Multicultural leader Nic Manikis says events in the 1960s and 1970s created a ''beautiful coalescence'' for Canberra.

Government departments expanded with workers who needed homes, shops and schools for their children and the migrants, many having just left the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electricity Scheme, obliged.

Mr Manikis said Greeks and Italians sacrificed their lives for their children, working 14- and 15-hour days, seven days a week, for 20 years.

In the 1960s, when the Civic pub filled with ethnics from the Snowy, the atmosphere was unbearable, Mr Manikis said, so migrants built their own social places like the Lithuanian, Hellenic, Spanish, Italo-Australian, and Harmonie German clubs.

He said the next generation was putting a green overlay on buildings and reaching beyond their parents, family and community circles into the wider Canberra population.

Many have followed their parents into building and development companies, but unlike the acceleration that quickly established Woden, Belconnen and Tuggeranong, today's generation faces a maze of planning regulations.

Retired Italian civil engineer Mario Serenellini, who was part of Canberra's early industrious surge, believes consultation and weak planning are killing any chance of another ''beautiful coalescence''.

''I am against all this consultation,'' he said. ''In Italy there is a saying: if too many roosters sing, the day will never come.''

The Canberra Times is recording a changing of the guard within our migrant community through the eyes of Dr Serenellini and other Italians and Greeks.

These include second-generation Maria Efkarpidis, who loves the smell of hamburgers, which she puts down to her parents' takeaway shop in Curtin in 1968.

Theophilos and Sophia cooked in the early stages of building their substantial business empire.

''Mum was pregnant with me,'' Ms Efkarpidis said. ''She said, 'I used to sit there and cook the burgers, and my belly sat up against the grill plate.'

''I said, 'Do you think that's why I always loved the smell of hamburgers.' I don't like eating them, but I love the smell of them.''

Theophilos and his brother Anastasios washed dishes, filleted fish, painted buildings and bought small supermarkets.

Taking Australian names of Tom and Tim, the Efkarpidis joined a surge of immigrants who arrived in Canberra with little more than an appetite for hard work.

They establishing Shoprite, then a warehouse and captured 55 per cent of the ACT's supermarket trade.

From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, Greek and Italian populations jumped by about 30 per cent.

The Italian population rose by nearly 600 to 2470, and the Greeks by 254 to 1122.

In 1954, 112 Italians worked in building and construction and by the 1961 census they outnumbered all other nationalities in the trade with 388 builders, 47 more than their nearest English-speaking rivals.

Greek-born Canberrans numbered 1540 by the 1986 census, and there were more than 2200 Italians.

Mr Manikis recalls a popular saying, that Americans designed Canberra, the Croatians and Italians built it and the Greeks owned it.

Members of the Efkarpidis family are redeveloping the Belconnen Fresh Food Markets with the addition of housing and offices, but it's slow going with the introduction of new planning policies. The development application for one project was delayed for two years.

Tim Efkarpidis' family negotiated with the National Capital Authority and the ACT government on the heritage-sensitive Acton hotel site for seven years before developing the mixed-use NewActon precinct.