Dr Fiona Barbouttis Martin MP, a Sydney Greek Australian of Castellorizian heritage, is an Australian Liberal Party politician who was elected as Member of Parliament for Reid at the 2019 federal election and talks exclusively to The Greek Herald.
Dr Fiona Martin MP, is a mum, psychologist and small businesswoman, who has spent her life working to better the lives of people, supporting some of the most vulnerable children in our community. Fiona’s work has helped to treat a wide range of learning, developmental and behavioural difficulties that children experience.
Congratulations on your win in the election. What is your first order of business now that you’re elected?
Now that the polls have been declared in Reid, my priority is getting out into the community and speaking to people. I want to hear more about the issues important to them so I can work with the Morrison Government to deliver the infrastructure and essential services that families in Reid care about.
I understand you are of Castellorizian background. How have you found growing up in Australia with a Greek upbringing? How connected do you feel to Greece and Greeks?
Growing up, I heard stories about my Papou and the challenges he faced as a migrant and a small business owner. These stories helped my sisters and I connect with our Greek heritage. My dad’s family lived through the Second World War and the occupation of Greece, which has a profound impact on our sense of connection to the Greek community even here in Australia.
Have you had a chance to visit Kastellorizo recently? If so how did you find it?
I have visited Kastellorizo but not for a long time. It struck me as a place that was beautiful and peaceful. For anyone not familiar with the area, Kastellorizo is a small island in the Aegean Sea. I was surprised at the time how many Greek-Australians were on the Island, mostly spending time with their extended families.
How has your Greek Australian heritage shaped you and what lessons have you been able to apply in your current position from this upbringing?
My Greek-Australian heritage has taught me the value of hard work. My Papou put all his energy into his business so that he could provide for his family, and that has inspired me to do the same. Together with my Yia Yia, he opened a café in Newcastle. They were hard working business owners.
What connection do you have with the Greek community and how do you think you can support them in your new position? Will you become involved in any local Greek initiatives?
I was baptised Greek Orthodox and spend a lot of time with my extended family celebrating milestones amongst the Greek community. Through my dad’s soccer days, I got to know many people in the Greek soccer community growing up. I met a lot of local Greek Australians from Reid during the campaign and I’m looking forward to spending more time with them soon.
We understand your father was a known soccer player? Tell us a little about him?
My father, George Barbouttis, played for a number of clubs in Sydney, including Sydney Croatia and Panhellenic, and a couple of clubs in Greece. He was selected for the Australian National team, but never played a representative game because of injuries. My dad was a coach for most of my childhood, so I spent many afternoons and evenings watching community sport, and the teamwork and collaboration that comes with it. I think that has had a strong influence on me today.
Will you keep the promises you made to your constituents?
Definitely. I’m getting to work straight away. During the campaign, the Morrison Government committed to a number of local projects, including funding for CCTV in Strathfield and Homebush, upgrades to Timbrell Park sporting facilities, and new facilities for the Wests Tigers and Cricket NSW. This is on top of projects announced before the campaign to tackle congestion on Homebush Bay Drive and support for a number of community organisations. I’m excited to see these projects delivered in coming years.
What do you want to be remembered for?
I want to be remembered as a hard working advocate for my community. I’m hitting the ground running and I’m ready to work hard for local families and businesses. I’ve got a strong interest in mental health, in children and families, and in sport so I’m particularly looking forward to working in these areas.
Award-winning Greek-Australian filmmaker Mary Zournazi talks to The Greek Herald and discusses her film Dogs of Democracy and her latest documentary film currently in production, Rembetika Blues.
Dogs of Democracy has won the Spirit of Activism award, Best Documentary Feature and Director’s Choice Award in the US.
What is your film about?
The film is a story about the stray dogs of Athens, but it is equally a story about peoples’ courage and dignity in times of crisis. The film is my love letter to Greece: to its people and to its stray animals. The film also took somewhat unexpected turns: I travelled to the island of Lesvos and documented not only the economic crisis but also aspects of the migrant crisis as it unfolded in Greece.
This subject is now part of my new documentary film, Rembetika Blues which looks at the experience of migration and music. It is a documentary film about the power of music and what makes us human. Rembetika music or the Greek blues is a music of the streets and a music of refugees. The film explores the heart and soul of Rembetika music through peoples’ stories of love, loss, and belonging.
What motivated you to do your project?
I made my film Dogs of Democracy almost by accident. I took my first ever trip to Athens in October, 2014. I had gone for a holiday and in search of my cultural roots. But I had arrived in the middle of the Greek economic crisis. I could feel the tension on the streets, but walking around the city, I also noticed something else, something unexpected and unique. All round the city there were stray dogs, they seemed to occupy the city like ‘citizens’ – they crossed the traffic lights, they socialised, they were part of the urban life and feel of the city. Immediately I fell in love with them, and I became curious about their ‘lives’. In a very short time, I realised that the dogs were looked after by volunteers in Athens, who cared for and fed the stray dogs. I became fascinated by how in the middle of Greece’s worst economic crisis people were willing to take care of the animals. I began to consider what this might say about our ideas of love, community and care. That’s how the story began: a love of the animals, and the love of the city and its people
Mary Zournazi is an Australian author, philosopher and filmmaker. She is the director of the multi-award winning documentary Dogs of Democracy (2017) and the author of several books including Foreign Dialogues, Keywords to War, Hope – New philosophies for change and Inventing Peace with the German filmmaker Wim Wenders. She teaches in the sociology program at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Currently she is working her new documentary film called Rembetika Blues.
The state-of-the-art museum is constantly rated as one of the best in the world and its designers, builders and operators are justifiably entitled to the kudos that have gone their way. But amidst all the euphoria, let’s not forget that the museum was seen as the long-awaited catalyst for the return of the Elgin collection of Parthenon Sculptures currently on display in the British Museum. Ten years later, how closer is Greece to reunifying the Parthenon Sculptures? The need for a museum to display the sculptures and other artefacts, principally from the Parthenon and the Erechtheion, was recognised long ago. The old Acropolis museum – a minimalist stone masonry building – was first opened in 1874 on the south eastern corner of the Acropolis and was modernised in the 1950s. But it was limited by the physical constraints of its location and the desire to build a museum large enough to accommodate all the sculptures and to counter the British argument that the Greeks did not have a suitable museum for the Parthenon Sculptures even if they were ever returned to Athens.
Old Acropolis Museum
In 1976, the then Greek Prime Minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis, actually suggested the current Makriyianni site as the prime location for a new museum but it took a number of international competitions before a design was chosen that met the main criteria of the competition, that is, securing the best solution for the great architectural and sculpted works of the Acropolis. At the same time, the competition guidelines stipulated that the “envisaged return of the Parthenon pediment marbles (the so-called “Elgin Marbles”) necessitates the creation of corresponding areas for their display”.
From the very beginning, as one historian has noted, the new museum was intended not only to create a modern museum space that related directly to the Scared Rock, but also served as a “political vehicle for the vociferous expression of the request for the return of the Parthenon marbles from the British Museum and a proof that they will take good care in the soil that gave birth to them”.
In the words of noted Spanish architect Santiago Calavatra, the Parthenon is a “present of our ancestors” and a testimony of civilisation which present and future generations have an obligation to honour. This was the architectural and archaeological imperative behind the construction of a new museum that would establish a new visual experience for all of the known surviving sculptures and the Parthenon itself.
After the last competition that was held in 2001/2002, the design that was adjudged by an international panel of architects as being the most appropriate and enlightened proposal was that of the renowned Swiss-American architect and Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Bernard Tschumi, and his Greek colleague, Michalis Fotiades. Their design successfully addressed the competition criteria.
Daniel Libeskind’s runner-up design
It is interesting to note that the runner-up in the completion, a radical avant garde design by the noted architect Daniel Libeskind, failed because it proposed that the Parthenon Sculptures be grouped and displayed as independent works of art. The angular building proposed by the Libeskind team may have architectural merit but the paramount consideration was the display of the Parthenon sculptures.
One of the members of the international judging panel, leading Greek-Australian architect, Nonda Katsalidis, strongly supported the winning entry in terms of its simplicity and clarity. He also commented that the design will “put the Elgin Marbles out in the sunshine, in the light of Attica which has clarity and the strong silhouette light and shade that produces”. The brilliant Attic light also reminds us of observation by the father of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, that the Parthenon affords us the “complete sensation of a profound harmony” of form and light. The Acropolis Museum succeeds in perfecting the harmony of sculpture with light. Building works were unfortunately delayed for many reasons, not least being the many archaeological finds that were uncovered during on-site excavations and which needed to be carefully preserved, including a large urban settlement dating from Archaic to early Christian Athens, late Roman baths and dwellings.
Whilst the construction was delayed beyond the hoped-for completion date in 2004 (to coincide with the Athens Olympics) the British cultural establishment watched on nervously. For years the British Museum has dreaded this moment in history when an iconic new museum will rise from the ground in Athens. Indeed, on 22 March 1991 the former Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, B M Cook, had sent a memo to the British Museum director warning
“The next phase of the campaign for repatriation is likely to begin any time after the actual start of construction of the new Acropolis Museum. The problem has not gone away, it is merely in hibernation; and when it wakes up, our successors will find that it is fiercer than before.”
The Greeks had also assumed that the new museum would make that case emphatically. As a 2002 report in the Washington Post noted, Greece was building the museum in hopes of reinforcing efforts to change the up-to-now negative stance of the British government and ”shaming the British government into giving back sculptures taken two centuries ago”.
The former Culture Minister in the PASOK Government, Evangelos Venizelos, went further in this statement he made in 2002: the Parthenon Hall in the New Acropolis Museum – once built – would function as an “ongoing challenge and invitation for the Marbles’ return and as a reminder for those who wish to keep the monument in a mutilated condition”.
At the actual unveiling of the museum in 2009 the former Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said: “Once the museum is completed, Greece will have a very strong argument for the return of the Parthenon sculptures. We are taking a very important step to finally realise a dream that unites all Greeks.”
Concept sketch by Bernard Tschumi
Movement – in the view of Bernard Tschumi – is one of the generating factors of architecture. In the Acropolis Museum, the visitor’s route takes the form of a clear three-dimensional loop along a multi-levelled architectural promenade extending from the archaeological excavations to the Parthenon sculptures and back through the Roman period.
The layout of galleries is designed to emphasise the element of time in spatial compositions, in this case reflected by the timeless beauty of the classical sculptures that once adorned the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis in Athens. This experience culminates in the grand Parthenon sculpture hall when the visitor discovers the Panathinaic frieze and the metopes and pedimental sculptures that survived the ravaging by Elgin’s men.
Bernard Tschumi, once remarked that the modern museum will inherit a legacy that “obliges it to reconsider its historical role both as a repository for its collections and as an influential context for the art of its time”. The Acropolis Museum clearly achieves that.
The Parthenon Gallery, with a view to the Sacred Rock
The proximity of the Acropolis Museum to the Sacred Rock, as one commentator has written, provides easy access to the buildings where the sculptures belong. It is an immediate connection, both historically and aesthetically, that serves the “comprehensibility of the total monument, without the interruption of a voyage to another part of the globe”. In other words, to appreciate the monument of all monuments atop the Acropolis in Athens, the visitor should not also have to travel to Bloomsbury in London.
So, as we can see, the Acropolis Museum is and has always been the centrepiece of the campaign for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures. So where are we now?
For a start, the British Museum has not taken a backward step. Over the last decade it has carefully rebranded itself as the universal museum, the “Museum of the Enlightenment”, the “collective memory of mankind”, the “cache of civilisation”, a museum at the “centre of a conversation with the world” and therefore the logical repository for the marbles. Today, it arrogantly describes itself as the “museum of and for the world”.
According to the British Museum, the life of the Elgin Marbles as part of the story of the Parthenon is over and they are now part of another story, that of the British Museum, in a not too subtle attempt to suppress the context of their origin.
In April 2018, the British Museum hauled some twelve pedimental sculptures, metopes and parts of the frieze into a separate hall in the museum under the pretext of displaying these works of art with sculptures by the renown French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. In its press release the British Museum stressed that the exhibition “will provide a new opportunity to focus on the Parthenon Sculptures as individual works rather than as part of an ensemble as an obvious counter to the claim that the sculptures are integral to a unique monument.
This followed a similar exhibition – Defining Beauty – in 2015 and the notorious ‘loan’ of the River God Ilissos pedimetal sculpture to the Hermitage Museum in Russia in late 2014.
Defining beauty: dispersing the Parthenon Sculptures
Whilst Greece may have a new museum in Athens, the British Museum has devised a new political and diplomatic playbook as to how it promotes the Parthenon Sculptures as individual works of art which can be dispersed as the Trustees see fit, with no intention of ever returning the collection to Athens.
Meanwhile, mediation through UNESCO has been rejected. Resolutions made at the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee on Cultural Property over the last 30 years for negotiations to be undertaken between Greece and Great Britain over the sculptures have been routinely ignored by the British side.
So, while we can justifiably celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Acropolis Museum as a magnificent museum and the unifying element for the Parthenon and its sculptures – the central monument of classical antiquity – as well as other treasures of antiquity from the Sacred Rock, the unfortunate reality is that the opening of the new museum has not proven to be the catalyst for reunification that many had hoped for.
Despite that, I hope to live to see the day when all the known surviving sculptures are reunited from the British Museum and elsewhere, so that the Parthenon Gallery of the Acropolis Museum will become the most famous single room of Classical Greek art in the world.
Only then will the Greek Stones be allowed to speak for themselves.
George Vardas Vice-Chair, Australians for the Return of the Parthenon Sculptures
The site of Delos island and the Byzantine church of Daphni, both World Heritage Sites, will be provided with funding under the EU’s NSRF funds for 2014-2020, phase 2, the Finance Ministry advised. To assist in the restoration of the antiquities and the centre of archaeology, Delos will be granted 4.5 million euros from public funds.
Delos was world heritage listed for its role in early archaeology and its vital role as the Mediterranean port from the 4th to the 1st. It was an influential political force and, with being the mythological birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, an important religious centre in the Archaic and Classical periods. The island was also a major commercial and trading centre in the 2nd and 1st centuries CE.
The Daphni monastery church, built in the 11th century AD northwest of Athens, will receive 1.2 million euros to strip later additions, restore the surrounding area, prepare information brochures and hold a one-day conference to present the project.
A total of 13 million has been set aside for the protection and promotion of important antiquities listed by UNESCO, under the NSFR phase 2 program.
The Finance Ministry said the monuments listed by the UN’s cultural organisation “play an emblematic role in the value of Greek tourism because of their global recognition” and help the development of their surrounding areas through tourism.
