Dr Kafcaloudes Phil CF
Author and broadcast journalist
Going English: The Anglicisation of Greek family names in migrant communities
Abstract
Greek migration to Australia over the last 200 years has necessarily meant a confluence of cultures: European to Antipodean; Greek to British-Australian. Across this period Australia has devolved from a Fortress Australia mentality, exemplified by the White Australia policy, which softened into a period of assimilation in the 1940s, to integration (1970s) to multiculturalism (1980s onwards). Nevertheless, attitudinal remnants of the race-based exclusionary policies of the pre-war era continued to be felt even in the more inclusionary period of the late 20th century. As a result, many Greek migrants to
Australia felt the need to anglicise their names in the perception that it would help them fit into Australian society. This qualitative study surveyed Australian Greeks and their children who anglicised their family names, asking why they did it, how they did it and have they considered reversion. These identity changes are examined using Alatis’ seminal categories of name change to see how new family names were selected. For a name-proud Greek culture, this is a study central not only to migratory and cultural issues but to the broader question of personal identity and how that may change when moving from one country to another. The paper also assesses whether such anglicisation is as prevalent now as it was in the post-war period and, as a result, looks at whether the perception among migrants of Australian attitudes has changed over the last two generations.
Biography Dr Phil Kafcaloudes is an author and broadcast journalist who presented the breakfast program on the ABC’s Radio Australia for nine years, broadcasting across the Pacific and Asia. For the ABC he worked in 12 countries and hosted the corporation’s first English language program from China. For a Churchill Fellowship, he studied journalism trauma training worldwide. In 2011 his third book, the novel Someone Else’s War was published in Australasia and translated into Greek for Europe. It tells the story of his grandmother who was a spy in Greece in WWII. His PhD looked at oral history storytelling which involved adapting the novel into a play. Phil has also taught journalism at La Trobe University and at RMIT where in 2019 he produced the first national TV election program presented entirely by students. This program earned Phil the inaugural teaching award by the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia. He has been commissioned by the ABC to write the history of Radio Australia. This book will be published in 2022.
