184 Years Since First Greek Arrivals in Australia

On August 28, 184 years were completed since the day the first Greeks demonstrably set foot on Australia. Those first Greeks were seven sailors from the Greek island of Hydra, who were accused and convicted of piracy against a  British ship.

According to other information, Greeks had arrived in Australia before the seven convicts, but this has not been proved with data.

Hugh Gilchrist, who has been Ambassador of Australia in Greece for several years, has thoroughly researched the case of arrivals, even forced ones, of those Greeks in Australia as well as the history of  Greek migration to the continent in general; after working methodically for decades on this matter, he gave stirring and revealing aspects of the issue.

According to Gilchrist, in July 1827, during the struggle of Greeks against the Ottomans, in the Libyan Sea, the ship Hercules from Hydra, with a nine-member crew, stopped the English ship Alceste, which was heading to Alexandria, and removed part of its cargo.

Near the Greek island of Crete, Hercules was chased by another English ship, was captured and led to Malta, which was under British sovereignty at the time. The crew was referred to court, the president of which was the known Admiral Codrington.

During the trial, the Greek sailors claimed they had attacked Alceste, because it was transporting supplies for the Turks, who were their enemies. Seven of the crew members were sentenced to death and the other two were found not guilty. Intense backroom processes to challenge the trial’s outcome and intervention by Kountouriotis in London followed and the death sentences were converted into penalties of exile.

The Greek convicts, Giorgos Vasilakis, Gikas Voulgaris, Georgios Laritsos, Antonis Manolis, Damianos Ninis, Nikolaos Papandreas and Konstantinos Strompolis arrived in Sydney, Australia, on 28 August 1829. After diplomatic and other governmental actions, five of them found favor in 1834 and returned to Greece, except for Gikas Voulgaris and Antonis Manolis who remained in Australia as free settlers.

Manolis’ grave can be still seen in New South Wales in Picton village, around 100 km southwest of Sydney.
Antonis Manolis spent two-thirds of his life there and rests in peace in the Upper Picton Cemetery since 1880.

Manolis married an Irish woman and remained in New South Wales. Since then and until his death in 1880, Manolis was a  farmer in Picton and one of the first to cultivate the land in that area.