Almost two centuries ago, seven young Greek sailors from Hydra arrived in colonial Sydney as convicted prisoners, transported thousands of kilometres from the Mediterranean after an encounter at sea during the Greek War of Independence ended in arrest, a piracy trial and sentences of death.
The British convict ship Norfolk entered Port Jackson on 27 August 1829 after sailing from Spithead, England, under Captain Alexander Greig. On board were around 200 male prisoners, including Antonis Manolis, Damianos Ninis, Ghikas Voulgaris, Georgios Vasilakis, Konstantinos Stroumboulis, Nikolaos Papandreou and Georgios Laritsos.
They would become one of the earliest recorded chapters of the Greek presence in Australia.
For generations, the seven men were described as the first Greeks to arrive on the continent. More recent historical research has challenged that distinction, suggesting at least one Greek may have reached Australia in 1811. What is firmly documented is that the Hydriots were the first known group of Greek convicts transported to New South Wales, and that two of them would choose to make Australia their permanent home.
Their journey to Australia had begun not in Britain, but amid the turbulence of the Greek Revolution.
On 29 July 1827, the Greek vessel Herakles, commanded by Manolis, intercepted the British-flagged merchant brig Alceste as it travelled from Malta towards Alexandria.
The episode occurred at a particularly volatile moment in the eastern Mediterranean. Greece was fighting for independence from the Ottoman Empire, while Egypt, under Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha, had become a critical Ottoman military power in the campaign against the Greek revolutionaries.
The Greeks boarded the Alceste and removed goods from the ship. Exactly how the incident should be understood has remained contentious ever since.
Greek accounts have frequently portrayed the men as fighters in the independence struggle rather than ordinary pirates, arguing that they believed they were interfering with supplies destined for an enemy-controlled port. Other historical accounts emphasise that goods were taken from a British merchant vessel and that the Herakles apparently did not possess the formal letter of marque that would have authorised privateering activity.
That distinction would prove decisive.
Two days later, HMS Gannet, a Royal Navy vessel conducting anti-piracy patrols in the Mediterranean, intercepted the Herakles. Its crew was taken to Malta, where a group of the sailors eventually faced prosecution.
A Trial With Life-or-Death Consequences
The case went before British authorities in Malta in February 1828, against a wider backdrop of concern over piracy in Mediterranean waters.
Seven men were ultimately convicted. They were sentenced to death, although the punishment was later commuted to transportation rather than execution. Contemporary and later accounts differ over some details of the proceedings, but records consistently identify the seven men who would eventually be sent to New South Wales.
Their punishment placed them within Britain’s vast system of convict transportation.
New South Wales had been established as a British penal colony in 1788, partly as a solution to overcrowded prisons and the loss of Britain’s former North American destinations for transported prisoners. By the time the Greeks arrived four decades later, convict labour was deeply embedded in colonial life, with prisoners assigned to government work or private landholders.
The seven eventually travelled to England before being put aboard the Norfolk for New South Wales.
The ship sailed from Spithead in May 1829 and arrived at Port Jackson on 27 August. The prisoners were mustered several days later and disembarked on 7 September.
Later retellings have sometimes described extraordinarily brutal conditions during the passage. Transportation was unquestionably coercive and isolating, particularly for seven young men with little or no English, but the surviving medical record presents a more complicated picture. Surgeon James Dickson recorded relatively few serious illnesses during the voyage, and no convicts died on board. The passage was, by the standards of the era, unusually rapid.
What awaited the Greeks after landing was forced labour in an unfamiliar colony.
The men were assigned to different employers across New South Wales. Ninis worked around Sydney Harbour, Laritsos was assigned to Major George Druitt, whose name survives in the western Sydney suburb of Mount Druitt, and Voulgaris was assigned to Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay.
Manolis’s experience became particularly significant.
He worked in viticulture, including on land associated with the Macarthur family at Camden. Along with Papandreou, he became connected with some of the colony’s early wine-growing experiments. SBS has reported that pioneering viticulturist James Busby referred to the Greeks in his writing on vineyard practice, while Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell later observed Greek convicts applying methods of viticulture familiar from their homeland.
It was an extraordinary turn in the story. Men transported to the opposite side of the world as convicted pirates were helping introduce Mediterranean agricultural knowledge into colonial New South Wales.
The Pardon that Divided their Paths
By the 1830s, the political world from which the sailors had been removed had changed dramatically. An independent Greek state had emerged from the revolution, and efforts were made to secure the men’s release.
Absolute pardons were eventually granted in 1836. Five chose to leave Australia and return to Greece.
Two did not.
Antonis Manolis remained in New South Wales, eventually establishing himself around Picton, south-west of Sydney, where he worked the land for decades. He died in 1880 and was buried in Picton’s old Anglican cemetery.
Ghikas Voulgaris also chose Australia.
Known in colonial records under several versions of his name, including Jigger Bulgary, he married Irish-born Mary Lyons and established himself in the Monaro region of southern New South Wales. The couple had five sons and five daughters, creating a large Australian family whose Greek origins were gradually absorbed into generations of colonial life. Voulgaris died in 1874 and is buried at the old cemetery in Nimmitabel.
Nearly 200 years later, their story sits uneasily between several histories. It belongs to the Greek War of Independence, but also to the British Empire’s campaign against Mediterranean piracy. It is part of Australia’s convict history, yet also part of its immigration story. And the question at the centre of their original prosecution, whether they were pirates motivated by personal gain or sailors acting for the Greek revolutionary cause, remains more complicated than the simplest versions of the story suggest.
What is beyond dispute is what happened afterwards.
Seven sailors from Hydra were taken from the Mediterranean, sentenced under British law and transported to a penal colony they could scarcely have imagined. Five eventually went home and two stayed.
From that unintended arrival came one of the earliest documented foundations of Greek life in Australia.
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