Diaspora and Colonialism in Australia in the 1920s: The Case of Alekos Doukas’s Migrant ‘Voyage South’

Abstract

This essay aims to locate a Greek migrant subject in Australia in the interwar years at the intersection of two tangential but related discourses of European settlement, that of the dominant white colonial discourse and that of the Greek diaspora which mediated the existence of Greek communities in Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century. The approach is biographical in the sense that it tracks the personal narrative of Alekos Doukas1, an Asia Minor Greek refugee, on his migratory voyage to Australia in 1927 and his first ten months in the country. The narrative is based on his letters home to his family and brother, the writer Stratís Doukas, in Greece.