Thanks to George ("Generation 7") Kosmakos for his assistance with this post as I fired questions at him while he was busy fielding the kids.
OK, here we go.
The primary aim of this post is about discovering a man called George "G3" Kosmakos who was born in the early to mid 1800s, who I've pinpointed as being as far back in the Kosmakos family as I'm ever likely to get (although there is some talk about the circumstances that brought the Kosmakos family to Tarapsa in the first place ... that for another day).
Now as luck would have it, and it's this that got me cracking on this post in the first place, I recently came across George "G3" Kosmakos' birth certificate. It's not a paper birth certificate, but see if you think that it's as good as or better, once you get to the end of this post.
The secondary aims of this post is to make it can go, so far, I'm also going to make this post something of an introduction to the story of the Kosmakos family's departure from Sparta for the New World, with a obvious focus on the branch that I've married into (as it turns out), the branch that came here to Australia. (A whole other branch left for America.)
And finally, as I get towards the end, I'll gently touch on some of the politics that is part and parcel of every wave of immigration to Australia, whether that is the politics of contemplating the first wave of immigrants some 40,000 years ago, or the wave that was my own ancestors who colonised this country from 1788, or the post-war wave that is the subject of the current post or the waves that have come since, and will continue to come. And when I do touch on that politics, I'll channel some of George "G7" Kosmakos' ideas (politics, along with many other things in the world, is something George is pretty passionate about, so it would be wrong to not even mention it!) and co-mingle those with some of my own ideas. It'll probably end up the case that I won't know where his ideas are finishing and mine are starting, actually. But that's good, because for starters you won't know who to blame "ha ha!", and in the end, this post arose from chats between George and me, and more than that, this post is about his family, not mine. I've covered my family in a separate post.
But all that for later. For now, let me give you some of the background or, I should say, the foreground, to the story of George "G3" Kosmakos and the Kosmakos family by bringing you forward 200 years to 2016 and show you where the family has ended up.
At the time of writing this sentence (12 Jun 2016), I am with the George "G7" Kosmakos, who is four generations this side of George "G3" Kosmakos. I'm sitting at his computer and he's largely ignoring me, because he's supervising young Alexander ("G9"), who at age four, likes to run on the treadmill he has here in his apartment above his factory. (George has just come back upstairs from showing Alex and his siblings a new machine he's had put in.)
Look out, here's a shock. At the risk of stereotyping Greeks, I'm duty bound to point out that George reckons that even a factory is a good place to grow vegetables!
The current George "G7" Kosmakos' parents are Steve and Nikki ("G6"). Steve and Nikki emigrated from Tarapsa, Sparta to Australia in 1954 with a wooden trunk and their children George, Helen and Pat. They left everything else behind, including their dog Zorro (Zorro was the first thing Nikki - who I knew as Yia Yia - mentioned, when a while back I asked her what she'd left behind).
Steve "G6" Kosmakos' father is George "G5" Kosmakos, who emigrated from Tarapsa to America and ended up in Pittsburgh.
George ("G7") Kosmakos with his niece Lisa ("G8") in the 1990s. I picked this one out of the photo album just now because Lisa is channelling Princess Di here, don't you think?
OK, here we go.
The primary aim of this post is about discovering a man called George "G3" Kosmakos who was born in the early to mid 1800s, who I've pinpointed as being as far back in the Kosmakos family as I'm ever likely to get (although there is some talk about the circumstances that brought the Kosmakos family to Tarapsa in the first place ... that for another day).
Now as luck would have it, and it's this that got me cracking on this post in the first place, I recently came across George "G3" Kosmakos' birth certificate. It's not a paper birth certificate, but see if you think that it's as good as or better, once you get to the end of this post.
The secondary aims of this post is to make it can go, so far, I'm also going to make this post something of an introduction to the story of the Kosmakos family's departure from Sparta for the New World, with a obvious focus on the branch that I've married into (as it turns out), the branch that came here to Australia. (A whole other branch left for America.)
This is family I married into, so obviously this post is heavily weighted in the direction of this portion of the overall Kosmakos family tree.
And finally, as I get towards the end, I'll gently touch on some of the politics that is part and parcel of every wave of immigration to Australia, whether that is the politics of contemplating the first wave of immigrants some 40,000 years ago, or the wave that was my own ancestors who colonised this country from 1788, or the post-war wave that is the subject of the current post or the waves that have come since, and will continue to come. And when I do touch on that politics, I'll channel some of George "G7" Kosmakos' ideas (politics, along with many other things in the world, is something George is pretty passionate about, so it would be wrong to not even mention it!) and co-mingle those with some of my own ideas. It'll probably end up the case that I won't know where his ideas are finishing and mine are starting, actually. But that's good, because for starters you won't know who to blame "ha ha!", and in the end, this post arose from chats between George and me, and more than that, this post is about his family, not mine. I've covered my family in a separate post.
But all that for later. For now, let me give you some of the background or, I should say, the foreground, to the story of George "G3" Kosmakos and the Kosmakos family by bringing you forward 200 years to 2016 and show you where the family has ended up.
And it's here. Footy in winter, cricket in summer. This is the hallowed turf that is the MCG. I can see a pitch has been dropped in, so we're talking summer, in this image. The Aussie flag is a dead giveaway too. That's never flown at the footy (Aussie Rules, of course). When the footy is on, and George "G7" Kosmakos and I are there, which has been for almost all home games this year so far, then where we've got our seats, the flags are all Essendon.
George's latest blow moulding machine in his factory, which is called Ellapack, here in Keysborough, in the southern suburbs of Melbourne.
Look out, here's a shock. At the risk of stereotyping Greeks, I'm duty bound to point out that George reckons that even a factory is a good place to grow vegetables!
George with some random G9 Kosmakos descendants.
The current George "G7" Kosmakos' parents are Steve and Nikki ("G6"). Steve and Nikki emigrated from Tarapsa, Sparta to Australia in 1954 with a wooden trunk and their children George, Helen and Pat. They left everything else behind, including their dog Zorro (Zorro was the first thing Nikki - who I knew as Yia Yia - mentioned, when a while back I asked her what she'd left behind).
Tarapsa, a photo taken straight off the web. I'm guessing that Tarapsa looked pretty much like this in 1954.
The Melbourne Olympics in 1956. What's the bet that this family of Spartans fresh off the boat couldn't resist mentioning once or twice the joke that they'd tried to leave Sparta, but Sparta had followed them?
Steve "G6" Kosmakos' father is George "G5" Kosmakos, who emigrated from Tarapsa to America and ended up in Pittsburgh.
Whatever somewhere like Pittsburgh in the 1930s looked like to George "G5" Kosmakos fresh from Tarapsa might be a hint at what Melbourne looked like to George "G7" Kosmakos fresh from the same village a generation or two later?
George "G5" Kosmakos's dad is Harilaos ("G4"), who lived in Tarapsa (where the Kosmakos family has a house to this day, in front of which is the well that is the focal point of the town).
The Kosmakos home. Helen "G7" Green nee Kosmakos (centre) was born here, and here she is with her parents Steve and Nikki.
Harilaos "G4" Kosmakos's father is George "G3" Kosmakos, who is the George born in the early to mid 1800s who is the subject of this post.
Unsurprisingly, I'm short on photos from the mid 1800s in Tarapsa. So, let's have a random splash of colour. In the late 1980s, the family took a trip back to Greece to show a few Gen 8s around. They tried to show them some of the history and so on, but Lisa ("G8") here is clearly having too much fun for any of that!
Which neatly brings me to the matter of George "G3" Kosmakos' birth certificate. I mentioned earlier that it's not a paper document. I've actually deduced that George K's name was George K after the George K who's here with me mentioned he'd been chatting to a cousin in America called George K online. And George K here told me that the American George K's grandfather had been George K just like this George K's grandfather had been George K. And I saw the pattern in an instant and I asked hey, if both your grandfathers were called George K, and they were cousins, which he told me they were, then under the Greek naming system, doesn't that make their mutual grandfather George Kosmakos?
And George said yes, that would be a matter of certainty as much as anything can be a matter of certainty. And he further underlined the case for the affirmative by noting that those two Georges weren't the only Georges in that generation, either. So there you have it. That's George "G3" Kosmakos' birth certificate. Take it or leave it!
OK, for my own amusement, before I move on, let me just briefly explore the question of whether a paper birth certificate necessarily stacks up better than this one I've just deduced. The following is a made-up example from my own history (I'm a mixture of Mick and Pom, by extraction), so I'll even have a bit of fun on the political correctness front, because one doesn't get many chances to do that, these days!
I'm imagining an illiterate, informant fresh up from the Gaeltacht and now sitting in a registry office in Dublin telling a pommie clerk who hates his job and who thinks that this Paddy's accent isn't the only thing thick in the air just at the moment, that the bloke lying dead right there went by the name of Caoimhín Ó Broin.
And I'm picturing the clerk writing "Kev O'Brien", reckoning that that's close enough for this lot, and yep, he looks about 70, right, I'll put him down as born in 1770 and get the hell out of here: it's beer o'clock.
And now I'm imagining one of Kev's descendants here in 2016 revering that document as gospel fact. And not having any way to know that Kev wasn't even Caoimhín Ó Broin in the first place! He'd switched his name on the road from Dún Laoghaire to Dublin to that because the real Kev had been his mate, and he'd died. And everyone knows that O'Briens get jobs easier than Murphys in Dublin.
And then I'm feeling amused, because voilà! My mate Kev here has just spent the last decade of his life buried in microfiches in the State Library of Victoria the wrong Kev's family tree. And he's just come back from spending a fortune making a pilgrimage to half the counties of Ireland scoring free counter meals and pints from his clan everywhere he went, when in fact "his" Kev's Dad was Bulgarian, and looked like Freddie Mercury!
Right. Intermission time. Another splash of colour (see below), and then I'll finish off by ticking off the last aim of this post, which was to have a bit of a chat about the story of the Kosmakos family's adventure in coming to Australia, which in my own immigrant ancestors' times was something very similar to being sent to the moon with not enough rocket fuel to get back to Earth.
But right now, I'll suggest that as much as a wrench as it must have been, leaving Greece, it wasn't the worst idea the Kosmakos family had, to come to Australia. Here is Nicole ("G8") in one of her (quite a few) slices of heaven here in Australia.
OK, last order of business, the part in which I said I'd gently touch on some of the politics that is part and parcel of every wave of immigration to Australia, and which makes Australia whatever Australia is (and as much as the history of the Kosmakos family is about Greece, the future of the family is all about Australia - the transformation is complete, I think. George often remarks that he hardly recognises most of today's Greeks in Greece. Which begs the question, perhaps: who's changed? Them, or him?
Onto it.
The history of Australia is the history of a succession of waves of immigrants, starting "super" slowly (!) with the first wave some 40,000 years ago, after which came the Continent-shaking wave that was my own ancestors (I'm an "Aussie", as we are labelled in joke skits on You Tube such as "Wogs versus Aussies").
After that came the Gold Rush, and another wave of Europeans, and quite a lot of Chinese too. The descendants of the 19th Century Chinese settlers are easily distinguished from the 21st Century Chinese that are coming in now: the original Chinese are sitting in the bar cracking jokes with broad Aussie accents with rest of us Aussies, and the current wave of Chinese owns the pub as part of some portfolio of other that includes, among other things, Tasmania, and doesn't even know where it is!
And then after World War 2 there was the wave that the Kosmakos family came in on, which is my current narrow focus. And that wave we tend to simply refer to as when the Greeks and the Italians came or, put even more simply, when the wogs came. Others came too, but ask anyone in the street, and they'll probably say "Greeks and Italians", because these days Melbourne is the cafe culture capital of the world, we drink more wine than beer and olive oil is no longer a medicine found only in 100 ml bottles in pharmacies.
Don't worry: the meaning of the word "wog" has evolved, unless you're stuck in a time capsule. And even back in the fifties and sixties, George says it was pretty much only the drunks still lying paralytic in the doorways of pubs as dawn approached, that used to say "bloody wog" as he walked past on his way to work. And even then, the wogs didn't care anyway. Because there are only two types of people in the world, it you ask a Greek: wogs and people who wish they were!
Now of course since the post war immigration that more than anything, sent sales of Valiants skyrocketing and sent the share price for cement through the roof ... hang on, hold tight, that suggests a sight gag, and then I'll get back to what I was about to say ...
... as I say, since the wave that was the Greeks, Italians and so on, there has been wave after wave, and for better or worse (only time will tell on that - it certainly does not follow logically that if the Greek/Italian gamble paid off, every wave will pay off - but I'm an eternal optimist, so I'm happy to guess that all these latest waves of immigrants will likewise make us richer as a nation) all sides of politics in Australia have now largely moved away from the policies that we had when we asked the Greeks and Italians and so on to come, the White Australia Populate or Perish in the Face of the Yellow Peril Policy or whatever it was called back then.
But all of that is for some other post. This post has a narrow focus, as I've mentioned. And for better or worse, and for whatever reason good or bad, Australia "did" invite Europeans to come (people from England first, obviously, but when not enough of those people were coming, then as our second and third choices, we looked to Northern Europe first and then finally, to countries further south like Italy and Greece), and in 1954, as a result, the Kosmakos family came. And when the family did come, it looked something like this: an image of the diminutive Nikki "G6" Kosmakos nee Kontzamani walking door to door up and down streets saying "have children, must have job" ... and getting one (it was a job in Tom Piper's, as in canned tomatoes and so on, actually).
And here's the thing about that.
Even though it was basically a cool-headed business arrangement between the Australian government and these migrants (only the ones who met "our" criteria, not theirs - compassion wasn't a factor) there nowadays seems to be almost universal agreement that the gamble has, as I've suggested, paid off. Whether you are from the left or right side of politics, or anywhere in between, you probably agree that Australia is richer in all sorts of ways practically and culturally for the Italians and the Greeks and so on having come.
And you can't say that about any other wave, I suspect. You certainly can't say it about the wave that was my own ancestors in the 1800s: that wave is widely criticised especially on the left side of politics as having made Australia a worse place than it was before, not better. Which means, as I have also suggested, and this is a concept that George came up with, not me: you can't use one wave of immigrant's CV to promote the virtues of the next wave of immigrants. Each wave is a completely different box of frogs, with apologies to the French. The immigration needs of Australia are different each time, the external pressures are different each time, the eras are different each time, the worldwide values are different each time and, put simply, the whole world is different each time. Realistically, each era in history can only really understand itself, and look to doing the best it can with its own world and time, although I do note that this does not tend to stop people in the modern era putting the word "sorry", for example, in the mouths of their dead ancestors. Without saying whether they are right or wrong saying sorry like that on behalf of others, I do sometimes wonder if they will get an earful after they die, and meet up with their ancestors!
But all in all, what I can say, within the narrow scope of this post, is that the wave that the Kosmakos family came in on is widely accepted as having been a great thing for Australia. And I should know. Because I'm married into the Kosmakos family, like some Australian version of that poor American bloke in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who married that Greek girl!
To finish off, I illustrated a point just above by seeming to claim that the wave of colonialists that were my own ancestors was all things evil, and the wave of wogs that came after World War 2 was all things wonderful. But if you have a close read, I wasn't saying that at all. I was simply illustrating a point. The benefits that came about when the Greeks and Italians and so on came to Australia was a two-way street, not a one-way street. Let me put it this way: George "G7" Kosmakos, when I was asking him for ideas to plant into this post, told me that he has no time for people from his wave of immigrants who claim that they built Australia from scratch. He made it clear to me that he is sharply critical of them, in fact, whenever he hears anyone suggest such a thing. He tells them that he and his lot walked in on a country that was already so well set up that it was the envy of the world. He tells them that Australians for generations had worked, fought and died to get the country into such good shape (note to self, unless you are looking at this from the perspective of an aborigine, but that debate for another day) that the Greeks and Italians and so on could just walk in, start work and start saving for a house in a neat little street in a safe and highly ordered society from day one.
Danny Raime, 19 Jun 2016
And George said yes, that would be a matter of certainty as much as anything can be a matter of certainty. And he further underlined the case for the affirmative by noting that those two Georges weren't the only Georges in that generation, either. So there you have it. That's George "G3" Kosmakos' birth certificate. Take it or leave it!
A touch of glamour before I move on. Helen Green nee Kosmakos with her husband, John. When the Greek girls hit Australia, that did not go unnoticed by we Anglo types.
I'm imagining an illiterate, informant fresh up from the Gaeltacht and now sitting in a registry office in Dublin telling a pommie clerk who hates his job and who thinks that this Paddy's accent isn't the only thing thick in the air just at the moment, that the bloke lying dead right there went by the name of Caoimhín Ó Broin.
And I'm picturing the clerk writing "Kev O'Brien", reckoning that that's close enough for this lot, and yep, he looks about 70, right, I'll put him down as born in 1770 and get the hell out of here: it's beer o'clock.
And now I'm imagining one of Kev's descendants here in 2016 revering that document as gospel fact. And not having any way to know that Kev wasn't even Caoimhín Ó Broin in the first place! He'd switched his name on the road from Dún Laoghaire to Dublin to that because the real Kev had been his mate, and he'd died. And everyone knows that O'Briens get jobs easier than Murphys in Dublin.
And then I'm feeling amused, because voilà! My mate Kev here has just spent the last decade of his life buried in microfiches in the State Library of Victoria the wrong Kev's family tree. And he's just come back from spending a fortune making a pilgrimage to half the counties of Ireland scoring free counter meals and pints from his clan everywhere he went, when in fact "his" Kev's Dad was Bulgarian, and looked like Freddie Mercury!
Right. Intermission time. Another splash of colour (see below), and then I'll finish off by ticking off the last aim of this post, which was to have a bit of a chat about the story of the Kosmakos family's adventure in coming to Australia, which in my own immigrant ancestors' times was something very similar to being sent to the moon with not enough rocket fuel to get back to Earth.
But right now, I'll suggest that as much as a wrench as it must have been, leaving Greece, it wasn't the worst idea the Kosmakos family had, to come to Australia. Here is Nicole ("G8") in one of her (quite a few) slices of heaven here in Australia.
Nicole ("G8") in the ice cream shop in Merimbula. Yes, it's only a picture of a beach. But aha, here's the thing. After you buy your ice-cream, you walk out and you actually can hit that beach, it goes for miles, so much sand and hardly any people, further than the eye can see ...
... as far as they eye can see? Actually, it goes all the way around. We call that "The Big Lap", but you'd do that by car usually: it's not really a walk-along-the-beach type of distance. I know it's a bit selfish, and I know it's a bit decadent, having a whole continent to yourself like this, but what can I say? If every country put its thinking cap on, the whole world could be a sparsely, populated paradise.
OK, last order of business, the part in which I said I'd gently touch on some of the politics that is part and parcel of every wave of immigration to Australia, and which makes Australia whatever Australia is (and as much as the history of the Kosmakos family is about Greece, the future of the family is all about Australia - the transformation is complete, I think. George often remarks that he hardly recognises most of today's Greeks in Greece. Which begs the question, perhaps: who's changed? Them, or him?
Onto it.
The history of Australia is the history of a succession of waves of immigrants, starting "super" slowly (!) with the first wave some 40,000 years ago, after which came the Continent-shaking wave that was my own ancestors (I'm an "Aussie", as we are labelled in joke skits on You Tube such as "Wogs versus Aussies").
Wogs versus Aussies!
After that came the Gold Rush, and another wave of Europeans, and quite a lot of Chinese too. The descendants of the 19th Century Chinese settlers are easily distinguished from the 21st Century Chinese that are coming in now: the original Chinese are sitting in the bar cracking jokes with broad Aussie accents with rest of us Aussies, and the current wave of Chinese owns the pub as part of some portfolio of other that includes, among other things, Tasmania, and doesn't even know where it is!
And then after World War 2 there was the wave that the Kosmakos family came in on, which is my current narrow focus. And that wave we tend to simply refer to as when the Greeks and the Italians came or, put even more simply, when the wogs came. Others came too, but ask anyone in the street, and they'll probably say "Greeks and Italians", because these days Melbourne is the cafe culture capital of the world, we drink more wine than beer and olive oil is no longer a medicine found only in 100 ml bottles in pharmacies.
Don't worry: the meaning of the word "wog" has evolved, unless you're stuck in a time capsule. And even back in the fifties and sixties, George says it was pretty much only the drunks still lying paralytic in the doorways of pubs as dawn approached, that used to say "bloody wog" as he walked past on his way to work. And even then, the wogs didn't care anyway. Because there are only two types of people in the world, it you ask a Greek: wogs and people who wish they were!
Remember these blokes? Right there in this picture is a huge chapter in the history of Australia.
Now of course since the post war immigration that more than anything, sent sales of Valiants skyrocketing and sent the share price for cement through the roof ... hang on, hold tight, that suggests a sight gag, and then I'll get back to what I was about to say ...
Yep ... you know what I mean!
This is a "wrong" poster. But was it wrong in 1954? Or in 1944? The modern era-chauvenist activist would say yes, probably, but for me, it's hard to judge. I didn't go through World War 2.
But all of that is for some other post. This post has a narrow focus, as I've mentioned. And for better or worse, and for whatever reason good or bad, Australia "did" invite Europeans to come (people from England first, obviously, but when not enough of those people were coming, then as our second and third choices, we looked to Northern Europe first and then finally, to countries further south like Italy and Greece), and in 1954, as a result, the Kosmakos family came. And when the family did come, it looked something like this: an image of the diminutive Nikki "G6" Kosmakos nee Kontzamani walking door to door up and down streets saying "have children, must have job" ... and getting one (it was a job in Tom Piper's, as in canned tomatoes and so on, actually).
And here's the thing about that.
Even though it was basically a cool-headed business arrangement between the Australian government and these migrants (only the ones who met "our" criteria, not theirs - compassion wasn't a factor) there nowadays seems to be almost universal agreement that the gamble has, as I've suggested, paid off. Whether you are from the left or right side of politics, or anywhere in between, you probably agree that Australia is richer in all sorts of ways practically and culturally for the Italians and the Greeks and so on having come.
Melbourne's coffee culture. Arguably it's better than Italy's. I live in Essendon North and I have eleven coffee shops to choose from in what is a very short local shopping strip a couple of hundred metres from our house. When I was kid, I'll bet there was only about one, and that one serving instant.
And you can't say that about any other wave, I suspect. You certainly can't say it about the wave that was my own ancestors in the 1800s: that wave is widely criticised especially on the left side of politics as having made Australia a worse place than it was before, not better. Which means, as I have also suggested, and this is a concept that George came up with, not me: you can't use one wave of immigrant's CV to promote the virtues of the next wave of immigrants. Each wave is a completely different box of frogs, with apologies to the French. The immigration needs of Australia are different each time, the external pressures are different each time, the eras are different each time, the worldwide values are different each time and, put simply, the whole world is different each time. Realistically, each era in history can only really understand itself, and look to doing the best it can with its own world and time, although I do note that this does not tend to stop people in the modern era putting the word "sorry", for example, in the mouths of their dead ancestors. Without saying whether they are right or wrong saying sorry like that on behalf of others, I do sometimes wonder if they will get an earful after they die, and meet up with their ancestors!
But all in all, what I can say, within the narrow scope of this post, is that the wave that the Kosmakos family came in on is widely accepted as having been a great thing for Australia. And I should know. Because I'm married into the Kosmakos family, like some Australian version of that poor American bloke in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who married that Greek girl!
To finish off, I illustrated a point just above by seeming to claim that the wave of colonialists that were my own ancestors was all things evil, and the wave of wogs that came after World War 2 was all things wonderful. But if you have a close read, I wasn't saying that at all. I was simply illustrating a point. The benefits that came about when the Greeks and Italians and so on came to Australia was a two-way street, not a one-way street. Let me put it this way: George "G7" Kosmakos, when I was asking him for ideas to plant into this post, told me that he has no time for people from his wave of immigrants who claim that they built Australia from scratch. He made it clear to me that he is sharply critical of them, in fact, whenever he hears anyone suggest such a thing. He tells them that he and his lot walked in on a country that was already so well set up that it was the envy of the world. He tells them that Australians for generations had worked, fought and died to get the country into such good shape (note to self, unless you are looking at this from the perspective of an aborigine, but that debate for another day) that the Greeks and Italians and so on could just walk in, start work and start saving for a house in a neat little street in a safe and highly ordered society from day one.
Danny Raime, 19 Jun 2016
Hi there, I found this post randomly while looking for a good picture online. I am a Kosmakos living in FL, USA. I think I have thio George on FB even though we never met. I'd love to get in contact w whomever to maybe match up some stories about our family history.
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