During the 1950s and 1960s, political events in Greece and Australia resulted in the close scrutiny of members of the Greek community by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). This paper considers the political activism by post-war migrants and explores the notion of political assimilation, arguing that assimilation was not only a cultural but also a political choice. This surveillance applied to both left- and right-wing members of the Greek community, although this took place in differing degrees and for different reasons. I argue that it was not exclusively left-wing organisations such as the Communist Party of Australia that were of interest to ASIO. They were concerned to follow and keep oversight of anti-Communist, right-wing and pro-British organizations which particularly expressed allegiance to the Greek monarchy. I argue that in attracting attention across a range of groups, surveillance was not only related to politics, but also to ethnicity. Drawing on the extensive ASIO files on Greek activists, this paper analyses these unexamined sources to argue for a more complex history of the political agency of migrants in post-war Australia.
Bio
Joy Damousi is Professor of History, Dean of Arts and Director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University. She has published on Australian political history, memory and aftermaths of war, women’s history, and the history of migration and refugees. She has served as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Australian Historical Association and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. Her latest publication is The Humanitarians: Child Refugees and Australian Humanitarianism in a Transnational world, 1919-1975 (Cambridge 2022).
