Dr John N. Yiannakis OAM
The Greek Orthodox Church’s Presence in Western Australia: Part 1, The formative years till 1975
Abstract
This paper is the first part of a shortened version of a longer chapter written for the centenary of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia (2024), that is awaiting publication.
The discussion covers from the early twentieth century to Archbishop Stylianos Harkianakis’ appointment as primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia in 1975. In this account, the presence and role of the Greek Orthodox Church in Western Australia is considered along with how the nature of the church’s establishment in WA, combined with Perth’s distance from Sydney and Melbourne, reduced some of the Church-Community tensions that devilled other states during this period.
On 7 March 1924, the Ecumenical Patriarch assumed jurisdiction over Greek churches in the New World, including Australia, replacing previous authorities. That month, Bishop Christophoros Knetes became the first Orthodox Metropolitan of Australia and New Zealand. Earlier, Sydney and Melbourne’s Greek Communities (Koinotites) had established community-owned churches. In WA, visiting priests provide church services and sacraments until 1914. For several years thereafter, a regional fraternity, the Castellorizian Association of WA, helped plan future church development until just before Metropolitan Christophoros arrived, when the Hellenic Community of Western Australia was formed.
Biography
Dr John N. Yiannakis OAM lectured in Modern and Ancient History before working as a Research Fellow at Curtin and Murdoch Universities. Dr Yiannakis has published extensively in the field of Greek migration, settlement and adaptation to Western Australia. He has written books and numerous articles pertaining to the development and structure of Perth’s Greek community, including Greek Pioneers in Western Australia and Odysseus in the Golden West. He published a co-authored monograph Black Night, White Day: Greek women in Australia, a longitudinal study, and more recently he co-edited and contributed several articles to the three volumes of Perspectives on the Hellenic Diaspora, Vols 1, 2 and 3. Articles about the role of Lemnos in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign and the anti-Greek Race Riots of 1916 in Perth and Kalgoorlie are further examples of his work. He has also written several biographies including Vlase Zanalis: Greek Australian Artist. Dr Yiannakis recently presented the Eureka Odyssey podcast episodes.
