It was one of the most incredible days of his life, Kostas Papachristopoulos told Neos Kosmos 14 years ago, after graduating at 80.
“Not even in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this,” said the then-octogenarian in 2009.
When landing in Australia in 1955, as a “26-year-old boy”, Papachristopoulos said he could never have imagined that at 80, he would “have graduated with a university degree.”
“I came carrying just one suitcase full of dreams and expectations, as well as, fear about life in an alien country.
“In that one suitcase was also my bitter disappointment with the Greece I was leaving behind. As we say, those ‘years of stone’ for Greece, war, and poverty.
“I was also afraid, and like all migrants, I encountered failures and hardships,” Papachristopoulos told Neos Kosmos, then.
Papachristopoulos rose as a community builder and played a leading role in representing and supporting Melbourne’s large post-war Greek community by serving 22 years on the Board of Directors of the Greek Community of Melbourne.
In his late 70s, he took the sage advice of “our ancestors that ‘it’s never too late’, and I enrolled at university to study Modern Greek.”
However, just before the late Papachristopoulos could complete his degree, the Greek department was forced to close due to poor enrolments, and he had to “choose something else.”
For Papachristopoulos, it was “natural”; he decided to study Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture.
“I decided to study the First Nations people who have been living in this place for sixty thousand years, who suffered deprivations and genocide after the British colonised Australia,” he then told Neos Kosmos.
As one of the Greek community’s oldest graduates, Papachristopoulos’s sage and instructive advice was to “urge all my fellow Greek expatriates to study at any age, if they can.”
Kostas Papachristopoulos, the community leader, social justice advocate, and graduate at 80, passed away at 94.
Source: Neos Kosmos
