Australia has been a significant destination country for Greek migration over the last 150 years, especially for the period 1952–74. Since then, flows have dried up, with Greece, now a member of the European Union, itself becoming a destination for migrants, including members of the recent Greek diaspora. Yet, the dispersion of Greeks stretches back several millennia, interlinked with foreign occupation of Greece, complex political conflicts in the Balkans, and rural poverty. Against this background, Anastasios Tamis has written a very readable survey of the Greeks in Australia.

The approach taken is that of a chronicle, moving from Greek migrant “discovery” of Australia through community formation and settlement, social life, cultural accomplishments, the achievement of respectability, and contribution to Australian public life. The tone is not overtly scholarly, and Tamis offers no commentary on the work of others, although the material used draws on a background of demographic, archival, and interview-based research, enlivened by many excellent photographs.

Tamis takes a quiet pride in Greek successes, especially when they are conducive to pan-Hellenism, whereas he evinces a Stoic disappointment when failure or setback ensues. One imagines the book was written mostly for Greeks in Australia to read about their history, rather than for scholars of migration, ethnicity, and diaspora.

At its best, this study provides fascinating insights into major features of Greek Australian life, notably the long and complex struggle between the Orthodox religious hierarchies and local Greek communities. This is described in considerable, possibly excessive, detail. The basic tension here has been between communities that wished to promote their social autonomy, whether or not their members were particularly devout, and a centralized church hierarchy steeped in long traditions of dominance over religious life and broader community activities, including education and Greek language promotion. Tamis notes how the church neglected the material needs of Greek migrants until comparatively late in the 20th century, undermining at least some of its legitimacy and prestige.

The descriptive depth of this study is, however, both a strength and a weakness. It both crowds out analysis and encourages a reliance on taken-for-granted explanatory gestures, for example, reliance on stereotypes of Greek individualism and love of freedom to explain phenomena such as high rates of home ownership and involvement in business. One problem here is a failure to explain how community, family, and individual life are interrelated and to explore the possibility that there are different modes of being Greek rather than one overriding set of core values.

Another problem is a rather muted engagement with debates over migrant ethnicity and, in particular, changes over the generations in the characteristics of ethnicity. Tamis notes that with migration flows drying up, the demographic profile will feature sharply decreasing numbers of Greek born. He also emphasizes shifts in orientation from the first to subsequent generations, with quite high rates of exogamous marriage among the second generation, in some states exceeding 50 percent, and declining participation in community organization. These threads, however, are not connected with scholarly debates over matters such as Herbert Gans’s theory of generational shift to symbolic ethnicity or discussions of hyphenated identity linking two affiliations. Tamis’s notion of “ethnotic,” as opposed to ethnic, affiliation is not spelled out sufficiently here to provide a clear sense of how he views processes of intergenerational changes.

Somewhat greater sociological depth is provided in discussing the changing social-class composition of Greek migrants. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the subtle coverage given to the microhistories of migrants from particular towns, villages, or islands. These groupings are significant both in terms of establishment of migrants’ own organizations and in terms of the formation of inhibition of interregional pan-Hellenic linkages among those from very diverse origins.

In the later chapters, the book moves far closer to a descriptive chronicle of Greek life, listing prominent figures in public life and the dense web of institutions, including clubs and newspapers that constitute the Greek Australian world. This is informative but lacking in any analytical substance. It is only in the final pages that Tamis returns to something approximating an analytical overview, picking up once more the problem of lack of second- and third-generation participation in Greek community life. This, together with Australian policies of multiculturalism that privilege English as the overarching national language, is seen as posing the greatest challenge to the maintenance of distinctive Greek presence in Australia.