The Language We Forget In

There is a man I have met a hundred times. He exists in almost every Greek community in Australia, and in every migrant community before and after ours.

In Greek he is a refugee’s son. He speaks of ξενιτιά, the ache of exile, with tears in his eyes. He remembers the factory floor, the landlord who would not rent to foreigners, the teacher who anglicised his name without asking. He will tell you, in Greek, that this country was hard on us and that we survived it through each other.

In English, he votes to make sure nobody else survives it the same way.

Same man, same memories, different language, different politics. I spent enough years in multilingual broadcasting to know he is no exception. And watching some Greek Australians applaud politicians who call multiculturalism the problem and multilingual broadcasting a waste, I found myself asking a different question. Not why they changed their minds, but why they change them when they change languages.

Language is where memory lives

We like to think our beliefs are reasoned, chosen and stable. Mostly they are social, and language is the room the conversation happens in.

In Greek, the room is full of witnesses. Your mother is in that room. The village is in that room. The suitcase is in that room. You cannot claim, in Greek, that migrants take advantage of this country, because everyone present knows exactly which migrants built your house.

In English, the witnesses are gone. English is the language in which we auditioned for belonging, and some of us never stopped auditioning. To agree, in English, that the newest arrivals are a problem carries no sense of betrayal at all. It works more like a password. I am not one of them anymore. I am one of you.

When people change their politics between languages they are not confused. They are switching loyalties, and the direction of the switch is worth noticing: we soften towards power in the language of power, and we keep our grief in the language of home.

How easily we forget

Consider what the audition requires us to forget.

We were the unassimilable ones. Within living memory, Southern Europeans were described in this country’s press and parliaments as a risk to its character. Too loud, too clannish, too attached to our churches and our languages. When Australia expanded migration after the war it was not, for the most part, a change of heart. It was arithmetic. Populate or perish. Even then the welcome was graded. Greeks were admitted as Europeans, long before Australia abandoned the racial hierarchy that kept so many others out. We were let in through a door that stayed closed behind us, which means our arrival was never proof that the system was fair. It was proof that we sat, for the moment, on the right side of an unfair one.

And we came by boat. Long before the phrase became a political weapon, Greeks and Cypriots crossed oceans by ship in numbers that reshaped this country, many of them displaced by war, occupation and poverty, asking a nation that had spent decades keeping people like us out to let us in anyway. After 20 July 1974, Cyprus alone sent thousands of families here with nothing but keys to houses they would never enter again.

We were also the ones accused of failing to integrate, right up until we became the evidence that integration works. That transition deserves more attention than it gets, because it reveals the trick. Australia did not stop being suspicious of migrants. It moved the suspicion down the queue, onto whoever arrived after us, and it offered us a deal: your acceptance is confirmed on the day you join the suspicion.

Enough of us took it.

How entitlement works

Entitlement is amnesia with confidence.

You survive the door being nearly closed on you. Then you succeed, and the luck quietly leaves the story. The strangers who vouched for you, the policy settings that admitted you, the timing you did not choose, all of it fades, until what remains is a self-made man standing in a house he believes he built alone. And once your arrival has been reclassified as earned, arrival itself becomes a prize, and prizes must be protected from those who have not earned them. So you start guarding the door. “We did it the right way” becomes the anthem, sung loudest by people whose right way was simply the way that existed when they came, before the rules were rewritten to be harder.

The entitled migrant is not exactly a hypocrite. He is a man who has genuinely forgotten that the queue he defends once had him at the back of it.

What racism really means

We have let the word shrink. We treat racism as an emotion, hatred, and therefore as an accusation about someone’s heart, which suits nearly everyone, since very few people recognise hatred in themselves. It lets the man at the barbecue say “I’m not racist, I just think” before repeating, almost word for word, what was said about his own father in 1962.

Racism was never primarily an emotion. It is an ordering system: the machinery that decides who gets the benefit of the doubt and who has to earn it, whose accent is charming and whose is a problem, whose religion is heritage and whose is a threat, who gets to fail as an individual and who fails as a statistic. Nobody needs to hate anyone to operate this machinery. You only need to accept your place in it and defend the places below you.

Its oldest recruitment strategy is to hire its former targets as security. Every wave of migrants is offered a promotion from suspect to gatekeeper, and the wage is belonging. The Irish took the deal in America. Some of ours took it here. Someone from the communities arriving today will be offered it tomorrow.

Anti-racism, whatever else it involves, begins with refusing that deal. The refusal, specifically, to forget in English what you know in Greek.

Δεν ξεχνώ

Greek Cypriots have a phrase for the invasion of 1974. Δεν ξεχνώ. I do not forget.

I want to widen it. Do not forget the invasion, and do not forget the arrival either. The door that opened, the neighbour who explained the forms, the country that was talked into taking a chance on people it had been taught to fear. We do not keep that memory as a debt to the past. We keep it because it protects us from becoming what once stood against us.

A community that remembers only its suffering turns bitter. A community that remembers only its success turns entitled. A community that remembers the welcome, who gave it, how contested it was, how easily it might never have come, becomes something rarer. It becomes the one holding the door.

Δεν ξεχνώ. All of it. Not just the invasion. Not just the loss. Also the welcome.

Remember in English what you already know in Greek.

First published on Substack, 20 July 2026.