It’s not easy to break into one of the most competitive housing markets in the world, but Stuart Penklis suggests one way it can be done. 

Stuart Penklis is the head of residential at property developer Mirvac and says persistence and making sacrifices pays off. 

“One thing that most of these first home buyers have in common is a clear goal and a willingness to make sacrifices to save towards owning their own home,” he tells the Daily Telegraph. 

“When you see young couples in their early 20s, who’ve been saving since they were teenagers and have the deposit and a steady income to support a mortgage, it gives encouragement to others trying to take the first step on the property ladder.”

No problems if you struggling saving up money, just set yourself goals, Mr. Penklis says. 

“Setting a goal and sticking to a budget is the best way to encourage good saving habits to build a deposit,” he says. 

“Living at home with parents if you can, rather than renting your own place, and cutting back on discretionary spending can add up to significant savings at a time when every little bit helps.”

He says it’s better a better use of your time to know how much you can borrow before you begin your property hunt. 

The national property market has risen nearly 14 per cent over the past year and it has no signs of stopping. 

Source: The Daily Telegraph 

Some Melburnians have woken up this morning to the first day of Melbourne’s snap five-day lockdown worse off than others. 

Wani Sakellaropoulos is the co-owner of Ms. Frankie’s in inner Melbourne and says she’s been hit by a bad case of déjà vu after being forced to shut her doors for two weeks. 

“I’m sitting in line waiting to be tested this morning and it just seems like a little bit of a cycle that keeps repeating itself,” she tells the Greek Herald. 

“This current situation that we find ourselves in isn’t something that we’ve experienced yet.” 

Mrs. Sakellaropoulos is in-line waiting for her COVID-19 test after receiving a call from Melbourne Health late last night. 

The representative tells her that a positive case of COVID-19 swung by her and her husband Giorgio’s Italian restaurant around 6pm to 7:45pm before heading down to go watch the rugby at Melbourne’s AAMI stadium on Tuesday, 13 July.

“We got a call last night saying… that we needed to shut down, deep clean, and to get tested and that regardless of a negative result, we have to quarantine for 14 days,” she says. 

“We hope that everybody can return a negative, we deep clean the restaurant, and come out the other end.” 

Ms. Frankie joins the ranks of Vanilla in Oakleigh that has also been listed as a tier 1 exposure site since the Delta outbreak reached Melbourne.  

They’ve just been given the ‘all-clear’ after a positive case of COVID-19 visited their restaurant on Friday afternoon, 9 July. 

“[The South East Public Health Unit] went above and beyond to assist us to ensure that we were ready to open our doors again in record time,” they posted to their Facebook page. 

“The infectious control team (IPCAR-ICCOM), otherwise known as the outbreak squad, were superheroes.” 

Mrs. Sakellaropoulos says her staff are currently looking into COVID-19 emergency support from the government to for what she predicts will be a lockdown that lasts longer than the intended five days.

“I was just saying to my business partner [that] we’ve got a lot of staff in their early-to-middle 20’s that are dealing with lots of people on a daily basis and they still don’t qualify [as priority for a vaccine],” she says. 

“It’s a worry but I think hopefully the government can roll out a better vaccine program and [if] we can all get vaccinated, this nightmare ends.” 

Melbourne Health is urging anybody who has visited a tier 1 exposure site to immediately isolate, get a COVID-19 test, and quarantine for 14 days from the date of exposure. You can contact the Department of Health on 1300 651 160. 

Do you have a similar community story? Email us at: greek@foreignlanguage.com.au

Dr Melanie Fillios is a senior lecturer in archaeology and paleoanthropology at the University of New England and has been drawn to the field of cultural archaeology since she entered college in the United States.

“I said, ‘I want to be an anthropologist!’, and my professor said, ‘What you want to be is an archaeologist. Come to my field school’,” she tells the ABC’s Conversations program.  

“So I spent eight weeks in the high desert of Idaho,” she says.

“We had snakes, grassfires, no showers, one porta potty and tents filled with earwigs and I was hooked.”  

She’s fascinated by hunter-gatherer societies and worked on digs in Greece for some years before moving to Australia to live and focus on understanding Australia’s megafauna.

Early on in her career, she travelled to excavate a site in the ancient Greek city-state Helike, in the northern Peloponnese, that dates back to about 2600 BC. 

“The site happened to be in an olive grove about five metres below the surface of the ground,” she says. 

“This site was really interesting because it’s mentioned by the classical sources of having been destroyed by an earthquake.” 

“What we found at Helike was a lot of pigs… [which] were a really fascinating animal in antiquity.”

Dr. Fillios says these pigs tell us about the nature of social differentiation in the Bronze-Age society and how they mark a shift towards the time of kings and kingdoms in classical Greece. 

“Pigs might have been a great way [for the Minoans] to maintain their independence from this burgeoning, complex state,” she says. 

She also recalls the time she came across a heap of research-worthy decaying sheep carnage in a mountainous Greek village. 

“Of course, in my naive and young state, the younger me said, ‘Wow! This is my opportunity to get a comparative collection!,” she says. 

“The [disgusted local yiayiades] just looked at me like, ‘You awful, disgusting foreigner’.” 

“That was probably one of the moments I should have questioned by choices in life,” she jokes.

Source: ABC Radio National

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