Australians and Greeks Volume 3: The Later Years was supported by the NSW Migration Heritage Centre and is available for purchase through Halstead Press.

Hugh Gilchrist’s Australians and Greeks Volume 3: The Later Years was launched by the Hon. John Hatzistergos MLC, the former Minister Assisting the Premier on Citizenship, on 10 February 2005 at the University of Sydney.

Concluding Gilchrist’s award winning history, Volume 3 covers an age of war and migration – when world crisis brought Greeks and Australians into intimate contact.

It identifies thousands of Australian Greeks, who fought in World War II, reporting heroic exploits like those of Angelo Barbouttis – who destroyed two barges full of Japanese soldiers in New Guinea.

It describes desperate struggles of Australians fighting in occupied Greece, and the Cretan and mainland Greeks who looked after them such as Lela Karayianni, shot by the Nazis for having saved dozens of Australian lives.

New generations of Greek Australians making their mark in the professions and other walks of life are covered. So is Greek society in wartime and post-War Australia – the Church, the Press, education, politics and social life.

As immigration brought large numbers from a troubled post-War Greece, Australian diplomats laboured to secure Greece’s place in its neighbourhood. Aid workers delivered vital help to the suffering population and famous Australians, including Patrick White and Dr Evatt, took part in Greek affairs. This book follows these issues through to the establishment of Greece’s permanent diplomatic mission in Australia in the 1950s.

It includes the first detailed and objective review of the work of the UN Special Commission on the Balkans. And through a period of travel and communication, Hugh Gilchrist surveys trade and the Greek ships which came to Australia – many sunk in the War, others bringing migrants to a new home.

Like volumes 1 and 2, Australians and Greeks – the Later Years is both a definitive history of its period and an entertaining array of colourful characters and stories.