Steve Pappas
As the Wet Season approached in the Northern Territory late in 1929, Stavros Papavassiliou had fallen in love with the Never Never country.
“They who have lived in it and loved it Never-Never voluntarily leave it,” Jeannie Gunn had written a few years earlier in the classic Australian novel, We of the Never Never.
Gunn had been writing about her experiences based at Mataranka, near Katherine, in the Gulf Savannah country she described as “a land of dangers and hardships and privation yet loved as few lands are loved”.[1]
With permanent residents numbering only about 100, Mataranka in 1929 was a far cry from the densely-populated Greek capital of Athens, where Stavros Papavassiliou had moved from his birth island of Euboea.
But it was in the tiny settlement at the end of the railway line with a weekly mail train from Darwin that Papavassiliou decided he wanted to be an Australian.
The 30-year-old son of a Greek Orthodox priest walked into Mataranka’s police station, handed over a naturalization application form, along with the equivalent of about a week’s wages from his job as a waiter at the settlement’s only hotel.
Nellie Fisher, who operated a local boarding house before she obtained a licence for the hotel where she employed him[2], swore that she’d known him for two years as “a person of good repute” with an adequate knowledge of English
He could hardly know he’d still be waiting more than 40 years later for his naturalization to be approved.
Stavros Jean Papavassiliou had arrived in Fremantle on 11 April, 1927 aboard the ‘Ville de Strasbourg’, disembarking in Sydney 13 days later.
After a stint as a seaman in the Royal Greek Navy, he’d migrated straight to Australia from Greece, which at the time was going through a period of coups and other political turmoil.
After a couple of months in Sydney, he’d headed to the Northern Territory, and ended up in Mataranka.
Sadly for Papavassiliou, he hadn’t realized he’d been ill-advised by a Darwin lawyer: his first bid for naturalization from Mataranka was soon rejected on the ground that he hadn’t satisfied a requirement to have lived for at least five years in Australia.
By the time he’d clocked up the five years in 1932, the Great Depression was underway, and he applied again from Berri in South Australia, where he’d moved a year earlier, and was now working as a casual labourer in a vineyard.
Again, his application would be rejected – but this time for quite a different reason.
It was to be the first in a long series of rejected applications by Papavassiliou, or Steve Pappas, as he later called himself, because he was given negative “security assessments” by ASIO.
After leaving Berri, Pappas settled in Adelaide, where he worked in a succession of jobs – including a moulder’s assistant in an iron factory, a motor vehicle assembler, and a ship painter.[3]
Former Industrial Commissioner and secretary of the United Trades and Labor Council of South Australia, John Lesses, was a long-time friend and colleague of Pappas, who he recalls as being ‘ethically outstanding, standing upright for what he referred to as the working class’.
According to Lesses, it was during Pappas’ days in the Northern Territory that he developed a strong sense of social justice – and anger over mistreatment of Australia’s Indigenous people.
“He used to recount to me the way he met Aboriginal stockmen and their families on their cattle stations that he had worked on. He supported the Aboriginal cause. He felt that they were badly treated and that he had this conscience that we are the foreigners here and we have taken the land away from the dopios. The dopios mean the Indigenous people.”[4]
In Adelaide, Pappas became deeply involved in the labour movement and various social and human rights causes – but it was his association with the Communist Party that would cause him most grief.
Objecting to his application for citizenship in October 1950, ASIO Director-General Charles Spry declared he was “a security risk” because “although there is no definite evidence that he is a party member, his associates and activities show that he has close affiliations with Communism”.
Making another objection in August 1953, Spry reported that the evidence against Pappas had hardened: he had become chairman of the Adelaide branch of the Communist Party of Australia.
By 1958, Pappas been living in Australia for 31 years – slightly longer than he lived in Greece – but his applications for naturalization had been rejected four times.
Labor Senator for South Australia Jim Toohey was the first politician to take up his case, seeking an explanation from the Secretary of the Department of Immigration, Tasman Heyes.
The grounds for rejection could not be made known to Pappas, the Senator was told, but the decisions “followed careful consideration of security objections”.
Undeterred, in 1959 Pappas soon lodged a fresh application, only to be rejected a fifth time, without explanation, prompting him to write to the left-leaning Greek community newspaper, Neos Kosmos.
“Perhaps it is it of interest to you to know that during my long period of residence here, I have not been accused nor convicted of the least violation of the law,” he wrote.
“I am a unionist and for quite a number of years I have been a member of the executive committee of the Federated Ironworkers Union.
“During the war and despite my age (I was then 40), I sought to enlist in the army and to offer my services for Australia.
“After all this, I want to learn indeed what exactly are the credentials required for citizenship. I believe at all events that at least in my own case, the authorities have done me a very great injustice.”
When Labor Opposition leader Arthur Calwell made inquiries, Tasman Heyes told him, in confidence, there was a “very strong security objection against Mr Pappas” that made him ineligible for naturalization.[5]
In 1964, another Labor Senator for South Australia, Jim Cavanagh, made an impassioned speech highlighting how Pappas had now reached retirement age but was unable to get the old age pension because he was not a citizen.
“We are reaching the stage where, as in the Fascist world, a cloak of secrecy is being drawn and a man can be condemned without any proof of guilt,” the Senator declared.
Cavanagh, who had known Pappas for 16 years, assured the Senate he was “one of the most inoffensive little fellows anyone could meet”.
He was well-known and popular in the industrial movement in South Australia, and did nobody any harm – but he could be driven into a life of crime if the government left him with insufficient means of support.
The Senator questioned government assurances that no application for naturalization was refused solely by reason of the applicant’s political or trade union activities or associations.
“Surely the government is not sincere in its actions,” he stated. “I challenge the Minister for Immigration to show any reason for refusing Mr Pappas naturalization other than the fact that he is or was possibly a member of the Communist Party of Australia.”
“Let the government refund Mr Pappas the taxes he has paid for 37 years if he is not suitable for Australian citizenship. I challenge the Department of Immigration to produce one iota of proof, other than his political activity, that this man has done anything that would not commend him as a decent Australian citizen.” [6]
Immigration Minister Hubert Opperman was not swayed on the citizenship question by any of the appeals on Pappas’ behalf from politicians, unions, and Greek and other community groups.
Late in 1965, however, he relented a little, after yet another intervention by a Labor politician, Clyde Cameron, who had known Pappas for more than two decades.
Pappas, now aged 66, was a recognized supporter of the Communist Party and had sold its newspaper, the ‘Tribune’ for as long as he could remember, Cameron told Opperman.
“But in all those years I can truthfully say that I have never once found him to be anything but a hard-working inoffensive little man, quietly pursuing an honest belief that Communism is the best solution to mankind’s problems,” he wrote.
“As one would expect, Steve Pappas has taken a keen interest in public meetings attending Liberal, Labor, D.L.P. and Communist meetings alike, and again I can truthfully say that I have never once known him to as much open his mouth to interject or ask a question at any of these meetings; he just sits and listens and quietly leaves when the meeting is ended.
“To the best of my knowledge, Mr Pappas has no police record of any kind. This does not surprise me because as I have said, he is a quiet inoffensive little man who minds his own business and, I am sure would not hurt a fly.”
In response to Cameron’s letter, Opperman convinced the Minister for Social Security Ian Sinclair to consider a “special benefit” payment to Pappas if he lodged a formal application and could prove “that a condition of hardship exists”.
No such application for a benefit was lodged – but Pappas did apply again for citizenship in 1966, 1968, and 1970 – all with the same negative result.[7]
Meanwhile, his friend John Lesses says, Pappas kept working part-time, living frugally in a small Whitmore Square cottage in central Adelaide.
“This man worked as a ship painter and docker in Port Adelaide after 65 for seven or eight years in order to be able to survive. That is a testimony to his commitment and his work ethic. He was very strong on that. He never wavered from having to get up and report for duty whenever he was on the roster to be able to do that work.”[8]
In 1971, Pappas had a stroke of luck, winning $4000 second prize in a lottery.
The ‘Sunday Mail’ reported that the 71-year-old bachelor was not well off, but intended making a wide range of donations from his windfall.
These included $20 for disabled children; $100 for the Australian Socialist newspaper; $5 for the Peace in Vietnam Campaign; $100 to help political prisoners in Greece; and $5 “for wreaths for the federal ministers who have refused to grant him citizenship”.
“Are they afraid of me because I am a Communist?” Pappas asked the paper. “I have never been in court in my life and I am a Communist because of the poverty and suffering I saw during the Depression.”[9]
A little over a year later, 72-year-old Pappas received a telegram from the newly-elected Labor Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, informing him that his naturalization had at last been approved – 43 years after the first application was lodged in Mataranka.[10]
Finally, he was entitled to receive the aged pension, but John Lesses says he never heard him condemn the Australian authorities for having kept him under surveillance and making him wait for citizenship for so long.
“He never, ever, spoke in a manner of bitterness. He never rubbished the Australian government in that context, they have not paid me. He was very objective, saying ‘Look, I have an entitlement as anybody else and I will struggle for everybody else as I struggle for myself’ and so he was very objective about it and he never showed any fear about ASIO or anyone monitoring him, or anything of that sort.”
Steve Pappas remained active at rallies on issues such as workers’ rights and nuclear disarmament until his admission to an Adelaide nursing home, where he spent several years before his death in 1988, aged 89.
After his cremation, his ashes were scattered into the sea by trade union friends from the ‘Island Seaway’ ferry as it sailed from Adelaide to Kangaroo Island.
John Lesses, who was the executor of his estate, says it wouldn’t have been appropriate to send Pappas’ ashes back to Greece.
“He called himself a kangaroo. I say that with due respect. He said I’m a kangaroo, no way am I going back to Greece. There was nothing there for him and he never wanted to return to Greece, even for a holiday or a visit. It never entered his mind.”
The Painters and Dockers, Seamen and Waterside Workers unions jointly sponsored the name of ‘Steve (Stavros) Pappas’ to be inscribed on the Port Adelaide Workers’ Memorial, in recognition of his contribution to the South Australian labour movement.
“People would recognise right across the trade union movement of South Australia that this little worker – and they referred to him as the worker, or ergatees, as we say in Greek – that this man has been punished for his beliefs, but he was held as a beacon of ‘dare to struggle dare to win’, and this is what he epitomized,” says John Lesses. “And the workers’ struggle against injustice. He reflected that and people said ‘Good on you Stevie, stand up and we’ll be with you’. That’s the great leadership that he showed for himself firstly but also for those who didn’t have the same benefit that he wanted of naturalization.”[11]
A modified version of a story originally published by SBS as part of a series called ‘Unwanted Australians’, produced by Kristina Kukolja and Lindsey Arkley
[1] We of the Never Never, by Jeannie Gunn,1908 (public domain)
[2] Northern Standard, 12 March 1929; 5 November 1929
[3] NAA: A6980, S201787
[4] John Lesses, interviewed by SBS, June 2015
[5] NAA: A6980, S201787
[6] Senate Hansard 17 September 1964
[7] NAA: A6980, S201787
[8] John Lesses, interviewed by SBS, June 2015
[9] Sunday Mail, 22 August, 1971
[10] NAA: A6980, S201787
[11] John Lesses, interviewed by SBS, June 2015
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