Every Sunday, for several decades, Paul Barboussas hosted a family barbecue. It was his favourite day of the week. He and wife Helen would begin preparations early in the morning. Helen would be in the kitchen, rolling out paper-thin sheets of pastry for spanakopita and chopping up tomatoes and cucumbers, fresh from the garden, for a salad. Paul would be outside, preparing the charcoal for the barbecue to ensure it was the perfect temperature to cook the meat – he usually bought enough to feed a small village.
By lunchtime, smoke would be wafting down the street, acting as a beacon to guide family and friends to their home. Paul had five brothers who lived nearby – they’d come with their families, bearing plates of food and maybe a slab of Victoria Bitter.
The men would congregate around the barbecue, the women would chat in the kitchen and the cousins would run wild around the yard. When everything was cooked to Paul’s liking, they would all dig in.
Sunday barbecues were one of Paul’s greatest pleasures, his son, George, says.
“Dad was a pretty hard-working guy but when he was off the clock he was very sociable. He loved spending time with family and those barbecues were always an open invitation. Cousins, friends and family would come and go at different stages throughout the day,” George tells Guardian Australia.
“It was his thing. So many of the best memories I have of growing up are from those barbecues.”
Paul, or Apostolis as he was known in Greek, was one of 50 residents who died during a coronavirus outbreak in 2020 at St Basil’s Homes for the Aged in Fawkner. He was 79.
He is one of 655 residents of private aged care homes to have died during Melbourne’s second wave. Aged care deaths made up 81% of the total death toll from that winter. The St Basil’s outbreak was the deadliest and is currently subject of a coronial inquest. A class action is also under way.
Born on 30 June 1941 on Rhodes, a Greek island on the Aegean Sea’s eastern edge, Paul moved to Melbourne in 1956 and took up a job in a textiles factory in Collingwood.
It was there that he met Helen, or Eleni. They married in 1967 and had two sons, Nicholas and George. The family settled in Northcote, not far from the Collingwood Football Club’s home ground at Victoria Park.
Nicholas and George would sometimes convince their dad to come to a match, though he wasn’t a big sports fan. He was more at home in his garden, where he grew seasonal fruit, vegetables and herbs.
When Helen died in 2008, the barbecues became less frequent. Paul could no longer cook or no longer had the heart for it.
“After Mum died, my brother and I learned her recipes, and we’d go over and cook for Dad,” George says.
“My brother would bring his girls, we’d have a couple of beers and cook for hours and that was his food for the week. He loved my mum’s makaronada recipe, kokkinisto, roast lamb and potatoes, and fasolada. All the traditional meals.
“One of the things that attracted him to St Basil’s was that he knew somebody in the kitchen, he tried some of the meals and he said, ‘I think I can live here’.”
Paul moved into the facility in 2015, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
George says his dad enjoyed the first couple of years in the facility - it was homely, many of the other residents were also born in Greece and the carers spoke their language.
“Dad made a lot of good connections and he had a lot of visitors,” he says.
His favourite visitors, though, were his granddaughters – Elena, Samantha and Evie, who was just two years old when her papou died.
“She was so young, she didn’t really understand what the days of the week were but she knew Saturday was papou day,” George says.
Paul never got to meet his grandson, Max. George’s wife Jacqui was heavily pregnant with him in the winter of 2020, when the second wave swept over Melbourne.
By July, it had entered St Basil’s.
Paul tested negative for Covid-19 on 15 July but a week later, experiencing a fever and shortness of breath, he was taken to Northern hospital, where he tested positive on the Friday. The brothers were told he wouldn’t make it past the weekend.
But in a show of the chaos and confusion amid the outbreak, on Saturday, Nicholas received a call telling him that his father was comfortably sitting in his room at St Basil’s, isolated from the outbreak.
“[Nicholas] was just completely lost for words,” George said.
As part of the inquest, the coroner is examining the timeliness of information provided to staff, residents and families.
Paul died the next day. By the end of the month, the group of residents Paul used to sit with for lunch had all died.
“There were some really good people there, they made a connection built on their experiences of coming to a new country, setting up a completely new life and embracing and loving the Australian way,” George said.
“And in one fell swoop they’re gone.”
