COSTA GEORGIADIS
on harmony in life
Costa Georgiadis is sitting in a patch of sunlight, gazing out at the glimmering water of Vaucluse Bay and drawing patterns in the sky with his hand. He’s describing flying over the Opera House and the yellow sand that runs the length of the NSW coast when his father was a surf patrol pilot, and he would tag along. On Saturday mornings, before the sun was up, the Georgiadis house in North Bondi would stir to life.
“Dad woke me up so many mornings at a quarter to six,” Costa says. He drops his voice: “What are you doing?” “What do you think I’m doing?” He says in the voice of a grouchy teen.
“Do you want to come up in the plane?” “No.” “Okay. See you downstairs in 10 minutes.” Father and son would fly from Palm Beach to Wollongong at 500 feet, searching for sharks. Costa, the reluctant co-pilot, was prone to motion sickness. “If it was a rough one, I’d get crook,” he says. But nothing could dampen his father’s enthusiasm. “We’re going to fly up over your sister’s place and do circles over it until she comes out,” Stan Georgiadis would tell his youngest son.
“Back in those days, we used to be able to fly in here and do circles above the [Harbour] bridge and the Opera House at 500 feet,” Costa says. “Now, you can’t even get a drone in there.”
There’s a tinge of nostalgia in his voice. “Now, there’s a lot of palaver,” he says. “In a strange, throw-away way, that was another discipline that was foisted on me: having to get up,” he laughs. Australia’s most famous gardener goes on to tell other stories of involuntary, childhood servitude,
like volunteering at the local RSL.
He’s in a reflective mood as he prepares to shoot the 30th anniversary special of Gardening Australia, the show he has hosted since 2012, after he brought his passion for nature to the masses with Costa’s Garden Odyssey on SBS. The gig elegantly combines his passion for plants and people. Costa laughs, recalling how much he resisted that early community service, and how much he came to cherish the values his parents instilled in him. The tales are from a time when life didn’t feel so rushed. Weekends were spent rolling up your sleeves in the sunshine and discovering the rewards of giving of yourself. “This was one of the values we had to live by,” he says.
“When it comes to everything that’s going on these days,” he says, the emphasis is local. “We’re going back to co-ops. We’re going back to locally managed things. Whether that’s a local food system or a local energy system. All these things are happening and it’s so exciting and the big players are getting involved. And it’s applying across everything. People getting involved again with their community. People connecting again with their local systems.”
Costa grows excited as he talks about technology bridging the gaps between neighbours. It reminds him of another story – his weekly attendance at Greek school, and the gauntlet of schoolyard bullies he had to run to get there.
“I copped it because I was going to wog school,” he says. “I suppose on today’s terms people would go, that’s bullying. It was teasing but I suppose, like anything, teasing is a lot to do with the unknown. When people don’t know something they fear it.
“It was hard,” he admits.
Each Tuesday and Thursday, young Costa would have to walk past a “crazy group of street kids, like a little pack,” carrying his plastic bag full of Greek books. “They were all out there going, ‘you’re going to wog school’. It was pretty full on, but my parents were steadfast.”
He came to appreciate what a gift it was to be able to communicate across cultures. In high school, he joined a group of 75 students who were sent on a tour of Greece. “It really connected me with that part of my heritage,” Costa says.
He discovered he was able to converse easily with the locals, and he realised how valuable the dreaded lessons had been. “I had something nobody else had,” Costa says. He was able to act as a conduit for his friends and fellow students to converse with their Greek relatives. “It changed me,” Costa recalls. “It was one of those points in your life where you realise how fortunate you are that someone has done something for you, with an insight and a kind of vision that you don’t have at that age.”
Speaking to Costa, you get the sense of an old soul. He’s playful and passionate, but also contemplative, and wise. Named for his grandfather who fled Constantinople at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, and raised watching Constantine tend his market garden with the tender care of an artist, Costa carries with him the values of village life.
In the market garden he set up, Constantine instinctively employed centuries-old practices that have jazzy new names like permaculture. “He didn’t know the word organic, but he did it because that’s what he’d done since day one,” Costa says. “Even though he didn’t have the vocabulary, he had a holistic understanding.
“That’s what motivates me to say to anyone, ‘You don’t need to have
a background, you don’t need to have a valid course in anything to get started. What you need is just ticker. You need that heart.’”
After the war, Constantine had boarded the first boat he could, and at age 13, arrived in the sunny state of Florida. From there he’d travelled to Cuba. “Imagine being in Cuba in the 1920s,” says Costa. “It would have been pumping.”
Constantine got it in his head there was opportunity to be found on the other side of the world, in a wide, brown country called Australia. He boarded another ship and was carried on the wind like spores, across vast waves to NSW, where he found himself working on the railways in Queanbeyan, a NSW town just outside the ACT border.
At the same time, a woman named Julia was living in Lemnos, an island in the northern Aegean Sea, when she received an invitation to come to Australia by proxenio (arranged marriage). She stepped off the boat in Circular Quay, where she was met by the people who were to become her new family, and an old man. When she asked who the grandpa was, they said, ‘he’s your husband’.
The man Costa’s grandmother was to marry looked nothing like the person in the photograph she had seen. “She just said, ‘thank you but
I’m not interested’,” Costa says, “which back then, doing something like that...” He shakes his head. “My grandma, she had ticker.”
Marooned in a foreign country,
Julia went to live with family in Canberra, where she met Constantine. “When you pan through the DNA of my life creek, they’re the chunks. My grandparents,” Costa says.
Constantine started a market garden and Julia set up a vegetable shop. When they had enough money they bought a farm on the Bogan River, where they raised their family. Costa’s father, Stan, was a violin prodigy, but living in a farmhouse in Nyngan whose roof had been stripped of metal for the war effort, it wasn’t possible for him to do the training necessary to become a classical musician. “They lived in incredibly harsh conditions but you realise the human spirit just adjusts to what the reality is,” Costa says.
Stan moved in with relatives in Sydney’s inner west and learned a trade. He married a woman named Anne and had three children who, as Costa has told, were sent to Greek school. They continued their lessons, and would practise with their grandparents. Costa and Constantine would speak Greek as Costa helped in the market garden. After university, where he studied landscape architecture, Costa set out for Europe. He lived in Melbourne for a short time but the call of home was strong, and he returned to his family house in North Bondi and moved in with his father.
Throughout this time, he was always supporting his local community. For decades he refereed for the local rugby club. When his sister died and his niece and nephew came to live in the North Bondi house in the mid-2000s, Costa became involved in their schooling at Rose
Bay Primary School. He was president of the school council and still does garden education there, even though Sophie is now at university and Jack is working as a personal trainer. Costa’s planning an upgrade of the garden in the next 12 months. After the interview with The Weekly he is going to drive past the school to drop off some sunflower seeds and some soil for a project he’s started called “guardian of the sunflowers”.
“The kindy kids of this year plant sunflowers about now so when the new kids come into the playground, the sunflowers are up at the front gate.”
He loves the small ways people can contribute to their local environment through something as simple as planting a few seeds, but he’s equally excited about what he calls the democratisation of the food system
through programs such as Brisbanebased Food Connect, which brings locally farmed food to a single hub. His mother Anne’s meticulous attention to her family and community helped shape Costa’s values.
“So many of my ways have been laid down inside me because of her connection to growing good daily habits,” he says. “She showed that love lives in what we do and the way we do the day to day ... Thinking about her makes me realise ever more just how her love and her heart were larger than the years they shared.”
When he joined Gardening
Australia he was able to communicate ideas like these on a national level.
“Gardening is about getting inspiration from people who are doing it because they love it, and then doing it yourself,” Costa says. “What I love, and what the show’s about, is that there’s no airs and graces. Get the sleeves up and get into it and stuff it up, because if you do stuff it up, it doesn’t matter. You’re going to get more out of stuffing it up than getting it perfect the first time.”
He flies all over the country delivering programs, speeches, educating communities and leading waste-saving projects. His character, Costa the Garden Gnome, who sings the horticultural hit Get Dirty, targets the next generation.
But no matter how far he travelled, he always returned home to his father in North Bondi. They lived together, pilot and co-pilot, until Stan’s death a year ago. The loss of his hero is something that’s still raw for Costa, and it’s an emotional topic.
“You don’t think they’re going to go,” he says. “They’ve been there all your life. In the back of your mind, you imagine that they’ll go on. You’ve sort of got to confront mortality in that sense, and look at someone who’s been such a pillar of strength and who’s been there, like, not bulletproof but just so strong and constant.”
One thing he was able to do was ensure his father’s last years were spent in comfort and dignity.
“You’ve got to adjust to a new reality of elements of frailty that weren’t part of this kind of superhero who has always been there ... and that’s hard because you don’t want to accept that they’re growing old.”
Again, a key part of the solution to his father’s changing needs was looking to the community. Through a friend, Costa met a young man from Korea who was eager to improve his English. Jimmy was a WWOOFER (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) and was coming to the end of his time on the farm. “I thought, what if I get Jimmy to come live with us?”
Jimmy’s presence in the home made it easier for Costa to support his father’s needs while also fulfilling his other commitments. Jimmy helped Stan with his exercises and meals, and Stan helped Jimmy improve his English. “When you look at those out-of-thebox solutions, you realise that you can do things differently,” Costa says. “We had an arrangement that was good for everybody. It just meant that he was at home on his terms right until the end and that’s how it ended. He went on his terms on the top of his game. I can’t feel bad about that.”
Having lived closely with his father for so much of his life, Costa is still adjusting to his new reality. When he gets off a flight, his first instinct is to ring and say, ‘Do you want anything on the way home?’
“It’s a little bit raw but over time it will be just a very positive thing,” he says, tears in his eyes. “You just go, wow, life is ... life can set out over a long course but at the end of the day, you’ve just got to focus on the bit of road in front, and what the next turn is, and how you’re going to negotiate that.” AWW
The Gardening Australia 30th anniversary 90-minute special will air on Friday, February 15, at 7.30pm on ABC and ABC iview.