George Damousi in Gertrude Street in Melbourne’s inner-city suburb of Fitzroy, soon after arriving in Australia from Greece in the late 1950s. My father, George, a village boot maker, migrated from the northern Greek town of Florina in the Olympian year of 1956, and then arranged for my mother Sofia, a dressmaker, and one-year old sister Mary, to join him in 1957. George Damousi (in sunglasses) and wife Sofia (centre) with family and friends in Florina in 1956 before making the momentous decision to leave. My mother would remind us repeatedly that this was not what she had given up her life for in rural Greece when she made the life-defining decision to abandon her village, her family and community, to travel to the other side of the world. The suburb had been condemned and the sensationalist press undertook a major campaign to highlight the outrageous poverty and slums this once-gracious suburb had descended into by the 1960s. ![]() ![]() The squalid, dilapidated boarding houses, the drunkards on the streets and the century-old Victorian houses in desperate need of light and repair drove my parents’ ambitions to move out as soon as they possibly could. The things I adored about growing up in the inner-city were the very aspects my parents despised. I loved the excitement of the fire sirens and lights going full throttle, neighbours spilling and milling onto the street just as the sun was rising. My mother ran about keeping us out of the way and my father raged through the house cursing the owner (who he believed lit the fires to get the insurance). It periodically caught alight and the fire brigade would use our passageway to put through their massive hoses in the early hours of the morning. We lived next door to a decrepit and decaying boarding house for single elderly men. Was it simply the glow, the freedom and innocence of childhood that made me love it so much? Or was there something about that time and my personal circumstances, which arouse such memories?Ĭhildhood is a time of roaming and freedom, and mine was eventful. Joy Damousi started school with no English, but her’s was not an unusual situation: most of her classmates were in the same boat. My parents may have came from the tobacco farms of rural Greece but my earliest memories are of being an inner city kid. And I loved it: the laneways, the alleyways, the bitumen and solid old historical buildings. The landscape of my childhood was bound and defined by the narrow, meandering streets and lanes of the area. ![]() I grew up in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in the 1960s and early 70s. I am the child of Greek post-war immigrants.
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