Going English: Anglicisation of Family Names in Greek Migrant Communities in Australia

Greek migration to Australia over the last 200 years has necessarily meant a confluence of cultures: European to Antipodean; Greek to British-Australian. Across this period Australia has devolved from a Fortress Australia mentality, exemplified by the softening of the racially exclusionary White Australia policy years into a period of assimilation in the 1940s, to integration (1970s) to multiculturalism from the 1980s onwards. Nevertheless, attitudinal remnants of the race-based exclusionary policies of the pre-war era continued to be felt even in the more inclusionary late 20th century. Across these periods many Greek migrants to Australia felt the need to anglicise their family names. For this paper Australian Greeks and their children are surveyed to assay how and why these anglicisations were done, with the questions also aiming to assess whether such anglicisation is as prevalent now as it was in the post-war period and, as a result, have migrants’ perceptions of Australian attitudes changed over the last two generations. On a sociological level, for a name-proud Greek culture, this is a study central not only to migratory and cultural issues but to the broader question of personal identity and how that may change when moving from one country to another.