Georgios Dim. Kritharis

This biography is part of a collection from "Life in Australia" :


Catoomba, in New South Wales, is one of the most important country towns in Australia. It lies about 29 miles away from Sydney, with which it is linked by rail. This country town, with its beautiful parks and magnificent hotels, is a great rural delight. It has many houses and in particular holiday homes, used during the summer. It is surrounded by a row of lofty mountains, which make it a place where one may recuperate and recover one’s strength. It is therefore visited by large numbers even from Europe itself. The climate is cool, even in the summer. At a small distance lie the large and famed Wentworth Falls, to see which large numbers of foreigners travel every day.

Thanks, however, to Mr. G. D. Kritharis, who comes from Kythera, a Greek shop was opened there in 1922, after Mr. Kritharis had been in Australia for four years.

His commercial name is "Comino".


This biography is part of a collection from "Life in Australia" published in 1916 by John Comino. It is an important book as it was one of the first Greek books published in Australia for the Greeks back in the homeland. If they needed any more convincing of the golden opportunities awaiting them in Australia, it probably helped create interest amongst young Kytherians and other Greeks. Each of the men portrayed in the book paid for the honour, which, considering their reputation for thriftiness, must have made the decision a hard one for many a Kytherian.

The Kythera-Family.net team, with the support of the Nicolaus Aroney Trust and other generous sponsors, has undertaken to transcribe the entire book for the website and to translate it into English for the non-greek-speaking diaspora community. We hope to also produce a printed version of the translation of Life in Australia sometime in 2005.

For valuable information about the historical background of the publication of Life in Australia, please read the entry by Hugh Gilchrist I ZOI EN AFSTRALLIA in the History, General History section.