Daily Archives: March 16, 2015

Alternate Culture Minister Nikos Xydakis says “at the moment, there is not a need for any more [funding]”.

There will be no more government funding at this stage for the archaeological work at Amphipolis, northern Greece, with experts focusing on the findings that have already been unearthed, Alternate Culture Minister Nikos Xydakis said on Saturday during a visit to the site.

“The excavation project has received funding,” he said in response to a question about whether more public money would be provided. “There are not many excavations in Greece that have received such support. At the moment, there is not a need for any more.”

The tomb discovered at the site, thought to date from Alexander the Great’s era, yielded five skeletons and various other artefacts. Xydakis said that archaeologists are focused on studying these finds and carrying out work aimed at making the tomb safe from collapse.

“This is a huge project, which at the moment is getting the breathing space that it needs,” added the minister.

Source: Kathimerini

Dr Gary Foley during his lecture at Melbourne’s Greek Centre last week. Photo: Stavros Messinis.

After reflecting on the long history of support experienced by Aboriginal people from the Greek community in Australia, in an impassioned speech to launch the 2015 Greek History and Culture Seminars organised by the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne, Dr Foley drew on the shared experience of cultural loss – and the unavoidable parallel between the ongoing campaign for Aboriginal artefacts to be returned by the British Museum and the Parthenon Marbles.

Dr Foley’s presentation coincided with the news that the British Museum is preparing to lend a bark etching from its collection (created by Dja Dja Wurrung people in central Victoria, that was taken by a Scottish settler in the 1850s) to the National Museum of Australia for an exhibition called ‘Encounters’ that will open later this year.

As he told the attentive Greek Centre audience, the ‘Encounters’ project is salt in the wound to a loan ten years ago made by the British Museum to the Melbourne Museum – a situation in which Dr Foley was intimately involved.

In 2004, Dr Foley resigned as a senior curator of the Melbourne Museum after his employer resisted legal attempts – under the then Federal Cultural Heritage legislation – to keep the bark etchings in Australia. At the time, Aboriginal groups sought – and got – the assistance of the Greek community to support their campaign.

The items in question – believed to be the only surviving examples in the world of Victorian Indigenous bark art – have been in storage at the British Museum for over 150 years until their display ten years ago in Victoria. At least one of the items is due to return, with a host of other Indigenous artefacts, just for the duration of the ‘Encounters’ show.

Faced with history repeating itself, Dr Foley says changes to legislation under the The Protection of Cultural Objects on Loan Act, enacted by the Gillard/Rudd Labor government, makes it harder today to contest the British Museum’s actions – and those of its Australian partners.

“You would expect the conservatives to support the Act, but what wasn’t expected was that a Labor government would be involved in such an exercise,” Foley told Neos Kosmos shortly after the Greek Centre event.

“They were the government in power. Peter Garrett was the relevant minister at one point, and the whole legislation went through a period of both Rudd and Gillard governments, and they’re the ones who need to be called to account.”

After the 2004 controversy, it appears the legislation was initiated at the call of Australia’s major cultural institutions who were keen on obtaining a legal guarantee to foreign partners (such as the British Museum) that items on loan in Australia would always return; so avoiding the fractious legal wranglings that took place a decade before.

Dr Foley says the Act ensures Australia’s even greater compliance with the British Museum’s anachronistic “colonial” position.

“We had legislation which went some way towards protecting Aboriginal people’s interest when it comes to cultural heritage, and that was removed.”

Repealing the legislation, says Foley, would be a way “to highlight the outrageous position of those at the British Museum who refuse to return anything to anybody, because they’re scared of the precedent that might be, in terms of the Parthenon Marbles.”

It’s clear that the ‘Encounters’ exhibition – the most ambitious show in the 14-year history of the National Museum of Australia – could not be mounted without the protection of the Act.

Despite its Australian curators’ ambitions for it to enliven a new discussion about the ownership and custodianship of Indigenous cultural objects, it is likely to be the museum’s most criticised and controversial show.

Reflecting the complexity of the debate around it, some might be surprised that the London version of the exhibition is being curated by an Indigenous Tasmanian – Gaye Sculthorpe, who previously worked at the Melbourne Museum and was appointed the curator of the British Museum’s Oceania and Australia section in 2013.

After five years of planning, ‘Encounters’ is due to open at the National Museum of Australia in November, after a related show at the British Museum which opens next month.

Meanwhile, Dr Foley and others are adamant that their only course of action is to draw the attention of the Australian people to the debate.

“The British Museum grew out of the era of colonialism. The rest of the world grew out of those ideas a hundred years ago,” says Foley.

“Their position has no credibility in the modern world. It’s really that simple.”

source:Neos Kosmos

Professor Michalis Damanakis.

With an increasing focus on the use of technology in the classroom, and many children familiar with how to use a laptop by the time they enter primary school, Professor Michalis Damanakis suggests that in moving with the times, e-learning could be the key to success for Greek education in the diaspora.
Currently in Australia to present a series of lectures on ‘Greek Language Education in the Diaspora Today’, the professor is part of a team at the University of Crete developing teaching materials for Modern Greek as a foreign and second language.

For the past 15 years, the team has been working with educators from abroad to assist them in adjusting their teaching materials and methods to cater to the changing Greek-speaking communities, which has led to the development of an e-learning platform.

“All of these are currently available free through the internet, and every educator can access them and use these tools that have been created by the University of Crete in conjunction with scientists and educators from the diaspora,” Professor Damanakis told Neos Kosmos.

According to the professor, online access to teaching materials and e-learning ‘classrooms’ is particularly important today as research shows children from a Greek speaking background are no longer gathered and living in the city centre and its surrounds, but rather are dispersed throughout the country.

“They are spread everywhere – on the outskirts of cities and in small towns, places where it often can be difficult to assemble enough children for someone to be able to create a department to teach the Greek language, as there aren’t enough students,” he said.

“In these situations, a teacher from Sydney can give classes through the internet to isolated locations, where there are few children.”

When it comes to motivating children to learn and speak Greece, aside from introducing technologies they are already familiar with, Professor Damanakis highlights the important role that families can play.

He suggests that parents and the extended family create spaces and opportunities for the child to use Greek within the household, so that they are accustomed to it from a young age.

In addition, the Professor stresses the significant role that educators play in making the Greek school environment a pleasant one, so that children look forward to attending.

“There is a big problem regarding how we can push children to learn Greek, or how you can inspire them. School is not just a space to go and learn the language, culture or mathematics; school is a place for social development, a space where the children gather and play, they create friendships,” he said.

“If the space where they go and learn Greek one night a week is a pleasant environment, then the child has vested interests to go and see their friends. This is one way to motivate the child to go and learn Greek.”

As a result of the 2009 economic crisis, large numbers of Greeks have migrated abroad, which the Professor sees as a positive for the Greek language in already existing diasporic communities, saying that they will bring with them ‘a new vocabulary’ for Greeks born in Australia.

Along with language maintenance playing a key role in the sense of cohesion and community amongst Greeks abroad, with the spread of globalisation there is an even greater significance in learning languages other than English.

“In a globalised world, we need to think beyond the borders. With globalisation, people don’t just live in one geographical location they live in many geographical locations – especially the Greeks,” he said.