When Sydney student Anthony Parissis opened the email confirming his HSC English Extension 2 major work had been selected for the prestigious HSC Young Writers’ Showcase, his first reaction was disbelief. Then came something deeper – a quiet sense that the voices of his ancestors were finally being honoured.
“It felt like my bloodline was looking down and smiling,” he tells The Greek Herald. “All I want is to do my family and community proud.”
For the third-generation Greek Australian writer, whose creative practice sits at the intersection of family memory, cultural hybridity and diasporic longing, the recognition marks not just a personal milestone but a moment of representation.
His 6,000-word pseudo-autofictive short story, ‘The delicate art of a funeral zeibekiko,’ was one of only a small number chosen from roughly 1,500 submissions statewide.
“My intention from the beginning was to do my best to be able share this piece with our community and to now have it published in the most prestigious HSC publication in the state is pretty extraordinary,” he says.
“It’s surreal that young Greek Australian men and women all over NSW will be able to go to their school library, pick up my piece and find a bit of themselves within it.”
A Major Work rooted in hybrid identity and Greek Australian storytelling
Anthony completed his HSC at St Pius X College Chatswood, where Year 12 became a crucible for both academic pressure and personal growth.
As he puts it: “Year 12 felt a bit like living inside a pressure cooker but to some extent somehow forged a clearer sense of who I was becoming.”
He reflects openly on the tension between writing authentically and writing for assessment: “In some respects, my style of writing was sculpted into one of attempting to appeal to HSC markers rather than cultivating my true passion.”
But Extension 2 gave him a space where, as he says, “this passion [could] flourish.”
Across 12 months, he produced ‘The delicate art of a funeral zeibekiko’ – a work that interrogates patriarchy, matriarchy, silence, mythology and the emotional economy of the Greek migrant household.
“My piece almost satirises what I’ve observed within our community to be an overwhelming reverence for the familial patriarch,” he explains.
“I describe it as a choreography—a dance between diaspora and homeland, following the fictional Pavlidis family’s acceptance and mourning of their recently deceased but incredibly flawed father.”
The story navigates the fractures beneath the polished facades of migrant pride: “It is a story that exposes the fractures, silences and contradictions that lie beneath the polished surface of diasporic pride.”
His work draws on postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s concept of the third space: “I wanted to show how migrant families negotiate hybrid identities, how they mythologise a homeland they can no longer fully access, and how storytelling becomes a means of reclaiming agency.”
Intertextual nods to The Iliad and the myth of Hephaestus enrich this multigenerational exploration of identity.
Most importantly, Anthony says, “It was very much my intention to showcase the matriarchal voice within my work as a broader mirror of the influence of the Greek women in my life.”
Why the Zeibekiko?
The zeibekiko, one of Greek culture’s most emotionally evocative dances, became the centrepiece of his narrative for a reason.
“To me the zeibekiko has always symbolised a kind of raw, unmediated truth,” he says. “It’s one of those dances that refuses choreography or symmetry or rehearsal, erupting when the body can no longer hold the weight of its grief or memory.”
He describes his own evolving identity as its own kind of dance between belonging and distance:
“For me, this vulnerability was a sense of disconnection.”
He took Greek dance lessons – “shoutout to Rallis’ School of Greek Dance” – and immersed himself more deeply in language and music.
“This, to me, is my own zeibekiko. It’s learning culture to unlearn it, which I think is what many 3rd generation Greek Australians do,” Anthony says.
Placing the zeibekiko in a funeral scene allowed him to expose how tradition can mutate through diaspora: “Placing the dance at a funeral in my story – a place it traditionally does not belong – allowed me to expose how diasporic families often misplace or reconfigure tradition in ways that generate new forms of estrangement.”
Fiction as a vessel for truth
Pseudo-autofiction became the ideal form to confront inherited stories without directly exposing real individuals.
“Labelling the piece as pseudo-autofictive was really my way of acknowledging that the emotional architecture of the story is undeniably mine, even if the literal events that unfold are not,” he says.
“Fiction gave me a certain type of freedom to honour this beautiful complexity without being bound by factual accuracy or the ethical constraints of exposing real people.”
His characters are built from glimpses – “fragments, half-remembered and sometimes contradictory anecdotes” – reflecting the instability and beauty of migrant memory.
The Lemnos–Gallipoli connection and a new understanding of identity
Anthony grew up hearing stories of his father’s homeland, Lemnos – myths of Hephaestus, tales of the cave-church of Panagia Kakaviotissa, and memories passed through generations. But learning that Lemnos was central to the ANZAC campaign transformed his understanding of belonging.
“This convergence completely disrupted the binary that Australians are traditionally taught: that Australian history existed on one side, and Greek history on the other,” he says. “Lemnos collapsed those divides and showed me that the migrant story isn’t an addendum to Australian history, but rather it is woven through it.”
Identity, he realised, “is a constellation formed from intersecting histories,” and Greek Australian belonging is shaped by myth, migration, loss, and reinvention.
A creative turning point: Writing for more than the HSC
A pivotal moment came at the Greek Australian Writers’ Festival, during a keynote by Koraly Dimitriades.
“She made a remarkable comment as to ‘not worrying about what the community would think’,” he recalls. “Prior I must admit I had some hesitations in my writing.”
This liberated him to critique aspects of culture openly.
Researching Greek histories of displacement further deepened this shift: “I began to see my own diasporic identity not as a diluted or distant form of Greekness, but as part of a continuum of survival, resilience and reinvention.”
Hopes for the community
Now that his work is selected for statewide publication, Anthony hopes it becomes a catalyst for intergenerational dialogue.
“What I hope more than anything is for my story to become a place where the older generation feels seen… and where younger Greek Australians feel empowered to speak openly and honestly about the complexities of inheriting those memories,” he says.
He imagines households reading the story aloud at the dinner table, sparking conversations long protected by silence.
Finally, he offers a message to emerging writers: “Write unapologetically. Be proud of your Greekness. Not the curated, ornamental version of it, but the real, complicated, inherited Greekness that lives in your family stories, your griefs, your contradictions and your joys.”
