VASILIKI PAPADOPOULOS

Queen Vic Market olive-seller, Hellas supporter and Oakleigh's favourite yiayia

Vicki Papadopoulos arrived in Melbourne in 1960 with one suitcase, a jar of Kalamata olives and an address on a scrap of paper that turned out to be wrong. She walked the streets of Richmond for two hours in the rain, asking in broken English and fluent Greek, until a shopkeeper recognised her surname and walked her to the right door. 'Greeks,' she liked to say, 'always find each other.'

Born in Kalamata in 1935, she had grown up picking olives in the hills above the Messenian Gulf and came to join her fiancé, Nikos, as part of the great post-war migration. She worked for twelve years as a machinist in a Richmond clothing factory, sewing winter coats on piece rates and sending half her wages to her parents. In 1974 she and Nikos took a stall at the Queen Victoria Market, selling olives, feta and dolmades from her own recipe. Customers queued in the cold for her samples, and her weekly basket of free olives for pensioners became a market legend. The stall stood for thirty-four years, and for most of them she was the first trader in the market each morning. She also cooked for the parish festivals and taught three generations of Oakleigh girls to roll vine leaves.

She watched South Melbourne Hellas from the grandstand with a transistor radio and a thermos of Greek coffee, shouted at referees in two languages, and played tavli against her grandsons, whom she regularly beat. Nikos died in 2011; she wore black for a year and kept cooking for two. On 13 December 2023, aged eighty-eight, she died peacefully at home in Oakleigh, with a tray of kourabiedes cooling in the kitchen. She leaves her son Peter, her daughter Sofia, five grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and a sister, Eleni, in Kalamata.

“Always give a little extra. The extra is what they remember.”