Esther Anatolitis describes her migration journey as complicated.
"Although my parents migrated from Greece to Sydney in 1964, the idea was that when things calm down at home, they will return," she says to SBS Greek. They did return in 1969 but that didn't quite work out.
"Then my sister and I were born in the 70s and then we decided to return to Greece permanently in 1980. But I think things were not as my parents expect. Many things were different and we began to miss life in Australia. So after less than a year, we then migrated back to Australia."
Ms Anatolitis father comes from the Peloponnesian city of Kalamata, and her mother is from the town of Megalopoli near Tripoli. She was born and raised in Sydney, where she lived for twenty-five years. Then, she moved to Germany before moving to Melbourne. At the moment, she resides in Sydney.
Art in childhood
NAVA Executive Director Esther Anatolitis, at the opening of the "Destinations" of the Greek-Australian Cultural League. Source: Supplied
Her strongest memory from her childhood and that is related to the arts was when she was at school.
"When I was in Year 5 and 6, my parents befriended with a very wonderful teacher. That was enough to make sure they would allow me to do the exam and enter a selective primary school. Thanks to that teacher, I was able to spend those two years of school doing all sorts of creative things, art history, and theory, ancient history, evolution theory, science, and mathematics."
Ms Anatolitis tells SBS Greek that her daily school bus trip took her from several Sydney's neighbourhoods. But she recalls a special she was observing every morning from her bus seat.
"I had noticed an empty room opposite a bus stop. An empty room with a lovely polished floor and pictures on the walls that would change periodically. It took me years to find out that that place was the first art gallery I have ever seen."
She remembers the images, the painting, and the photographs on the wall. "A place where people could create work and show their creations to each other, a place where they could have discussions and do the critique, or spark new thinking. I was just amazed and inspired."
NAVA's critical role
Esther Anatolitis, Executive Director of the National Association for the Visual Arts - NAVA. Source: Supplied
"Our role is to work with artist and organisations with governments on all the things that support and sustain the artists' careers. To broadly support the kind of Australian culture that is inspired by artists, artists that work across the contemporary art field."
Esther strongly believes that NAVA's role is to make sure that all the artists have the support that they need to go on being artists and to ignite the Australian culture.
Multiculturalism in Australia’s art world
Esther Anatolitis is a true multicultural believer. "There would be no art world without the Australian cultural diversity," she says to SBS Greek.
"Australia started with the 60,000 or more years of First Nations culture and has since been a place that has always been culturally diverse. There are hundreds of cultures and languages spoken and then after colonization, and mass migration and the arrival of the Greeks and others in Australia, we are now more confident than ever. Today, we are not pretending not even for a moment that Australia has some kind of a bland monoculture." 
It’s always in our minds and our ethics to think the object, the practices, the rituals, and the customs with which we articulate our culture particularly for us the Greeks. We exist in a place of hospitality and generosity, we make things, we break things, we celebrate confidently and we speak our minds; that is the ethos of the artist."
Esther Anatolitis, with members of the Greek-Australian Cultural League Committee. Source: Supplied
Worried about the big art pockets
She dislikes the fact that there are pockets of the art world that are more interested in profits and profiles than in the work of actual artists.
"Artworks in these days worth more than ever before. In the future when people will be looking back, it will be the work of artists that they are going to observe, to remember and the learn from."
According to the Australia Council for the Arts research that artists’ average income from the artwork alone is $18,000 which is lower than the poverty line. "On the whole, artists are not being paid in respect as well as they should be," Ms Anatolitis tells SBS Greek.
Australia's visual arts vision
Esther Anatolitis wants to see an Australia where our national conversations, our politics, the decisions that are made by a small group of people on behalf of a large group of people, are actually formed by the ethics that mean something to the majority of Australians and we see that through the work of artists.
"The artists’ work is respected and celebrated when artists are paid fairly, when we seek out their voice and listen to them. My vision is for a culture that is led by artists."
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