Oh we're from Tigerland: Gina Zouglakis

Oh we're from Tigerland

Stories of being Richmond

Gina Zouglakis, 46, East Kew (via Richmond)

Favourite all-time Richmond player
Mathew Richardson - “For his courage. I’ve met him a couple of times but I’m not sure he’s even seen me because he’s so tall. He’s done great things for the club, the game.”

Favourite current Richmond player
Trent Cotchin – “I’ve a very big soft spot for ‘Dusty’, I think he’s amazing. But it would have to be Cotchin, the captain. He’s spectacular. He’s been a great connector for the team.”

“I’ve lovely memories of this place,” says Gina Zouglakis, the second-born daughter of two Greek migrants who came to Melbourne in the early 1960s, married, owned a milkbar in Burnley on the river flats of Richmond, where they made a new life. “The counter of mixed lollies, me and my younger brother always out the front, around adults and interesting people, entertained by all the people coming in. As a young girl, our shop was the most exciting place in the world.”

On a cold Monday morning, made a little cooler for both of us with a Richmond loss, I meet Gina at Bendigo Street Milk Bar, a café directly opposite the redbrick former GTV 9 television studios (built in 1909 as the Wertheim Piano factory, and used by Heinz from 1935 as a food preserving plant).

Gina was born into this milkbar, living in the rooms at the rear, growing up with the jingle of commerce, selling milk and bread, long hours, into two Greek families sharing a business and so much more. The nearby television channel was a window onto a mainstream Australian society that hardly recognised its multicultural make-up, even though by early 1970s, no other Melbourne suburb was as Greek as Richmond.

“A Greek family lived next door,” she remembers. “And a lot of businesses on Swan and Victoria Street were run by Greeks. Tailors, shoe-makers, hairdressers, barbers, small businesses that brought trades out of factories and into little shops.”

In the middle of it all were Gina’s mum and dad, Vasiliki (‘Vicky’) and Manoli (‘Emmanuel’), their three children, and an aunt and uncle of theirs, and cousins, selling smallgoods, making a new life for themselves and while doing so bridging a cultural divide.

“I knew a lot of the people who came into the shop from across the road were famous, because they wore nice clothes,” says Gina.

“I remember mum fan-girling some of them. Lorraine Bailey from The Sullivans came in and mum turned into a puddle. She got her autograph and everything.”

“Back then, I never heard my parents speaking Greek in the shop in front of the Australians. Other Greeks wouldn’t do it either. It was frowned upon. It was their way to integrate.”

Richmond, more than most other AFL clubs, is a football club of its place, and this place has a post-war Greek migrant history that by its numbers is richer than anywhere else in Australia. Melbourne is often said to be the largest Greece city outside of Greece, and by the 1966 Census, 5773 Greek-born immigrants lived within the City of Richmond, or almost 18 per cent of its resident population.

For this first-generation, their odyssey followed familiar paths. The great Greek influx began from 1952, when Commonwealth assisted passages were offered to meet labour shortfalls in the Australian workforce, with a chain migration that led mostly to inner-city neighbourhoods. In Melbourne, this was usually Richmond, and Prahran (5418 Greek-born residents in 1966), Collingwood (4730), Brunswick (4708), Fitzroy (4261), and Northcote (4205), where they found cheap housing, factory jobs, and access to public transport and services.

Gina’s story is part of this bigger diaspora.

Her mother, from a small mountain town on mainland Greece, arrived as a 19-year-old in 1961, moving-in with her aunt and uncle in Fitzroy. She took a job at the IXL Jam Factory in Prahran, canning fruit. Her sister worked at the Pelaco shirt factory on Richmond Hill, her brother at the Kodak factory in Coburg.

Gina’s father migrated from Crete in 1963, on the promise of a marriage. A health surveyor back home, his first job was as an orderly at Queen Victoria Hospital (where Gina was born), then as a postal worker at the GPO.

“They had no English, they had nothing when they came,” says Gina.

“It was businesses like the milkbar that helped them establish those English skills. They worked so hard at learning this new language.”

Her parents, along with her mother’s sister and husband, bought the freehold business in Bendigo Street in 1966, seeking economic independence. It’s a common Greek story, the ideal of the self-employed man, free of bosses and unions, that lead to owner-enterprises; Greek restaurateurs, fishmongers, greengrocers, tailors, cobblers, milkbar proprietors, market gardeners.

In shop keeping, the Zouglakis family worked long hours, established the business, then moved-out to the suburbs for further opportunities. And as is typical of this story, the first generation had no time for football.

“Dad had no interest in sport, not even soccer. He’s never been to a game.”

Gina’s interest in the game and in Richmond, was late blossoming, but no less fervent for it.

The two cousins she grew-up with in the shop, Louis and Chris, both started school at Burnley Primary, and as such, playing kick-to-kick in the schoolyard playground, were given a head-start in all the ways of Richmond. Theirs was a physical and emotional assimilation. By the time Gina started school, the family had moved to Blackburn South, where Greek identity and football belonging were diluted.