer Fotis
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Just over a week ago, the Justice and Development Party led government of Turkey threatened the military invasion of Greece over the disputed and uninhabited Greek Imia islets. The Anglo-Australian media did not report on this. The ABC failed to mention it. This may be, in part, due to the spectre of post-colonial theories that have woven themselves
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The Australian media organisation I go to for most of my political analysis is the ABC. But lately, it feels a tad confused. The ABC’s mainstream news programming seems to be slowly colonised by youthism. Youthism, my word, denotes the ill-conceived actions by institutions to garner youth support and clients, while most youth see through these bogus attempts.
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George Xylouris and Jim White (pictured above) are one of the most exciting musical collaborations right now. Their new album Mother is not for the fragile. The alternative rock and Cretan music meld is blood and bones, earth and sea, literature and poetry, war and love; it is Crete. One needs to understand the Cretans
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It seems that a sizable proportion of Australia’s non-Anglo Celtic communities in key Labor electorates voted ‘No’ in the Marriage Equality survey. As did many traditional Australians living in these electorates. Now a perilous narrative is arising that Muslim Australians were all opposed to Marriage Equality. Nail Aykan, the executive director of the Islamic Council
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Nick Tsiavos is a mysterious musician. He creates new mysteries, built from the divine and the secular. And he does extraordinary things with a contrabass. He has been described as “an architect of sound” and his music as “otherworldly avant-garde” and “spacious, mysterious, edgy and beautiful“. His music is a link between a brooding Byzantium, an alchemic Medieval Europe,
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The first time I was married was because of Australia’s immigration rules. I had fallen in love while working as a waiter on the Greek island of Spetses in 1987. I told the authorities that my Austrian girlfriend was my fiancé in the naïve hope that a visa would be issued faster. The visa condition
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I have been invited to a panel on Tuesday in Melbourne, Insight through Diversity – A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Grief and Ritual for D2KDay – Dying to Know Day. Four of us will represent Chinese, Greek, Arabic and Kenyan ancestries and will discuss cultural and personal death and funereal rituals and grief. I guess our religious/spiritual
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My body aches, my joints, my lower back and my wrists hurt. My muscles are stiff. My head is empty, except for the script. Yet I’m elevated. For almost three months, I have been rehearsing and playing three secondary characters in The Wages of Fear for Metanoia Theatre.in Brunswick, Melbourne. I have not been on the stage
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