Here and There – Greece

Perhaps because it is at the ‘wrong’ end of Europe, the eastern end, the furthest away from the UK where I grew up, I have seldom visited Greece, and, with one exception, only after I had moved to Australia!  When I did visit, I was usually in Athens, and my time largely taken up with meetings.  However, the first time I went there was when I was moving to Australia.  Back in the 1970s tourism wasn’t the big business it is now, and it was possible to wander around the Acropolis.  You could stand in the remains of the Parthenon, and the Temple of Athena Nike.  You could walk over rubble left from the various damaged temples and visit the Pandroseion, with its porch roof held up by six marble Caryatids, although even that was cordoned off, as that part of the site was deemed unstable.  I never had the chance to return to the Acropolis when back in Athens, although on two visits I could see it from my hotel room.  Equally frustrating is that I can’t find the photographs I took that first time, nor those taken a week later in Egypt, although some taken by one of my daughters have survived.

In some ways my recollections seem appropriate to the place.  The Acropolis I saw was a muddle, remnants of majestic columns laying around higgledy-piggledy.  The site lacked the guided tours that now take place, in sharp contrast to the stolen Elgin marbles in London which were elegantly and preciously displayed.  Taken together the two provide a visual image of the aftermath of Greek culture.  Ruins along with some books, plays, second-hand versions of Plato’s dialogues and other materials, balanced alongside centuries of scholarship, with interpretations, translations, and imaginative reconstructions by scholars from across the western world.   Greek fragments counterposed to modern exegesis.  As I look back at that first visit, ignorant then as to what I was seeing, what was the most compelling image?  It was seeing groups of old men sitting on steps near the Acropolis playing backgammon!

There is one other memory from that time, far more vivid than seeing monumental ruins.  Travelling with my family, on the way to Adelaide, we wanted to see the Greek Islands – but we had very limited money.  Down at the harbour in Piraeus, the cost to travel to the more famous islands was out of our reach, but there was one cheap ferry that would take us to a small island where we could have lunch before returning in the late afternoon.  I can’t remember which one it was: it might have been Poros.  There were no other tourists on the ferry, and it was obviously off the popular route (perhaps most of the islands were at the time).  There was little time for looking at the sights once we arrived there, and after wandering around for a while we found a tavern where we could get a meal (and ice cream!).

With no real sense of what was best to do, we sat at a table.  A waiter noticed us.  He didn’t come over, and when he looked over a few minutes later, I gave a tentative wave.  He turned away, to get a menu I presumed, and so we sat and waited.  He didn’t come over.  I saw him again a few minutes later and waved a little more forcefully.  We sat there alone.  Eventually, an older man from one of the tables came over.  He’d heard us talking and had understood our predicament.  He explained that everyone had assumed we were Germans.  My wife’s hair was pale brown, probably looked blond, mine was fair, and our children all had blond bleached hair from swimming in chlorinated pools.  He told us we would never get served but, if would like to go with him, he could offer something at his house.  I was stunned, and more than a little uncertain.  However, at the very least we needed water, and so we agreed.

Would we have done that today?  I suppose the situation would be very different.  We would have been travelling with water bottles and snacks.  Tourism is a major industry, especially in Greece and the Greek islands.  There would have been others on the boat, and the locals would want our business, wherever we came from.  Back then, we were alone, and it was risky, but I was young and ignorant.  Our host proved to be a lovely man.  He provided us with an antipasto meal and soft drinks.  He wouldn’t accept any money and kept apologising for the behaviour of his neighbours.  For once my children had the good sense not to complain, especially as I promised we would get ice cream back in Athens.

To put all that in context, I had travelled quite frequently with my family.  We’d been to France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, and Austria, and I’d spent time in other European countries.  The trips had always been enjoyable, and I’d managed to communicate through a combination of English, schoolboy French, and enthusiasm.  Over the years we travelled, in the period between twenty and thirty years after the Second World War, the main evidence of the Germans and Italians were cemeteries, bombed buildings, abandoned tanks and howitzers in parks for children to play on, and a few museums.  I suppose we were usually in places where the English were seen as allies.  Like many others in the baby boomer generation, all I knew of history was a simplified account of the war and its aftermath.  The boomers were fortunate, (I was born a year before that famous generation burst on the scene). As wealth and the standard of living shot up, things, well things ‘flowered’ in those years.  The boomers should be called the lucky generation, far luckier than any that have followed.

My education had been narrow.  I hadn’t been interested in history and knew little about the war and its aftermath.  I’d focussed on science, especially geology, at school, and then social anthropology, learning about people in Melanesia, Papua New Guinea, and Asia. That lunchtime was like a wake-up call, or perhaps a slap in the face.  A wake up and realisation that knowing about the Trobriand Islands offers a rather narrow view of society, albeit quite fascinating in its limited way.  Forty years later, that day in Greece remains sharp and uncomfortable.  Sharp, because my memory, certainly ‘improved’ over time, is clear about our being ignored, and the kind islander.  Uncomfortable, as I still recall that I felt ashamed when the situation was explained to me.  Not just ashamed because I hadn’t understood, but ashamed because I felt we were like the Germans to those islanders, pale-skinned, fair hair, and speaking a language that the people around us didn’t understand.  Ashamed because we represented, albeit mistakenly, the people who had oppressed these islands, murdered locals, raped women, and had stolen whatever they wanted.  Ashamed because we were interlopers, strangers who had assumed that we would be liked, kindly hosted and respected.

It was a good lesson, and one I’ve never forgotten.  Just because I had a good education, went to a good university, had read fairly widely, and researched various of topics, I wasn’t so special, just another person who should always respect the people I meet.  I had learnt about other cultures and other people in social anthropology and understood the very different ways in which societies develop and are structured.  This was different.  This was personal.  The people I met were people very much like me.  That painful and uncomfortable day on the island knocked the last bit of English privileged stuffing out of me.

It wasn’t an overnight change.  No sooner had I come to terms with the advantages of my upbring and education than I was in Australia, a Reader (Associate Professor) in a university, living a nice middle-class life in a lovely part of Adelaide.  Just down the road were beaches (for the children) and wineries (for the adults).  My colleagues were as varied as in any workplace:  some thoughtful, kind, and interesting, others rude, self-centred, and boring. Almost immediately I was involved with the Medical School, I started various research projects, and I relished the Adelaide International Arts Festival: it was only a little later I realised it was biennial event, with rather less going on for the 101 weeks in between!

It also took me some time to realise that Adelaide was like an island, several hundred miles to the next large city, surrounded by desert, an oasis in a dry region.  Of course, it was quite unlike Greece and its islands.  This was a ‘new’ place, and the Greek and Italian families I got to know in Adelaide were Aussies, happy to sustain a lingering but weak attachment to a place they were unlikely to see again (many had arrived just before or after the Second World War).  There was a popular tourist spot, a ‘German’ town close by, settled by immigrants, Lutherans from Prussia, most arriving in 1838.  The German influence was still evident in the architecture of the surviving buildings.  More to the point for visitors, several restaurants in the town served German cuisine (German in the same sense Chinese restaurants overseas serve ‘Chinese’ food).  Bizarrely, in the First World War the South Australian Government changed many German place names, and for a while Hahndorf was known as Ambleside, not because it resembled the town in the English Lake District, but because that was the name of a nearby railway station (which I suppose must have been so named by UK immigrants).

Sunshine, wine, beaches, a seductive 1970s lifestyle in a pleasant, planned city.  The centre of Adelaide was laid out as a square, with four small open grassed squares.  The two to the north, Hindmarsh Square and Light Square were named after early explorers, surrounded by shops, hotels, cultural centres and the like.  The two to the south, Whitmore and Hurtle Squares, with similar naming pedigrees, were in a more commercial part of the city where there were offices, pubs and cheaper hotels.  When we arrived there, Hurtle Square was home to a small Aboriginal community.  Going past there was the first time I had seen indigenous people, and new friends suggested it was a place best to avoid.

Now that was a surprise.  In Australia, we quickly learnt the dominant view was that this was an egalitarian part of the world.  All mates down at the pub, just blokes and sheilas in a classless society.  Relaxed, ‘free and easy’, Adelaide was a town for young people.  More than egalitarian, it was ‘open’:  people ate out much of the time, and parties inevitably included neighbours.  It was easy to live in this young country, and not even notice any Aboriginals, out of sight, out of mind, an inconvenient but largely invisible reminder this hadn’t been ‘terra nullis’ when Cook claimed the land before the British arrived to settle.

Long after my time in Adelaide, Hurtle Square has become home to The Forest of Dreams.  This is a piece of public art, by Anton Hart.  Those four words, in steel and granite, mark the beginning of the four paths at each corner of the square.  To quote from the city’s website, it is “a work that explores the contemporary landscape.  Note how it just as easily reads Dreams of the Forest.  Words have a long history of use in describing public space.  The four words remain as entry points from the road into the park, creating and maintaining a separation of space which the artist suggests is important in understanding the pre-settlement history of the location.  The benches that accompany the work invite people to sit and contemplate their surroundings.  The work also acts to unite the four quadrants of the Square.”

In fact, contemplating the Square, with a major road running through the middle, is to look at an empty space.  There are a few trees, a lot of grass, and several paths made from squares of stone or concrete.  Is this meant to be a strange way to remind us of the Aboriginal Dreamtime?  Or perhaps to symbolise how Europeans came and stamped out Aboriginal culture?  It is hard to let your mind explore ideas when there is the buzz of cars, trucks and buses filling the air.  Is this to encourage us to dream about what we have lost, the forests we have cut down, the environment we have stamped on?  I’m confident the City can explain.

However, I find it achieves a very different outcome for me.  It reminds me of that Greek island.  In Hurtle Square we are the ‘Germans’, occupants for a mere 250 years, while the Indigenous people are the ‘Greeks’, almost erased after 40,000 years.  The people from the ‘pre-settlement history’ must hate us, just as the Greeks hated those fascist empire builders.  Most don’t want to share a meal with us, nor do they want to share their culture.  Why would they.  We have shown ourselves to be ignorant, thoughtless and exploitative.

A recurring issue in Australian politics is seeking to find some way to deal with the past.  Various attempts have been made at apologising for what was done to the native Australians when the British turned up.  Slowly, often apparently grudgingly, we recognise ownership of the land, well some of it anyway.  We use the word reconciliation, but I think reconciliation is close to impossible.  It is like saying to young people they need to reconcile the physical abuse their grandfather meted out on his wife, both now dead.  It is like asking the Germans to reconcile the pain and suffering they inflicted on the Greeks eighty years ago.  All too late.

The Greek heritage that lives on is not just the Parthenon and the other extraordinary remains on the Acropolis.  It is the contributions of people like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  They were lucky, their ideas and theories have been saved, translated and made available.  Indigenous Australians have not been so fortunate.  We have artefacts, music, cave paintings and some dance ceremonies.  The contributions of their thinkers, their ideas, are almost totally lost.  It’s not that they don’t try to explain their culture, but we are poor listeners.  The world as they see it is almost invisible to us, and what we hear in Dreamtime songs and stories tends to be written off as little more than colourful myths.  It isn’t just laziness, although that plays a part, but it is the phenomenological challenge of setting aside how we understand the world around us, and accept we need look at things with a very different perspective.  Innovators in art and science know that issue well as they attempt to re-present experiences.  When it comes to Aboriginal views, we happily, lazily, reply “I just can’t see it”.  Once again, I am ashamed, ashamed to be part of an Australia that obliterates the past, an Australia of recent arrivals who are seemingly unwilling to stop and listen.

There was a Greek writer who put it well.  In his History of the Peloponnesian War, in a passage sometimes named The Melian Conference, Thucydides sets out the opening remarks of the Athenian invaders: “For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences–either of how we have a right to our empire because we over‑threw the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us–and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Must it always be the strong crushing the weak?  Thucydides wrote about physical oppression, but that’s the easy part to notice.  When Carol Gilligan explained how women’s views were made invisible, she acknowledged she was up against a pervasive culture: “so much a part of everyday living that it never has to be articulated. Fish don’t know they are swimming in water, until they are a fish out of water. It is when culture shifts that we recognize the ocean in which we have been drenched.”  We still don’t see how our culture swamps Aboriginals.  There’s indigenous art in galleries, but now we’re promoting artists who’re moving on from traditional culture.  Is that the best we can do in the 21st Century, a disappearing world left to be mourned by the old men and women sitting on steps beside Uluru, their ‘acropolis’.

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