Antonis Vrettos has been a familiar character on the main road of Laganas for over a decade.  Selling sponges from a small roadside unit, wearing his trademark peaked cap has earned him the nickname of ‘The Captain’.

A youthful twinkle in his eye belies his seventy-six years and betrays a renegade spirit within.  Born in Ithica, 1934 his early boyhood spanned the Metaxas dictatorship years, times were tough and money scarce.  Food was scarcer still during the outbreak of WWII, and when the Italians arrived on Ithica, he recalls gratefully taking a loaf of bread as payment for interpreting.  At the end of the war, Australia opened its ports to immigrants – he was ten years old when, with his elder brother, sister and his mother, he boarded the squalid Egyptian SS Misr, a post war migrant ship bound for Melbourne.  They planned to stay only a few years, earning enough money to live in comfort on returning home to Ithica.

Arriving in Melbourne thirty-one days later, the family continued on to Sydney  on a packed train.  From there they took a train to Morundah as far as the railway line went, completing their mammoth journey by dusty road in a truck to the small town of Durumbandi, New South Wales.  The Vrettos children set to work at the towns’ only cafe and milk bar, entering into the servitude of the owner - their uncle.  Working long hours for a fraction of an adults wage left no time for school.  Antonis attended school only once to be picked to play rugby league, when he made the team he never went to school again.  The self-reliant Antonis saved for a train ticket, aged just thirteen he set off to take a job cleaning bottles in the original Coca Cola factory on the south side of Brisbane.  He lodged at a boarding house run by a Russian landlady, Mrs Poppels who, for one pound a week would include a basic laundry service and a daily packed-lunch for her tenants.  Antonis took up boxing lessons at the local gym out of necessity!  A foreigner and of small stature Antonis frequently found himself the focus for street fights.  He learnt fast, it was a matter of survival and at seventeen; he was Lightweight Champion for North New South Wales.

Antonis worked and fought his way across Australia literally, taking on all manner of hard labour - sheep sheering, ring-tree barking, sugar beet harvesting, coal mining to name but a few, in between serving his National Service.  Antonis became a regular face on the amateur boxing circuit and spotting an opportunity for publicity Nikos Lukas offered him a partnership in his cafe in Adelaide.  This was Antonis’s first chance to earn a decent living.  Saving hard he managed to make enough money to set up a family restaurant with his brother in Goondiwindi, Queensland.  The Vrettos family worked together to build the business,  his sister married and they bought a house for his mother Evyonia, a pious woman who insisted on cleaning the local Orthodox church for free so the priest wouldn’t need to pay a cleaner.

The wanderlust in Antonis kept him from settling too long in one place, he later sold out his share to his brother and moved to Darwin with his Australian girlfriend Cathleen whom he later married and had three daughters.  At a time when he was on a sales trip selling opals in Toronto he met the then exiled PASOK founder Andreas Papandreou who became godfather to Melina his youngest daughter.

Time moved on and his mother passed away without ever returning to her beloved Ithica .  A flawed character by his own admittance, Antonis has had something of a chequered past.  He could not commit himself to one place or person for long and yearned for his homeland, eventually returning to Greece.  Travelling the islands Antonis stayed on in Kalymnos, the island of the sponge divers.  The mayor of the island, offered Antonis a sales position based on his fluent English – selling sponges to the new wave of British tourists on either Lefkadas, Mykonos or Zakynthos.  Antonis chose Zakynthos because of it’s proximity to Ithica.  Though the sad irony is that he feels he can never go home, the boy in him is pained by a family plan unfulfilled.

Antonis has sailed in and out of controversy, like the time he returned to Greece for his father’s funeral and was held by the Military Junta on suspicion of activities against the right -wing government.  Antonis made international news when the 4,000 strong Waterside Workers Association of Australia put an embargo on all Greek ships until he was released.  On another occasion, he was quizzed, mistakenly, in connection with the infamous left-wing terrorist group known as November 17!