Copyright (1930)

Nicholas Lianos, who performed as a singer in New South Wales under his stage name Nick Leenos in the 1920s and 1930s, also composed his own ‘hit‘ song, Goodbye My Love, and was quick to register it for copyright.

While Nick Leenos’s song farewelled a sweetheart, Dimitrios Fouras and his family could probably nevertheless identify with the song’s poignant lyric ‘remember me …‘.

At the age of ten, Dimitrios left his home in Manesi, Greece to come to Australia to live in Southport in Queensland. Dimitrios (Jim) and his brother Theodore lived with their uncle, Michael Theodore, a café proprietor, while they attended the local Church of England Boy’s School – a school Jim was still attending when he applied to become a naturalised Australian citizen not long after his sixteenth birthday.

In 1967 Jim married his wife Maria (née Kentrotis) in Brisbane; five years later, the public servant and father of two returned to his birth country for a family visit, 23 years after he had left as a child … and just five years before he was first elected to the Queensland Parliament.

National Archives, Australia, Canberra, A.C.T.

From,

Article on groundbreaking Greeks, NAA