FOR OVER FOUR DECADES, photographer Effy Alexakis has been quietly rewriting Australian history — one portrait, one interview, one carefully preserved memory at a time. What began as a personal response to grief — the sudden loss of her father in 1983 — evolved into the most comprehensive visual and oral record of Greek-Australian life ever assembled.

Together with historian Leonard Janiszewski, her partner in both life and work, Alexakis has criss-crossed Australia and travelled around Greece, documenting stories that challenge stereotypes and reveal the true depth of Greek contributions to Australian society. From the goldfields of the 1850s to the fading neon glow of country milk bars, from the pearling boats of northern Australia to the soup kitchens of modern Sydney, her lens has captured a community’s journey — from migrants to settlers to Australians.

This interview reveals the story behind the archive they’ve built — a vast, decades-long project capturing the visual and spoken histories of Greek-Australians across generations and geography. It explores how a trained art teacher became an accidental historian; why Greek cafés served as unlikely conduits of American modernity; and what it means to preserve 1,500 audio cassettes’ worth of memories for future generations. It’s a conversation about identity, about the power of images to reshape national narratives, and about the quiet determination required to prove wrong those who once said, “Greeks don’t buy books.”

Most importantly, it’s about why a photograph of two men — one Greek, one First Nations — mud-crabbing together in 1940s Darwin might be just as revolutionary today as when the shutter first clicked. For 40 years, she and Leonard Janiszewski have built the most complete visual archive of Greek-Australian life. Here, we present their journey entirely in Effy’s own words — no cuts, no summaries — just the unfiltered story of how grief, curiosity, and a camera reshaped Australian history.

When Effy Alexakis began documenting Greek-Australian life in 1983, she wasn’t just taking photos—she was correcting history. This unfiltered interview traces how grief, serendipity, and 1500 cassette tapes built an archive that redefined a community’s place in Australia.

We weren’t just documenting Greeks in Australia. We were proving they’d been shaping Australia since the 1850s gold rushes – a story nobody had told.  — effy alexakis

Personal and Collaborative Journey

EFFY ALEXAKIS:
“The loss of my father was the catalyst for the ongoing documentation of Greek-Australians. When he died of a sudden, fatal heart attack I was doing a Post Grad Diploma in Photography; I had already completed a Bachelor of Arts and had done the one year teaching Diploma, the plan was to start my career as an art teacher, which I had already started. Leonard and I met at Sydney Teachers College, we were both doing a teaching diploma and both of us had initially intended to be art teachers. My father’s death made me question this path. Leonard’s other main interest was Australian history, he was writing a Master’s thesis at Sydney University about the gold rushes and told me of the Greek names he was discovering on the New South Wales goldfields. This knowledge, that Greeks were in Australia at that time, the 1850s, was new and exciting. It was generally not known that Greeks had been here from such an early period. Our approach was to combine the history with the photography, so that is what we did; we started travelling around the country interviewing and photographing Greek-Australians nationally.”

“The same year of my father’s death (1983) I changed career, I began a job as a junior photographer at Macquarie University. For the project we had started, being at a young university and having academics as mentors was very motivating and assisted in us seeing a clear direction for the work we were doing. People such as Professors Max Kelly and Peter Spearritt, both Australian social historians, and Professor Gillian Bottomley, a migration and sociology academic, was truly inspiring. Presenting exhibitions became a big part of showing my work to the community and helped in broadening my network of potential subject matter. I loved fine art printing, most of my early analogue work is black and white. Whilst I worked as a photographer at Macquarie University an equal passion was teaching, which I did at the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP), I taught classes of an evening for about 25 years.”

“Our two earliest books record our travels around Australia and also Greece. The first one Images of Home: Mavri Xenitia, published in 1995, looked at what is ‘home’ and included many interviews and the photography we did on Kythera, Ithaca and Kastellorizo. These islands were where the largest number of early Greek migrant-settlers to Australia had come from. Our aim was to see what had been left behind, we also found many Greek-Australian returnees and their reasons for returning. The second book was the umbrella title of the project In Their Own Image: Greek-Australians. Both were published by well-respected Australian history publisher Hale & Iremonger, sadly both now out of print, and the publisher is no more.”

“The In Their Own Image book also served as a companion publication to a major exhibition – that carried the same title – we curated in partnership with the State Library of New South Wales. It was a successful partnering in that we attracted a Visions Australia grant which helped us create a professional exhibition that travelled to significant cultural venues in most of the Australian states, as well as being invited to be displayed in Greece – Athens in 2000 (part of the Sydney Olympics Cultural Olympiad) and Thessaloniki in 1997 (part of the city’s Cultural Capital of Europe program). I am sad that the companion book is now not available, as I am proud of the historical narrative and the photographic archive we managed to document. Essentially, it and the exhibition were a pictorial, thematic history of Greek-Australians nationally. The themes were: Early Settlement; Work; Migration & Remigration; Identity; Aspects of Greek-Australian Life; and Comparisons.”

Stereotypes persisted because no one asked Greeks to describe themselves. We did.

“The stereotypes which I have always been interested in dispelling – which were the Greek café and milk bar, the black clad widow, the folkloric stereotype of wearing national dress, and Greeks being not just post-war settlers – such images were immersed with the Greek-Australians we met around the country: academics, sheep farmers, crocodile hunters, mining families in Coober Pedy, fishing families in Thevenard, sugarcane cutters and farmers in Queensland, pearlers in northern Australia, women doing non-traditional occupations, descendants of the goldminers that were 4th and 5th generation Greek-Australian, and much, much more.”

Greek Cafés and Cultural Impact

EFFY ALEXAKIS:
“In the late 1980s we drove around Australia on various field trips. We documented many Greek cafés in country towns and cities nationally. At this time the ‘heyday’ of the café and milk bar had long passed. Often it was the elderly owners that ran them, with their children having gone to the city to study. Generally, the cafés were never intended for the second generation, they wanted a better future for their children. From the start of our project we would copy historical photographs that people had in their photo albums, their arrival to Australia, their businesses, where they came from, family studio portraits, etc.”

“With the cafés we realised how rich these historical photos were. The cafés were often the pride of the country towns, and the owners spent money to keep them updated and modern. Apart from my contemporary photographs many of the historical café images in our book, Greek Cafés & Milk Bars of Australia, are sourced from these individuals, and not available in public archives or libraries. Two or three of the historical images we have in the book were taken by renowned photographers Max Dupain and by Frank Hurley. Because the café and milk bar were indeed a stereotype, we did not publish this book first, as it would reinforce that this was the only occupation that Greek-Australians were engaged with.”

“The focus on American culture in the cafés was made obvious by some of the historical photographs we found. Early window signage would state ‘American Ice Cream and Chocolates’, and we know that many of the early café owners here had relatives in America and some had even worked there themselves. It was also reflected in the menus, the names of the drinks, as well as the names of the cafés – the Niagara, The Hollywood, The Monterey, The California, The Golden Gate, etc. The Greek diaspora was a vehicle for the introduction of American modernity and popular culture into Australia. The Greek cafés and milk bars introduced American food-catering technology and products, American Streamline Moderne Art Deco architecture, and even rock and roll music long before its acceptance on broadcast radio. Their symbiotic relationship with cinemas, that many Greeks also owned and operated, reinforced that fantasy of America through films.”

“As each café disappears it is so important to document them; the younger generation do not have the experience of them and don’t understand the cultural, social and historical significance of what they once were. The café book did well critically and commercially – second print run had to be undertaken. Given how many stories we have amassed on cafés and milk bars, we are currently preparing a second volume. The photographs, both contemporary and historical, married with their stories, are significant. We must publish them to ensure that they are on public record, especially given that most of these businesses have disappeared, and that many of the pioneering Greeks that were once in the nation’s country towns, have either passed away, or moved to the larger urban centres and cities. Photography and associated oral histories awaken interest and reveal the past as the foundation of the present, and the potential future. In combination, they are immediately accessible to both the young and senior Australians and reaffirming of the significance, impact and transnational influences of the Greek-Australian historical and contemporary experience.”

Identity and Representation

EFFY ALEXAKIS:
“I often ponder as to why the Greeks tend to retain their cultural heritage more than other cultures given we have been in Australia a very long time. We hyphenate ourselves (Greek-Australians) and it is accepted now, more so than when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. I had experienced name calling growing up in an area that wasn’t very Greek and I think that toughened me up. I’m always very conscious that we should be labelled as settlers, not migrants, particularly given the multigenerational presence. Many of the 4th and 5th generation that we have interviewed really do not have much of the Greekness remaining. Generally, they recognise that an aspect of their family’s historical background is Greek, but culturally, the Greek language has often been lost, together with religious and social elements, particularly when successive, generational intermarriages have occurred.”

“One of the reasons we became obsessive with recording Greek stories of migration and settlement was to balance what was available in libraries and public institutions, to add to the mainly Anglo focus, we had to include our stories. One of our early drivers was that our first publisher stated that ‘Greeks don’t buy books’ – with the success of our books, that certainly is not the case; both Greeks and non-Greeks have acquired our published work. The complex diversity of Greek involvement, at times seminal, across the full spectrum of the social-cultural, economic and political development of modern Australia is what our visual and written work has attempted to achieve in order to challenge and disparage pre-existing Greek-Australian stereotypes. This is the understanding that we hope that those visiting our exhibitions or reading our publications will take away with them.”

Archival Project: In Their Own Image

EFFY ALEXAKIS:
“As stated above, we called the project ‘In Their Own Image‘ from the outset, as we wanted Greek-Australians to use their own words in describing themselves, and to photograph them in their private and public spaces – this had not previously been undertaken and as such stereotypes persisted. We started the project in 1982 and have literally thousands of historical and contemporary images. In March 2025, we announced our gifting of the archive to the State Library of New South Wales. The Mitchell Librarian, Richard Neville, has always been a great supporter of our work and we believe it is the right place for us to leave it – the State Library of New South Wales is one of the nation’s most significant research and collecting institutions.”

“Hopefully future photographers, artists, writers, academics, researchers and students will be able to access and do their own research from our collection, to provide fresh new insights, challenges, responses, and interrelationships with other visual and/or written documentation – the collection will take on new meanings, new intersections, new directions. It will take us a minimum of two years to digitise and provide the information and historical context for public accessibility. I want to scan the negatives myself as I have always been a perfectionist with quality and the way I want the images to look. We are also trying to fundraise the money needed to assist with additional digitising and databasing. We have over 1500 audio cassette tapes and many documents that need to be digitised! The archive represents our life’s work and we feel a huge burden has lifted knowing that an institution will be its perpetual caretaker. So the next few years we will be involved in rediscovering our past work.”

Recent Works and Future Directions

EFFY ALEXAKIS:
“Our two recent projects Forty Photographs: A Year at a Time and The Heart of Giving, Father Nektarios’ Soup Kitchen, were undertaken during the COVID period. Both started as exhibitions. I had been asked by the Greek Festival of Sydney Festival Chair Ms Nia Karteris to think of an exhibition to celebrate their 40th year of the festival. It also was my own forty years of documenting so it worked brilliantly that I had time during the lockdowns to go through my archive and I decided to select an image a year, use the original text and then update that with current thoughts about each image used. The exhibition worked well so I translated that work into book form. I believe that the hard work in creating an exhibition becomes less transient when it becomes a book. Both of these projects are also more personal than our earlier books.”

“As a working photographer time was always limited, it was cathartic to have this time (during COVID) to review and look back at my images. The In Their Own Image project was always done around fulltime work and family commitments and during the selection for the Forty Photographs I would sometimes look at some negative sheets and could barely recall having photographed those people! I am really looking forward to starting the digitisation of the negatives because I think we will rediscover images that we had no time to focus on previously. As an example, we are currently preparing to present a brief paper at an upcoming seminar on Greek and First Nations connections. I found a photo of a Greek man in Darwin with a First Nations man mud crabbing in the 1940s. A very unusual image, and very rare to have this documented, we had obviously realised its importance by copying the photograph and then just filed it away. It was an exciting find.”

“The Heart of Giving, Father Nektarios’ Soup Kitchen project was a documentary photographer’s dream project. I would visit the soup kitchen once or twice a week for over two years. Father Nektarios is a well-loved, kind and generous priest, with many calling him a ‘living saint’. One of his volunteers who had worked with him for decades suggested that it would be a project that I would enjoy. When we normally record someone’s story, Leonard interviews them on tape (now digital) as per Oral History Association guidelines – high quality and ethical guidelines being observed. When I worked on the Soup Kitchen book, I used an iphone to get accurate and brief quotes from people, I wanted a more spontaneous response to questions I asked. I also spent sleepless nights worrying about how I was going to depict people experiencing homelessness, I did not want to objectify what some people were going through. I worked hard trying to get the book done as I wanted Father Nektarios to see it, he was born in 1935 and is frail in health. People are generally hesitant about the cover, thinking it may be a religious book. Being a Very Reverend Archimandrite I wanted to give him the respect of his position. Beyond the cover, the book tells the stories of the volunteers and those that seek food and support, the day to day running of a soup kitchen. I wanted a holistic documentation, photographing volunteers, the people that use the soup kitchen, social workers, a funeral director, and other Greek Orthodox parish churches that also provide food, all acknowledging that it was Father Nektarios’ that inspired them to do so for their communities.”

EFFY ALEXAKIS’s work stands as a monumental achievement in Australian cultural documentation. Through her photographs and collected oral histories, she has preserved the rich tapestry of Greek-Australian experience in its full complexity – from the earliest settlers to contemporary community heroes like Father Nektarios.

Her archive, soon to be accessible through the State Library of NSW, will ensure future generations can continue learning from these stories. As she prepares to digitize this lifetime of work, one senses that for Effy, the most exciting discoveries may still lie ahead – in images forgotten but not lost, in voices preserved on cassette tapes waiting to speak again, in the ongoing story of a community that helped shape modern Australia.

This is history made visible, personal, and profoundly human – exactly as Effy Alexakis intended.

For photographers, Alexakis’s archive is both a gift and a challenge: How will you document the unseen stories of your time? As her 40-year project enters the public realm, it reminds us that every image is a future memory waiting to be awakened.

All images courtesy of the artist. More information about Effy Alexakis’ work: Photowrite