
This clip shows members of the Canberra Greek community on their annual picnic at Good Hope just outside of Canberra on 26 December 1949. Friends and relatives sitting in the shade lift their glasses and toast to the camera as it pans across their faces. Some do a traditional Greek dance in a circle around a solo violinist. Down by the side of the lake, the group gathers for another song. Summary by Poppy De Souza.
Babies, children, parents and grandparents – all generations of the Canberra Greek community enjoy their annual Christmas outing and celebration in this clip. It is a wonderful illustration of family and community life amongst the close-knit Greek community in Canberra during the late 1940s. Dancing, singing, laughing and drinking are common throughout the Gerakiteys footage. Weddings, birthdays and celebrations such as this one are filled with details of Greek-Australian life.
Home movie footage of members of the Canberra Greek community filmed between 1949 and 1950. Footage includes two annual picnics, family scenes at home, a birthday party, and a family outing around Canberra.
It is from a four-part compilation of 16mm silent colour home movie footage of the Greek community between 1949 and 1955, filmed by Emmanuel Gerakiteys and his family.
This beautiful colour footage vividly captures the Greek community in Canberra and some family moments amongst the Gerakiteys family. The home movie captures a lot of the scenes, events and celebrations common in this sort of private footage, but it is also an insight into how the Greek community in Canberra lived at the time, and the ways they contributed to community life. The large communal gatherings seen in their annual picnics are evidence of just how close-knit the community was.
Emmanuel Gerakiteys (who filmed most of the footage) owned and ran the Canberra Café in Queanbeyan and then the Blue Moon Café in the Sydney Building, in Canberra’s city centre. Like many Greeks who migrated from the 1930s onwards, Gerakiteys was from the island of Kythera. His experience in small business was common amongst many of the Greeks, with others working in grocery stores, fruit shops, cafes, and wholesalers.
Notes by Poppy De Souza
This clip shows silent home-movie footage of members of the Greek community from Canberra and the surrounding district on an annual picnic at Good Hope, near Yass, on Boxing Day 1949. A man pours a drink from a barrel of what may be home-brewed beer. The camera pans across the group, many of whom raise their glasses in a toast. The clip also shows a traditional Greek dance, with dancers circling a fiddler and Emmanuel Gerakiteys, who shot much of this footage. The clip ends with a posed shot of the group singing, with Lake Burrinjuck as a backdrop.
Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.