Monday, 25 March 2024
Strangers' Dining Room, NSW Parliament House
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Bujari gamarruwa

Diyn Babana Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

In greeting you in the language of the Gadigal, Traditional Owners of this land, I pay my respects to Elders, past, present and emerging.  

Kalispera Sas. Good evening.

• Your Excellency, Mr Theodoros Livanious, welcome to New South Wales.
• Your Eminence, Archbishop Makarios,
• The Honourable Stephen Kamper, representing the Premier of NSW,
• Ministers, Distinguished Guests,

As one of the great ancient civilisations of the world, Greece has given to the world an enduring and multifaceted legacy.   Democracy, derived from those Greek words: ‘demos’ and ‘kratos’ is perhaps the greatest of those gifts.

Tonight, as we celebrate 203 years of Greek independence, we do so in the halls of the first Parliament in Australia established 200 years ago when the Legislative Council was first constituted pursuant to the Third Charter of Justice, passed by the British Parliament the previous year. 

It was barely representative government but the Charter of Justice and the establishment of what is now the Upper House in our bicameral Parliament in New South Wales laid the foundation for what the ancient Greeks knew was the best form of government for the peoples of a city, or a city or a nation.  

As I have said the legacy of the ancient Greeks is multifaceted:   the Socratic rhetoric of Plato’s Dialogues; something which has informed education in the great learned institutions of the world from Oxford to Harvard and even to my cohort at Sydney Law School;  there is the Iliad and Odyssey, which together with the Dialogues form two of the most influential works in literature; and Herodotus, who drew on a tradition of Ionian storytelling, his Histories clearly intended for public reading. 

The Greek language is the etymological source of much of the English language.  Take the word ‘History’ itself – the Greek root being history - meaning wise man, to be contrasted with the Latin histrionic. 

However, the modern emanation of our two nations could not be more different.  New South Wales took a steady course along the democratic route, gradually moving to representative and then responsible government in 1855, with our first written constitution and then, becoming part of the Commonwealth of States in 1901.  I should add that what few people know, however, is that when the then colony of New South Wales was deciding whether to join this new Commonwealth, not one but two referenda were necessary.

Greek Independence, as everyone in this room knows, was gained through a Revolution, commencing with the proclamation of Independence on 25 March 1821, the Feast Day of the Annunciation, by Bishop Germanos of Patras, who raised and blessed a banner with the Greek Cross outside the Monastery of Agia Lavra. The connection is clear: Throughout four centuries of Ottoman rule, from the 15th to the 19th centuries, the ‘poets of the people’, the clerics of the Greek Orthodox Church, had conscientiously protected and preserved the Greek language and culture, its literature, learning and faith.

One of the artists of that period was Theodoros Vryzakis (1814 – 1878), who became known as the ‘painter of the Revolution’. Growing up during the War of Independence, having witnessed his father’s death at the hands of the Ottoman army and fleeing with his mother to the mountains, he felt the emotive power of this period of Greek history keenly. He ‘put the pictures’ to the words “Eleftheria I Thanatos" (‘Freedom or Death’), which became the motto of Greece.

These words had originated in the Greek Filiki Eteria and the independence struggle’s songs of resistance. Indeed, the nine stripes on the Greek flag are said to represent the nine syllables of the call to freedom, the five blue stripes for Eleftheria and four white stripes for i thanatos.

In marking an important period in Greek history, we recognise that the War of Independence also changed the face and the future of modern Europe. In becoming an independent nation state, Greece provided impetus to the aspirations and the liberation of smaller nations.  Greece began to look west rather than east to the Ottoman empire, an impact that would later reverberate in the First World War, with Greece joining the Allies in 1917. In the Second, many thousands of Greeks, and over 17,000 Australian and Greek-Australian soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder in the devastating Battles of Greece and Crete.

There is much that is Greek in New South Wales.  From the first Greek migrants to NSW, seven pallikaria, Greek Independence freedom fighters who were transported to NSW in 1829 after being captured and mistakenly convicted of piracy, through successive waves of migration,  the early businesses, the ubiquitous fish and chip shops of the 50’s and 60’s , the emergence of a highly regarded professional class - all providing the ballast to a Greek community that has grown to become one of the largest and most successful diaspora communities in NSW.   

The Archibald Fountain at the northern end of Hyde Park perhaps best symbolises the contribution of the Greek community, with its depiction of the Apollo, Diana, Pan and lastly Theseus, who represents the embodiment of the pursuit of the public good.

To the NSW Hellenic community – and the people of Greece:

Zito I Ellas! Long live Greece!