80 Objects, 2 Centuries: The Greek Families Who Built Queensland

When Chrysanthi Zantioti found two bundles of letters after her mother's death, one labeled "from Nick to Popi" and another "from Popi to Nick," she got a window into a migration story that defined her family and thousands like them. Her father Nick had left Kythira for Queensland, where an uncle ran a café. Her mother Popi followed, and they married in Brisbane in 1955.

Zantioti, now an artist and co-curator of the exhibition "NOSTOI | Homecomings: Stories of the Ionian Island Diaspora in Queensland," says her mother may have imagined her departure like a scene from a Hollywood film, her beloved waiting on the other side of the world. Instead, Popi arrived in a remote Queensland town that didn't even have a sewage system, and later survived a flood clinging to a rope as the water swept away her shoes and clothes.

"Only when they visited Kythira did they truly smile" — Zantioti

The story sits at the heart of an exhibition now running at the RD Milns Antiquities Museum at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. It brings together more than 80 objects, photographs, garments, and audio testimonies documenting the lives of people who emigrated from Corfu, Paxos, Lefkada, Ithaca, Kefalonia, Zakynthos, and Kythira during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Zantioti says many women arrived having only seen a photograph of the man they were to marry. "At least my mother knew my father, even vaguely," she told Kathimerini. "Other women arrived to marry men they had only seen in a photograph." Curator James Donaldson notes that migration from the Ionian Islands surged after World War II and the 1953 earthquakes, with Kythira and Ithaca especially well represented.

Popi learned English from newspapers, kept Greek traditions alive inside the home, and helped run a café next to a cinema, part of a pattern across regional Queensland where Greek families introduced locals to a food culture they had never encountered. Zantioti recalls children going home and telling their mothers that "the Greeks eat worms," having never seen spaghetti before.

Both of Zantioti's parents longed to return. Her father asked to be buried on Kythira beside his mother. "Only when they visited Kythira did they truly smile," she said. The exhibition runs at the University of Queensland until the end of 2027.