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I was one of a number of journalists at the time who were posted overseas to get
publicity for Australia and hopefully to attract migrants to join the large numbers who
had come in the large-scale immigration programs since the Second World War.
And being in Greece, I had the additional handicap of working within the parameters of
the military junta.
The colonels, George Papadoupoulous and co were in power and, naturally, they discouraged
emigration because it could become a measure of their popularity.
So, we had to find any means of publicising Australia and a mention of Australia in the
press was counted as a sore loss.
It's a wonderful, warm human interest story that is timeless but to understand how it
came to be meant we have to go back to 1972 and find that Arthur Frelingos, then 72
himself, was coming back to Greece to the island of Kythera to meet his sister for the
first time.
We came to Kythera a week after Arthur had actually arrived and because the ferry only
came in once a week we had to hire a fishing boat, which you can see in the film.
First of all we had to go up on the mountainside and capture a goat, shove it in the
boot of the family taxi that we commandeered to get around the island and pass it over to
the chef for the feast the next day.
This feast was quite remarkable and then a wonderful thing happened.
A very old woman started to sing - just spontaneously - and she was singing songs about
the island of Aphrodite, which was Kythera.
A lot of people from Kythera and other parts of Greece spent half the year in Australia
and half the year back home.
We had a woman and her husband from Parramatta who had the only private car on the island
it seemed, following us everywhere and getting in every shot.
Mysteriously, someone knew the deputy prime minister Patakos and that enabled us to put
this film on as the lead-in to the opening ceremony of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.
So, I would say just about everyone in Greece saw this film when it went to air.
I saw it with a group of about 20 Greeks and I was quite moved myself to find at the end
of the film they were all crying.