“Mathematics runs in the blood of the Greeks. I tell my students that Pythagoras was my uncle and quite a few of them believe it,” laughs 73-year-old Saki George Ganella OAM, who was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List this year.

It’s clear that after 50 years as a maths teacher at Melbourne High School, Mr Ganella still loves what he does and has no plans to slow down any time soon. And why should he? His journey to get to where he is today was one of immense hardship, courage and as he likes to call it, “motivation.”

Arrival in Australia:

Mr Ganella was born in 1947 in Kozani-Grevena, northern Greece, “right smack in the middle of a Greek Civil War.” His father, a bank manager in Kozani, was killed during the war and so at the age of three in 1950, Mr Ganella’s mother decided to flee Greece for Melbourne.

“My mother wanted to seek a better life for us. We were lucky enough to live with my aunty and her family in Melbourne until 1958, when my mum met and remarried a lovely man named Peter Pesnikas,” Mr Ganella tells The Greek Herald.

“Peter was fortunate enough to have a fish shop in Chapel St. The fish shop was only five doors down from Toorak Road in Melbourne, which is 200 metres from Melbourne High School. So in a sense, the long journey from Greece to Chapel Street almost forced me to go to Melbourne High School. It was meant to be.”

When the student becomes a teacher:

And meant to be it was. As a young boy, Mr Ganella recalls sitting in his stepfather’s fish shop watching Melbourne High School students walk by. Impressed by their smart uniforms and confidence, he decided he would attend the school and make his family proud.

“The boys in uniform with caps looked strange to this Greek boy at the fish shop,” Mr Ganella laughs.

“But because my mother brought me up to be very motivated and aspirational, I tried my hardest and was accepted into Melbourne High School for my senior year. Once there, I studied the highest level mathematics subjects I could.”

READ MORE: Greek Australians recognised in Queen’s Birthday Honours 2020.

The rest is history. Mr Ganella completed his senior studies, taught maths in the small Victorian rural town of Kerang for two years, before being “lucky enough” to be transferred back to his beloved Melbourne High School – where he has remained for 50 years since 1971.

“I love the students. In my 50 years at Melbourne High School, the demographics have changed. When I was there as a student, there were a lot of Greeks and Jewish boys and now they’re eastern, Asian boys and no matter how the demographic changes, the commitment and passion is wonderful,” Mr Ganella says.

“Very quickly they become Melbourne High School boys and that’s what has kept me going all these years.”

His future plans:

With such an illustrious career, which actually also includes a stint as a Commanding Officer in the 415 Squadron Australian Air Force Cadets, it’s clear that Mr Ganella deserves a well-earned break from teaching. Something he’s planning on taking full advantage of next year.

“I’ve applied for leave next year and for some strange reason I’m aiming to retire at 75, which I think is a good innings. I’ve been advised to retire while I can still walk out of the school,” Mr Ganella says.

But not without giving one final word of advice to the students who have held such a special place in his heart over the years.

“Follow your passion. If you’re really passionate about something, the chances are that you will do well at it… But if you don’t follow your passion and you do something for monetary gains and you don’t like it, to my mind, that’s a terrible life.”

Wise words from a very wise man.

The Greek version of this article will be in print on July 11, 2020.

“I wish I never knew. It’s turned my life upside down,” begins 49-year-old Andriana as we sit down for our exclusive chat. She’s referring to how she only recently discovered she was adopted – a fact her parents, who have passed away, never told her about.

“I will never get full closure because my parents took the answers with them. I was angry with them for a long time. Not because of the adoption but for the lie. It’s the lie that kills me.”

Andriana describes her life as ‘The Original Truman Show.’ She says she always felt she didn’t belong when she was younger. Not only was she always missing from family photos, but a routine blood test at age 21 showed Andriana had thalassemia minor, a genetic condition neither of her parents had. It just wasn’t adding up.

Until one day three years ago when all the missing pieces of the puzzle came together. Andriana and her family visited a family friend in Greece, who had reached out to her after her mother’s death, and as they were leaving her house she said the words which would change Andriana’s world forever.

“She said, ‘wow you look so much like your mother.’ And I said, ‘No I look like my dad’ and I actually did look like my dad. And she said, ‘No. The mother who gave birth to you’,” Andriana tells The Greek Herald with tears in her eyes.

“I asked her to repeat herself and she said, ‘What? You didn’t know you were adopted?’ And my whole world fell apart. It just fell apart.

“I rang my nouna and I said, ‘I’ve learnt something. I want you to tell me the truth.’ She started screaming down the phone ‘why did she tell you?’ So the whole community I’ve grown up in, everybody knew. Everybody from the part of Greece my parents are from, to the neighbours of where I grew up, to family friends.”

Now although Andriana says she doesn’t blame these people for knowing and not telling her, it was still an important trigger which pushed her to find out more about the woman who gave birth to her.

“What if I’m not Greek?”:

As Andriana’s search for her biological mother began, she says not knowing whether she was Greek hugely affected her.

“I had this huge identity crisis. I said to my husband, ‘It doesn’t bother me that I’m adopted but what if I’m not Greek? What do I do then?’ I’m Greek. My kids are Greek, I look Greek, I cook Greek. Greek is who and what I am,” Andriana says.

Fortunately for her, her official birth certificate showed that her biological mother, Maria*, was in fact Greek and actually gave birth to her on May 15, 1970, in Sydney. It is here where the story, which has been pieced together from a file “three times bigger than the Bible,” becomes heartbreaking.

“On May 8, 1971, a few days before I turned one, my biological mother took me into children’s services and abandoned me. I became a ward of the state. The only thing she told the service workers was that she wanted me to go to a Greek family and that I had to be raised as Greek Orthodox,” Andriana says.

“So I was put in an orphanage for about three weeks, followed by emergency foster care for a week and a half, back to the orphanage and then my mum and dad adopted me.”

Finding out you were abandoned would have stopped anyone from searching for their biological mother. But the same can’t be said for Andriana.

One small Facebook search later and the next thing she knew she was having a phone conversation with her biological mother. Over the phone, Maria not only told Andriana that she had a half-brother and sister, but she also confirmed that she did leave “a girl with blue eyes” behind when she left Australia for Greece.

This was the only confirmation Andriana needed to hop onto a flight to Greece in October 2019 to meet her biological mother once and for all.

“I get off the plane and she’s waiting at the airport… It was like I was looking in the mirror. A much older version than me but I look exactly like her,” Andriana explains.

“That first night we visited my half-sister, who I’m still really close with, and Maria and I were sitting on the couch and she says to me ‘are you happy that you found your mother?’ And I looked at her, I’ll never forget this, and said ‘You are the woman who gave birth to me. You’re not my mother. My mother has passed away.’ She responded with ‘maybe one day’.”

“I’m grateful she gave me up”:

It’s this fierce protectiveness over the parents who raised her which remains a constant throughout Andriana’s journey to find her biological mother.

Despite lying to her and keeping secrets all her life, Andriana takes any chance to defend their actions and protect them from criticism. In fact, her own father was still alive when she first found out she was adopted and instead of telling him she knew and asking for answers, she decided to not tell him.

“What am I going to tell him?” Andriana said rhetorically when I asked why she never told him. “It would’ve sent him to his grave earlier.”

“At the end of the day it doesn’t bother me that I was adopted because I had a fantastic upbringing. I had a loving set of parents. I was the apple of their eye… You couldn’t wish for better parents.

“Maria gave birth to me and that’s it. I can say that quite clearly. I have an affection for her. I don’t love her. Am I grateful she gave birth for me? Yes I am because I wouldn’t be here. But I’m also grateful she gave me up because I had my parents and they were bloody amazing.”

A tale of secrecy and lies which doesn’t even come close to breaking the strong bond between a daughter and her parents.

* Names have been changed to protect privacy.

The Greek version of this article can be found in print on July 8, 2020.