Nikos Ninolakis was born on the Greek island of Crete in 1923 and migrated to Australia in 1956. He immediately engaged in many community and literary activities and was a founding member of the Greek-Australian Cultural League. After his death in 1982 Melbourne academic Chris Fifis edited and published his poems in one volume, Ο Αργοναυτης του Νοτου [The Argonaut of the South] in 1986. Ninolakis is a significant poet of the first generation of Greek migrants in Melbourne. The translator Konstandina Dounis is a Melbourne academic, writer and poet. She has studied and translated Ninolakis' poems as part of her academic research. Translations of poetry are usually undertaken as labours of love – either of a particular poet, or of a whole generation. Dounis writes in her Introduction to this book: "I was very moved by the themes expounded and the sensitivity that imbued them: the horror of the second World War and the subsequent Civil War in Greece, the agony of exile, the longing for his homeland, the harsh working conditions in Australia ..."