ABSTRACT
In 1897, on the eve of Australia’s Federation, a handful of migrants from Greece gathered together to form a community organization, the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria. The Community’s founders were eager to maintain their distinctive cultural heritage in the British colony where they lived as foreigners who had become successful businessmen. In forming their association, however, the foreigners also gave institutional shape to a certain principle of ethno-cultural diversity and this during times that following the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples, gave rise to a newly federated White Australia. Surprisingly, a form of association that presupposes cultural pluralism took shape and flourished just as the white Australian state, which came into being by denying equal citizenship status to Aboriginal peoples, was busy setting up the machinery to enforce race-based immigration restriction controls in the name of maintaining the racial purity of its British people. The Greek community leaders saw no contradiction in their actions. Absolute devotion to their own Greek national origins did not bar them from demonstrating their genuine political allegiance to the Australian state or from showing respect for the presumed higher status of its British people as was expected of the foreigners. On the contrary, as if to anticipate Lenard’s claim concerning the link between a society’s nation-building efforts and its reliance upon multicultural policies and programs oriented towards fostering trust relations, they took the view that to render public the precise nature of their dual loyalties was to supply evidence of a moral character and integrity in the foreigners that rendered them trustworthy and hence worthy of the BritishAustralian authorities’ acceptance (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2004, 55-118).
