Forging Hybrid Subjectivities: The Presence of the Greek Diasporic Childhood in Adult Third Generation Greek Australians

This paper explores third-generation Greek Australian identity as study participants recall their childhoods as members of the diaspora. It is an approach to research that foregrounds how recalled knowledge and memories of time past are transmitted collectively and is the implications for participants’ identity formation. The research method investigated fifteen third-generation Greek Australians and their accounts of their Greekness through semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021–2022. The study disentangles the intergenerational inheritance of diasporic consciousness to illuminate not only the ways in which the collective memory of Greekness is transmitted but the distinctiveness of third-generation Greek Australians. The study makes two key contributions. Firstly, third-generation Greek Australian identity is constructed around a nostalgic connection to grandparents, which is unlike the second-generation lived experience of feeling ‘other’ in Australia. Secondly, the third-generation experience is a more secure hybrid identity, choosing to embrace being Greek as a vital part of their life, values and self-expression.