The 1916 ‘secret census’ of Greeks in Australia: Reclarifying some misconceptions
Source: NEOS KOSMOS
In a recent letter to the editor, Andrew Raftopoulos raised some interesting and noteworthy points around our work on the ‘secret census’. This letter is a response to his points on migrant class and who was/who was not counted.
Firstly, our paper on this can be accessed here for free and deals to a large extent with the questions that were raised.
Our paper also contextualises the racial views surrounding the ‘secret census’ and Greeks in general in more depth than the well-researched Neos Kosmos article, which due to word constraints had to paraphrase and summarise much of our work.
As a matter of wealthy or elite Greeks being included/not included, we took South Australia as a case study in our paper. The two families in question that were not counted were both landowning pastoralists, who had somewhat moved away from Greek Orthodoxy and to the most part shed their Greek identity and were perhaps considered ‘exemplary’ examples of ‘assimilation’ by local police. These families were the North (Tramountanas) family, and the Rallis. George (Tramountanas) North of Lemnos was the first Greek settler in SA, arriving at Port Adelaide in 1842. He married English migrant Lydia Vosper, and the pair converted to Catholicism, and bought pastoral land outside Port Lincoln, where they raised their two sons, and eventually had 22 grandchildren.
George died in 1911, but the North family had become prominent in the region and are still active Greek community members today. His sons and grandchildren were not counted despite their Greek origins, and despite other Australian-born Greeks being counted. The Norths are comparable to the Kefalonian migrant, and first ‘Greek’ naturalised in SA, Andrew Siffoli, who was counted, and others who had presumably ‘assimilated’ to some extent, including Port Wakefield’s Peter Dolf and John Black. The key differences ultimately were religion and social status (the Norths being pastoralists). Another case that has since arisen is that of Miltiadis Bidzanis (Michael De Diar) of Kytheran and Cretan origins, who was the first Greek in Port Pirie, where he became a successful trader, boat owner and pilot/master mariner. De Diar was also absent from the ‘secret census’.
The Rallis were similarly not counted. Stephen S. Ralli was a London-born Chiot, whose famous merchant family had escaped the Chios Massacre (1822). He settled in SA in the 1880s, and in 1886 had purchased 15,200 acres in Balaklava. Ralli had married the English Ida Cecil Beck, and had three sons, two of whom were born in Adelaide. The Ralli family bounced between Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, and even in his many obituaries in Australian papers after 1941, only 1 mentioned his Greek origins.
There were also cases of non-Greeks being counted as Greeks such as the Syrian (or Lebanese) migrants Alilem (Alikem) Alem and Michael Hessin (Nassin), the Persian fisherman Alex (Alik) Said, and the ‘Christian Turks’ Constantin Machail, Panagiotis Machail, and Nicholas Lolougis, all of Port Pirie. These men being counted imbued questions of who really was considered ‘Greek’. Additionally, while the ‘secret census’ challenges standard census numbers of Greeks in Australia during the 1910s, it itself is also challenged by other reports, such as out of Western Australia, which reported around 1,000 Greeks in 1916 newspapers, compared to the ‘secret census’ which noted only 285 in WA.
As is emphasised in our paper, there were a lot of nuances around who was and who was not counted, and there was no one rule followed.
We do agree with Raftopoulos’ sentiments around the counting being ad-hoc, as the specific guidelines only asked that Greeks and their businesses/meeting places be counted (which would have naturally included the cases of AJJ Lucas and Grigorios Matorikos mentioned by Raftopoulos, due to their businesses being ‘meeting places’). Although there were certainly urban middle-class ‘exceptions’, the vast majority of Greeks counted were working-class labourers (which reflected the demographics of Greek migrants at the time), who were perceived as the likeliest to become ‘threats’ if Greece joined the Central Powers.
Essentially, two forms were provided for police to follow. It was up to each police jurisdiction to count their own way, and when looking at the documents, there is a noticeable difference in information collected not only between states, but between townships. Essentially, it was not a uniform count, but they all did follow a rough outline (except Northern Territory who held their own census that only counted men of military age later in 1916 and included Maltese immigrants). The snapshots below show the orders to police, and the guiding forms – both very basic and open-ended, although still much more involved than any other migrant group that was counted during the period.
In all, the ‘secret census’ was a unique episode in the history of migrant monitoring. It raises many questions around class, religion, assimilation, naturalisation, migrant monitoring, war-time loyalties and suspicions, and who was considered Greek. It has become an invaluable resource for the current generation of researchers, and we look forward to interrogating it further to uncover what aspects of the early Greek community of Australia it can provide.
Please take the time to have a read of our article in Australian Historical Studies.
The original article: belongs to NEOS KOSMOS .
