In Melbourne’s inner north, the suburb of Brunswick was built by migrant labour, much of it Greek.
In brickworks, textile mills, tanneries and other industrial workplaces, migrants powered post-war Melbourne. Those hands built more than an economy. They established churches, businesses and institutions that anchored community life across generations.
What is now at stake is not only whether this history is acknowledged, but whether the civic place created through that labour continues to be upheld. The question is whether the material conditions that were central to multiculturalism, enabling participation, contribution and community life, are allowed to endure as demographics and urban planning priorities shift.
Long before Brunswick became a desirable inner north suburb of cafés, boutiques and galleries, its landscape was defined by factories.
Chimneys dominated the skyline, dust settled over cottages, and chemical smells drifted through laneways. Migrants returned from long factory shifts to crowded weatherboard cottages where multiple households shared space in order to survive.
For thousands of newly arrived Greek migrants in the 1950s and 1960s, Brunswick represented a place where a future could be built from very little. Here, the Greek story of the inner north begins.
The Industrial Roots of Brunswick
Before British colonisation, Brunswick and Coburg formed part of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country of the Kulin Nation, shaped by established patterns of land use, movement and resource management prior to nineteenth-century settlement and industrialisation.
Post-war Greek migration reflected hardship in southern Europe and Australia’s demand for migrant labour. From the 1950s, thousands of workers from southern Europe arrived in Melbourne’s inner north. Greeks settled alongside Italians, many from Sicily and Calabria, as well as migrants from Malta and Yugoslavia.
On factory floors, the phrase una faccia, una razza (“same face, same race”) was often used in jest between Italian and Greek workers to express shared histories and common experiences forged through labour, hardship and displacement.
By the 1970s, Brunswick was widely regarded as one of Australia’s major Greek suburbs, with Greeks forming one of its most visible communities and opening many small businesses that sustained everyday life. Greek echoed across pavements and shopfronts, and the area was informally described by locals as the “Little Paris of the Greeks”.
From the 1970s onward, migrants from Turkey and Lebanon established themselves in the area, followed by Vietnamese workers. Post-war migration shaped suburbs like Brunswick and Coburg and their layered multicultural character.
Historical estimates suggest that over 100 factories operated in Brunswick, employing over a thousand workers. The majority were migrants, many of them Greek. Migrants faced exploitation, discrimination, and the long-term health consequences of factory labour, including respiratory disease, spinal and joint damage, repetitive strain injuries and hearing loss. Heat, dust, chemicals, airborne fibres, unsafe machinery and repetitive work were everyday realities for workers with limited English.
Migrant women formed the backbone of Brunswick’s textile workforce. From the post-war decades through to the industry’s decline in the late 1980s, factories across the suburb relied heavily on their labour.
In late November 1981, three hundred workers at the Kortex textile factory, most of them migrant women with limited English, walked off the job in protest against low wages and difficult conditions. Over more than a week, they maintained the strike and secured improvements in pay and recognition. Years later, they again protested, this time against the looming relocation of work overseas. These actions overturned stereotypes about migrant women as passive and remain defining moments in Brunswick’s labour history.
Working Lives, Shared Histories
The Greek presence in the area has been continuous for more than sixty years.
My father began working at the age of twelve on farms in his village of Elos near Sparta and later as a barber in the evenings.
After migrating, he worked in a tannery in Brunswick before going on to work as a barber for the next sixty years, establishing his own barbershop on Sydney Road.
The shop functioned not only as a workplace but as a social space where news was exchanged, relationships sustained and community life unfolded.
My maternal grandfather, previously working as a seaman in Kastellorizo, laboured in the Brunswick Brickworks. Like many brickworkers of his generation, the physical toll of heavy labour followed him into later life.
My mother left behind Kastellorizo, a remote jewel of the Dodecanese islands. She worked in textile factories, including Kortex, alongside Greek, Italian, Turkish, Lebanese and Vietnamese women. For migrant women, the work involved long hours at high-speed machines and constant repetition, undertaken while also carrying the weight of domestic labour, child-rearing and care for extended family.
My parents first crossed paths on the steps of St Basil’s Greek Orthodox Church in Brunswick in 1969, where they married soon after and our family marked baptisms. Churches structured migrant life through baptisms, weddings, funerals and memorials, while also serving as spaces where reassurance, information and connection circulated.
From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, Rebetika nights at the Retreat Hotel, featuring the Apodimi Kompania on Friday and Sunday evenings, functioned as an important site of cultural transmission and a local revival of the underground music. Older Greeks gathered alongside younger Greek Australians discovering Rebetika as a marker of identity and authenticity. These gatherings also attracted significant numbers of non-Greek Australians, including local residents, musicians and students, reflecting Brunswick’s multicultural milieu and sustaining enduring intergenerational links across ethnic and generational lines.
The suburb has long been home to Laconian, Cretan and Pontian organisations. Sparta Place, marked by a commanding bronze statue of King Leonidas, reflects the historical Laconian presence. Coburg likewise is home to Kastorian and Kalymnian associations, with Kastoria Lane serving as a named reminder of this heritage.
Faith, Continuity and Community Institutions
Greek Orthodox churches in Brunswick and Coburg emerged as central institutions in the everyday lives of post-war migrants, functioning as places of worship and stabilising community centres.
Construction of St Basil’s Greek Orthodox Church in Brunswick began in 1959, with the first liturgy taking place in 1962. In 1969, St Eleftherios Greek Orthodox Church was founded in Brunswick. In neighbouring Coburg, the Greek Orthodox Church of the Presentation of Our Lord was founded in the mid-1970s. Together, these churches have anchored Greek life across Melbourne’s inner north for several decades.
Churches supported Greek language education, youth and elderly programs, welfare assistance, memorial services, pastoral care as well as weddings, baptisms and funerals.
They filled gaps in education and welfare long before such services were systematically provided by the state.
Parishes operate daily and remain active spiritual and community centres. At the Presentation of Our Lord in Coburg, thousands of people engage each week with religious, educational, community and welfare services.
Through initiatives such as Our Daily Bread, the parish assists struggling individuals and more than 250 families each week. St Basil’s likewise operates as a highly active parish, with engagement across the year through religious, educational and welfare services.
Multiculturalism in Practice: Access, Contribution and Civic Continuity
There have been debates about practical access and the ability of long-standing institutions to operate normally amid urban planning changes. These issues cannot be separated from the communities that helped make these suburbs desirable.
In Brunswick, the proposed extension of a new park would result in the loss of proximate and accessible parking near St Basil’s, essential for elderly parishioners, people with mobility restrictions, carers and families.
In Coburg, planning pressures take a different form through a proposed eight-storey housing development opposite the church, which would constrain the capacity of the Presentation of Our Lord, a highly active parish, to sustain the daily educational, welfare, pastoral and liturgical services it has long provided.
Formal access does not equate to meaningful access when distance, gradients, time constraints and physical capacity determine who can realistically participate. For much of the post-war period, planning arrangements, traffic flow and on-street parking evolved informally around religious and community use, reflecting a shared understanding that churches functioned as public and semi-public institutions.
Long before multiculturalism entered official policy, churches supported communities navigating industrial labour, linguistic barriers and settlement pressures, roles they continue to perform through intergenerational continuity.
As inner-city suburbs industrialised, declined and later gentrified, long-standing institutions and communities repeatedly came under pressure as land values and planning priorities shifted.
The mobility limitations many parishioners now experience are directly shaped by decades of physically demanding industrial work that supported Australia’s economy, meaning participation often depends on accessible infrastructure and family support.
Greek migrants working in these suburbs paid rates and taxes and helped fund the roads, footpaths and infrastructure that later made the inner north attractive.
Public land, roads and parking function as the practical conditions of civic participation and as collective returns on long-term contribution.
The question, therefore, is not whether public space serves one group, but whether it continues to support the public functions it has historically enabled.
Census data confirm that Greek presence remains a significant feature of Merri-bek’s social fabric.
In 2021, 5.9 per cent of residents identified Greek ancestry and around 4.0 per cent spoke Greek at home, with higher concentrations in parts of Brunswick and Coburg. These figures do not capture those who return from other areas to attend services, volunteer, care for elders or mark life-cycle events.
Orthodox parishes therefore continue to operate as regional, intergenerational institutions shaped by family ties, rites of passage and return.
Inclusivity and multiculturalism are realised not only through symbolic recognition but through practical arrangements that enable everyday participation.
They are reflected in whether long-standing communities can continue to access services and sustain the institutions that have anchored their social and civic lives.
When planning decisions reduce participation for ageing, mobility-affected or culturally embedded communities, inclusivity risks becoming a stated principle rather than a lived reality.
Future planning that ignores the contributions of migrant communities risks more than historical amnesia; it facilitates cultural erasure. When the conditions that allow institutions to function are incrementally withdrawn, erasure occurs not through intent but through attrition, compromising the diversity and inclusivity foundational to multicultural Australia.
The story of the Greek community in Brunswick and Coburg is the story of hands that lifted bricks, stitched garments, forged metal, ran small businesses and founded churches. It is the story of migrants, now Australians, who arrived with little but contributed immeasurably to the city around them.
The pavements of Staley Street leading to St Basil’s and Victoria Street leading to the Presentation of Our Lord are permanently marked by the footsteps of those who helped build these suburbs through decades of labour, followed by their descendants.
Those footsteps were taken in moments of joy and in moments of grief, as families gathered for baptisms, weddings, feast days and Easter celebrations, and returned for funerals, memorials and collective mourning.
These streets carried people at their strongest and at their most vulnerable, binding individuals into community across generations.
The traces of labour, faith, family and community remain embedded in these suburbs. The descendants of migrants continue to walk these same streets, grounded in the knowledge that their place here is woven into the very making of these suburbs.
*Dr Themistocles Kritikakos is a Greek Australian historian and writer. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne. His forthcoming book, Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Genocide Recognition in Twenty-First Century Australia, will be released by Palgrave Macmillan in January 2026.
