NT-born Greeks head back to Darwin amid economic chaos in homeland
As Greece considers whether it should leave the eurozone, thousands of Darwin-born Greek Australians are choosing to migrate back to the Northern Territory.
Darwin has an established Greek community, dating back to the early 19th century and booming in the 1950s when postwar immigrants arrived to work as sponge divers and on pearling luggers.
The majority of Greek immigrants arrived from one Greek island: Kalymnos, about 300km south-east of Athens in the Aegean Sea.
It is estimated up to 80 per cent of the Greek community in Darwin are descended from the Kalymnian workers.
As Greece recovered from its postwar poverty, many Darwin-born Greek Australians moved to Kalymnos and the mainland for careers and marriage.
Darwin-born woman Yvonne Panatos decided to move there as a young adult when her family went back to Kalymnos for a holiday in the 1980s.
"It was how I expected. Later on I met my husband and we took life from there, got married had three children and ever since I'd lived there," she said.
Ms Panatos worked as the director of an English language school on the island, but when the the rumbles of Greece's economic crisis began to be felt in 2004, she started to think about leaving.
"Despite the fact my husband and I had very good jobs, our clientele was suffering and we would see people who were once very well off struggling, and we were no exception," she said.
John Anictomatis, the Honorary Consul for Greece, said the ties between Darwin and its sister city in Kalymnos remained strong.
"In the last three-and-a-half years there would have been up to 3,500 that have returned to Darwin from Greece and of course mainly from Kalymnos," he said.
Last year he accompanied Northern Territory Government representatives to the island to establish a program aimed at bringing workers from Greece to help fill Darwin's labour shortage.
The trial program would enable Darwin businesses to sponsor workers from Kalymnos in a similar arrangement to the Designated Area Migration Agreements, proposed by the Federal Government.
Mr Anictomatis said the flow of repatriates had slowed since the worst of the crisis in 2013, but a 'Grexit' (Greece's withdrawal from the euro economic zone) could see more make the journey back to their home city.
In data released on Monday, the Northern Territory has Australia's strongest job market, but fewer people are moving to the Top End.
The latest CommSec State of the States quarterly report ranked both the New South Wales and NT economies in first place.
