Researcher remembers Greek cafe boom

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 18/06/2007

Reporter: Peter McCutcheon

Australia in the mid-20th century was a boom time for a type of business that has all but disappeared. With names like the Paragon, the Olympia or the Parthenon, and often with an art deco facade, the Greek cafe used to be a part of everyday Australian life. A Queensland researcher is now trying document this often overlooked chapter of recent Australian history, and has self-published a book on the subject entitled Aphrodite and the Mixed Grill.

Transcript

'Aphrodite and The Mixed Grill - Greek Cafes in twentieth century Australia', by Toni Risson, self-published - $49.50 plus $11 postage and handling

http://www.ipswich.qld.gov.au/documents/heritage/aphrodite_and_the_mixed_grill.pdf

KERRY O'BRIEN: Australia in the mid 20th Century was a boom time for a type of business that has all but disappeared. With names like the Paragon, Olympia and the Parthenon and often with an art-deco facade, the Greek cafe used to be a part of every day life. A Queensland researcher is documenting this part of Australia's history and has a self-published a book Aphrodite and the Mixed Grill. As Peter McCutcheon discovered, this part of history for many Greek Australians is still very much alive.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Angelo Pippos is one of the last of his kind. His business in western NSW is a rare living example of a phenomenon that swept the country nearly a century ago: the Greek cafe.

ANGELO PIPPOS: It's one of the original ethnic things that ever happened in Australia as far as we're concerned.

TONI RISSON, GREEK CAFE RESEARCHER: Certainly every town in New South Wales and Queensland would have had a Greek cafe.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Every town?

TONI RISSON: Yes!

PETER MCCUTCHEON: It's a story of hardship but ultimately success, for tens of thousands of Greek immigrants and their children.

CHRISOULA KONTOLEON: We've come here to work, so we done it.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: It was hard work?

CHRISOULA KONTOLEON: Hard work, hard work.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: The first Greek cafes can be traced back to the late 19th Century, originally trading as oyster saloons. And as the pioneers of these early businesses sponsored family members to migrate and work in their cafes, the business model expanded.

TONI RISSON: It was part of the chain migration process that saw so many come out and a natural thing that they would go into that business that they had learned.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Toni Risson is the author of Aphrodite and the Mixed Grill, a study of the rise and fall of the Greek cafe.

TONI RISSON: From the '30s onwards that's when you get this classic cafe form, where you get the cubicles down the sides, the confectionary counters, big dining room in the centre, the kitchen out the back, that's the beginning of the heyday which is the '30s right through to the '50s.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: That pretty much describes the Cafe Deluxe which is still doing business in the outback NSW town of Brewarrina. Operator Angelo Pippos inherited and business from his father, a migrant from Ithaca, who set up the cafe in 1926.

ANGELO PIPPOS: That seemed to be what the Greeks went into in those days. They never had experience in food before they got here. That's what they seemed to do.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: And indeed Chrisoula Kontoleon went into the cafe business with no previous experience after marrying her husband George in 1948.

CHRISOULA KONTOLEON: I never have a holiday, I never. 25 years in this shop, I never have a holiday.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: The Kontoleons, who like the majority of Greek cafe owners immigrated from the small island of Kythera, ran the Seaview cafe on Brisbane's north-east outskirts, until 1972. Living above the business, it was an all family affair, open up to 14 hours a day.

ANNA CASSAVETIS: It was a hard life, but in another way it was a good life.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: But the younger daughter of the Kontoleon family, Anna Cassavetis, is unsentimental about her life as a cafe kid.

ANNA CASSAVETIS: After school we had to help in the shop, fill the fridges. I can remember hours of standing there pumping oil because we had a big stove which was filled with oil and we'd have to pump the oil through. Chop the chips by hand, it was horrible, horrible.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Although Greek cafes may have differed in architectural style and size, they all had one thing in common, they never served anything resembling food from their homeland.

ANGELO PIPPOS: I don't know why they call them Greek cafes, there was never any Greek food there.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: There is one Australian dish, however, that Greek cafes claim to have invented. The once ubiquitous mixed grill.

ANGELO PIPPOS: I think it's true. When the mixed grill started there was no other cafes around, really.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Why was there no Greek food?

TONI RISSON: As one man said to me, they would have been strung up if they had served Greek food.

CHRISOULA KONTOLEON: We serve Australian food, but I cook Greek for the kids and my husband.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: But never in the cafe?

CHRISOULA KONTOLEON: No.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Why not?

CHRISOULA KONTOLEON: They don't know this taste.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Australia in the 1950s was a time Chrisoula Kontoleon recalls when even pasta was regarded with suspicion.

CHRISOULA KONTOLEON: I cook spaghetti and feed the kids and the kids next door come play with my kids and they see me feed the kids with spaghetti and go home to their mother and say, "Oh Mrs Kontoleon feed the kids worms." They don't know spaghetti. "They feed the kids worms." Oh, dear.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Greek cafes began to disappear in the 1960s with the spread of supermarkets and fast food chains. But the general success of Greek migration to Australia is their continuing legacy.

TONI RISSON: They definitely were at the forefront of our acceptance of other cultures being part of Australian culture. So if you like they've laid the groundwork for a lot of other communities that have followed them.

CHRISOULA KONTOLEON: You know those days where Greeks they have a cafes and fish shops and fruit shops and Australia say, "Oh, they're going to take over, like the Chinese." We wouldn't take it over. We worked very well with the Australians. Never have a trouble, never.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Slice of the past with Peter McCutcheon.