Abstract

The is now an identifiable constellation of Greek archival collections in Australia. These collections contribute to telling alternative histories of Australian multiculturalism. This paper considers how archives which hold Greek language collections – like the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora (La Trobe University), the Greek Australian Archive (State Library of New South Wales) and Our People, Their Stories (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia) – represent a plethora of Greek pasts, politics, peoples and places. By the mid-1980s, archiving Greek experiences in Australia had become a source of fascination and urgency in ethnic community and academic spheres. Seen as treasuries of memory, active archiving became a viable means to ensure aspects of Hellenic cultural activity in Australia were brought out of obscurity and not forgotten. Archiving, in other words, conveyed a twofold message: first, the importance of preserving Greek migrant pasts to tell stories of multicultural Australia; second, to make available to future researchers how Hellenic culture was reworked by those living in diaspora. In recent years,  archival projects have re-imagined how to document and preserve diasporic cultural expressions. Such archival endeavours, which range from collecting the minutes of ethnics community associations to family photographs and oral testimonies through to public heritage murals, make observable the contemporary importance, motivation for and effects of making diasporic community archives accessible. By examining how Greek archival collections in Australia have evolved, I demonstrate that archiving Australia’s many Greek diasporas has played, and continues to play, a crucial role in the representation of diasporic pluralism.

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