Under the 1923 Lausanne Convention, expulsion was decided by religion, not by language. These are Turkish-speaking Orthodox children from Cappadocia, orphaned or separated from their families in the exodus, put on ships for a country whose language they did not speak. The Armenian children who reached the same barracks had fled the same coast with no treaty to name them at all.

Many of those children would spend the rest of their lives negotiating who they were. No law ever ordered them to change their names. They changed them anyway. In a country that had just called them Turkish seed, an ending like -oglou was something you learned to shed, and many of the children in this photograph would sign a different name as adults than the one they were born with.

A name could change more easily than a mother tongue. They arrived speaking the language of the people who had driven them out. The children learned fast that fluency was safety, and the ones who already carried both tongues carried the younger ones across.

Some things, though, could never be replaced. These children would grow into adults who could never visit a grave. Their dead lay on the far side of a closed border, in villages nobody was going back to. With nothing to tend and nowhere to kneel, they carried the remembering instead. A name said aloud to a child. A face described until the child could see it. They became the only archive their families had, and they spent the rest of their lives handing it on.

No guild barred them. The market did. By 1928 refugees were 83.8% of every new entrant to Greek industry, wages fell by as much as half, and the unions denounced them as a reserve of strike-breakers. Men who had run salons in Smyrna set up on the quay at Piraeus because the quay was the work that existed, and shaved the same dockworkers who paid a few drachmas for a haircut but rarely forgot they were refugees.

Only the hands came with them. That was the cruelty of it. The technique that had once commanded a room in Smyrna now earned small change in the coal dust of the harbour, from men who would never have been let through the door of their old shops.

A trade could keep a family alive. It could not secure a future.The Refugee Settlement Commission handed them a house in Nea Kokkinia and the debt that came with it, and the deed stayed out of reach until the last instalment was paid. In Drapetsona there was not even that, only mud, plank and tin thrown up in the shadow of the factories. So they paid it down, and they built onto what they had been given, room by room, until the thing they held was finally theirs.

If property came slowly, education offered something different. Nobody could confiscate what a child had learned. The generation that lost everything put what was left into schooling, and the settlements founded by refugees still show higher educational mobility than the ones around them, a century after the ships came in.

Roughly two in five Greeks who reached Australia before mid-century came from three islands: Kastellorizo, Kythera and Ithaca. They left places where the sail fleets had died against steam, and they made their lives in fish shops and cafes from Sydney out to the country towns. The baptism itself happened where it always happens, in the church, with a priest and a font. What moved that September in 1946 was the party afterward, carried down from the inner city to the sand at Bondi, where a photographer caught the family still dressed for the church.

Women were never absent from these churches. They baked the bread for the liturgy, boiled the wheat for the dead, and ran the mutual aid that fed new arrivals, all of it inside the church, long before any of them had a vote in how it was run. The vote was the part they were kept from: the incorporated committee that owned the church property and elected its officers admitted only men. Sydney's own records show none in its leadership for decades. In Melbourne, the sister community that kept the sharpest paper trail, a motion to give women that vote was raised in 1934, defeated again in 1951, and only carried in August 1952.

Trust was the infrastructure the state never provided. Australia barred them at the border, counted them in a secret census, capped their entry, made them register as aliens. So the capital moved the same way the labour did: hand to hand, on trust. A relative paid your passage. You stood behind a compatriot's counter until you could take a shop of your own. A wholesaler gave you credit on your name alone. The Castellorizians founded their brotherhood in 1912 and the Kytherians theirs in 1922, and between them they sponsored the arrivals and buried the poor.

What began as improvisation became institutions. The churches, the schools, the associations, the archives. In a diaspora a name can vanish inside a single generation. The people who built these institutions became the generation that remembered.