Key points
- An Australian migrant couple started a relationship and kept it alive through letters for years in the 1960s and 1970s, before their first encounter.
- The story gives a glimpse into the socio-political context of the time, including the very personal consequences of being associated with communism.
- Their son credits his parents’ positive outlook for ensuring a rewarding life for their family in Australia.
Do you know the story of how your parents met? For Melburnian Tasos Polyzos, the answer reads like a Hollywood romance movie script.
“I remember my dad saying he loved my mum’s handwriting and fell in love through her writing,” he said.
This is because Mr Polyzos’ parents were exchanging letters for six years before meeting in person for the first time.
Their correspondence was prompted by an ad his father Tony (Antonis) placed in the classifieds section of a Greek magazine in 1966, a year after migrating to Australia “looking to meet a girl from back home".
"To my beloved Tony...Forever yours, Vasso. On my way to the Peloponnese aboard the ferry boat. Greetings Tony." The couple exchanged letters for years. Source: Tony Polyzos
Mr Polyzos had already spent some time in Adelaide, at the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, and later working in mines, with limited opportunities to meet people.
“My mum, who was working as a hairdresser at Livadeia [a town 90kms from the Greek capital Athens], randomly came across the ad while browsing the magazine at work and she just wrote back,” Mr Polyzos said.
“Writing letters, I guess, was like the Facebook of the time.”
Vasso saw Tony's ad on a magazine she happened to come across while working at a hair salon in Greece. Source: Tony Polyzos
For the first five years it evolved into a friendship before turning romantic and culminating in a marriage proposal two years later, Mr Polyzos said.
Of course his mother, Vasso Stamatiou, said "yes" and migrated to Australia, he said.
A few years later, he and his brother, Yiannis, were born, with the couple staying by each other’s side until the very moment "death (literally) did them part", Mr Polyzos said.
However, his parents' love story was almost derailed by Cold War politics and communist paranoia both in Greece and Australia, he said.
Vasso arrived in Australia in 1972. She said 'yes' to Tony's marriage proposal while still in Greece. Source: Tony Polyzos
“My mum’s visa application wouldn’t get approved because my grandfather was associated with the Communist Party,” Mr Polyzos said.
As documented in , scrutiny by intelligence services of new arrivals with suspected communist links was rife during Australia’s post-war migration program.
But anti-communist sentiment was also prevalent in Greece following the country’s civil war.
And in the early 1970s, when Miss Stamatiou's visa application was inexplicably kept shelved for months, interference by the political apparatus in the lives of dissidents and their families was a given, especially in cases like her father's, a former exile.
“My mother first met my grandpa when she was six or seven and he got out of prison where he was serving a sentence for being of communist ideology,” Mr Polyzos said.
He said his father only realised it was Greek authorities blocking his future wife's visa application after asking a friend working in the Australian Federal Police to find out what the issue was.
According to Mr Polyzos, his father tried two things to change their minds: He sent a $500 bribe to an official working at Greece’s visa approval department, and a letter to a prominent Greek junta militant then serving as Home Affairs Minister.
He was asking for his soon-to-be wife to be allowed to leave the country and vouching for her non-association with communism, he said.
“We’ll never find out which of the two worked, but a couple of weeks later and after months of waiting, mum’s application got approved,” Mr Polyzos said adding that the departure for the overseas trip was organised within 24 hours, “...out of fear authorities might revoke the approval”.
Source: Tony Polyzos
According to her son, his mother never looked back partly due to the freedom she had in Australia to lead the life of her choosing.
“My grandparents were upset she left. They wanted her to have an arranged marriage, she didn’t," Mr Polyzos said.
"Up until recently when I asked her: ‘Do you regret leaving Greece for Australia?’ she would reply: ‘No, this is where I rediscovered my freedom’.”
Life in their new home for the couple and their two children was as typical and as unique as any post-war migrant story, Mr Polyzos said.
“Like many migrants back then, my parents thought they would stay in Australia for a few years, make money and then return,” he said.
The family did try relocating to Greece in the 1980s but the attempt only lasted a year, Mr Polyzos said.
The Polyzos sons Yiannis and Tasos with their father Tony. Tasos remembers: “My brother and I were lucky growing up. Whether in Greece or at the farm in Shepparton, we experienced everything as adventure." Source: Tony Polyzos
The repatriation dream was quickly replaced with the reality of endless queues outside public service offices, high unemployment and corruption, he said.
It was then back to Australia for the family, calling Shepparton in regional Victoria home for the next decade, he said.
There, they established a vegetable farm from scratch, before taking over a fish and chip shop, despite not having previous experience in either enterprise, Mr Polyzos said.
“My dad would always listen to this inner voice every time when he dared a new venture,” Mr Polyzos says.
“(It was) The same voice that prompted him to choose Australia over Canada at the last minute at the port or set up the ad through which he met my mum.
"She was also free-spirited in this way.”
Mr Polyzos credits these family traits for his own channeling of a passion for science into a career in academic research.
“I’m a son of migrants, my parents didn’t go to uni," he said.
Mr Polyzos, 81, with sons Tasos and Yiannis today. Source: Tasos Polyzos
"But what stayed with me was this positive attitude of theirs, that if you aim for something you can do it ... that persistence and love outbeats anything."
Asked how his dad, today 81, describes the relationship with this late mother, he says it comes down to one word: trust.
“And taking a deeper look, trust encompasses love, respect and more," Mr Polyzos said.
“It wasn’t a disposable relationship like what some experience through online dating today.
"Yes, it was a different time back then, but if you think about it people still want the same things in a relationship, to love and be loved.”
Mr Polyzos said he didn't recall his parents presenting their love story as in any way unusual.
“I feel my parents’ generation were perhaps more resilient, accepting life more as it happened, if they could not change something,” he said.
The couple were inseparable till Vasso's passing. Source: Tony Polyzos
He said his mother's final hours were like the poignant end to a romance movie.
“We lost my mum two years ago," My Polyzos said.
"I remember the night before she passed away, I heard her singing along to a concert of her favourite Greek artist, Tsitsanis.
"She liked to walk so we were out on a stroll with her and my dad, (and) I walked a bit ahead to knock on a friend’s door and heard my dad shouting ‘ambulance!’, it was a heart attack.
“When I turned, I saw her collapsed in my father’s arms (and) she died in his arms.”
