Italian Australians Trailblazers For Multiculturalism
- Dr Loretta Baldassar
When once Italians were derided for speaking their language on the streets, (at the end of the Second World War Italian was only taught at Sydney University), by the late 1980s it had become Australia’s and Australians’ preferred second language, easily the most taught and studied language other than English, particularly at the primary and secondary levels (Lo Bianco in Jupp, 2001:510) and remains the most widely used community language throughout Australia.
These days we take Italian cuisine and language for granted, and much of this change can be attributed to the Italian migrant presence. We have come to recognise and admire the considerable small business success of Italian builders, craftsmen and shopkeepers. We now covet Italian fashion and other consumer items, although not as connected to the migrant presence as to Italy’s international reputation, the ‘made in Italy’ label has made ‘being Italian’ a rather trendy identity to assume. The Australian-born descendants of Italian migrants are well accepted and feature in just about every sector of industry and society, but perhaps most conspicuously in sporting, news broadcasting and religious institutions.
And yet, Italians have not always occupied such a privileged place in Australian society. They were once despised as ‘Dagos’ and ‘Eyeties’, and, peculiar to Western Australia, as ‘Dings’. Feared for their difference and misunderstood, they had an uneasy entry into Australian nation-hood. This chapter explores something of the remarkable transformation in acceptance and integration that has occurred for Italians in Australia. By tracing the history of this group, and its connections to homeland, we hope to chart how the largely pejorative set of connotations associated with ‘being Italian’ in the past: dirty, dangerous, dark-skinned, uncultured and untrustworthy, have been overlain, much like the term ‘wog’, with positive connotations. Although mainly the preserve of the second and subsequent generations, ‘being Italian’ today represents a sense of cultural pride, culinary flair and contemporary chic, reinforced by the success of a growing number of literary works, popular films and TV shows that explore the experience of growing up in Australia. Ultimately, we ask, what lessons can be gained from the Italian-Australian experience in our endeavour to develop a genuine multicultural Australian society for the future.
Settlement and Sentiment: routes and roots
An overview of the almost 300 years of Italian settlement in Western Australia shows that the number of arrivals form a rather neat bell-curve, and are, somewhat surprisingly, more-or-less matched to motives for migration. The recent and few skilled migrants, admitted under the rigours of the current system in which they are awarded points for English language ability and professional qualifications, tend to migrate for lifestyle, career and love interests. They have more in common with the early and few expatriates, primarily scholars, missionaries and visionaries, mostly associated with elite social groups or powerful institutions, who migrated for ideological or career incentives and who also preferably met stringent entry requirements, including, under the Western Australian Immigration Restriction Act 1897, the acquisition of British experience or knowledge (cf Stransky in Jupp 2003 p493).
The migration story of the Italians in Australia, like most other groups, is intimately linked to the story of their compatriots in the homecountry. From the outset, the fortunes of Italians in one place affected the fate of Italians in the other. The Italians who arrived in the mass migration waves were not so much individuals intent on settlement in the new land, as members of transnational households enacting the tried and tested economic strategy of return-migration for the benefit of their extended families.. The history of Italian immigration to Western Australia can be categorised into 5 main time periods, as detailed below.
A few missionaries and visionaries
The earliest arrivals comprised a modest number of explorers, missionaries and colonialists, the latter with the vain hope of establishing the ‘interests’ of official Italy in the region. Whether church-related or convicts, most individuals were part of the long-established diaspora of Italians in Europe and they enjoyed a relatively ready acceptance in the burgeoning Australian society. The British colonial elite, like their counterparts in Britain, held in high regard their image of Cultural Italy; constructed on the notion of an ages old Italy, land of past glory, history and culture.
The honour of being the first ethnic Italian to arrive is usually attributed to Dr Luigi Giustiani. Described as a ‘broadly educated Jesuit turned Protestant’, he arrived in 1836 and was appointed the first missionary of the WA Missionary Society and worked with both settlers and Aboriginal people at Guildford (Pascoe in Jupp 2003p487). Giustianini is noted for his vocal criticism of the treatment of indigenous people and was denied British naturalization as a consequence and did not stay in Australia long (Gentilli 1983:2-3).
But emblematic of the Italian presence at this time was the establishment of the Benedictine monasteries at New Norcia and New Subiaco. Although founded by the Spanish priests, Rosendo Salvado and Joseph Benedict Serra, who arrived in Perth in 1845, they facilitated the arrival of many Italian brothers and artisans.
(New) Norcia and (New) Subiaco are the first Italian place names, selected by settlers themselves, to appear in Western Australia (Gentilli 1983:4). Perhaps the most well-known Italian priest of this period was the Rev Luigi (Aloysius) Martelli who arrived in 1881 and worked in Perth, Fremantle, Southern Cross and Bunbury. Martelli, who always aspired to help the aborigines, travelled to the Kimberleys with Daisy Bates and succeeded in preventing the abandonment of the Beagle Bay Mission (Gentilli 1983:9).
A stream of miners and fishermen (1880s-1910s)
It was not until the WA gold discoveries of the 1880s that an Italian migratory movement to the state began. At this time, most Italian migrants worked as unskilled labour and were concentrated in Queensland and Western Australia in the sugar and mining industries respectively.
Perhaps the most famous Italian goldminer in W.A history was financier and entrepreneur Eugenio Vanzetti, a chemist and metallurgist by training (Pascoe 1990:310). He arrived in 1894 after more than a decade in N.S.W where he had practiced medicine (permitted in those days without qualifications), chemistry and gold prospecting. He purchased the Golden Pig (now Haddon) Mine at Southern Cross. By the mid 1890s Vanzetti through his mining investments may have possessed more capital than any other individual in the colony. He developed an ambitious plan to transport ore by rail to Northam for treatment. He also recruited labour from Italy and a measure of his fame is glimpsed from the 1896 shipping list of the Orotava which simply stated “23 Italians for Mr Vanzetti” (Gentilli 1983:47).
Another of the most famous sites of Italian mining endeavour in W.A is the Sons of Gwalia mine, at Leonara, where about 90 Italians were employed until early 1904, when the introduction of an English test reduced the number to 38.. Renowned as a dangerous mine, it was known as il cimitero dei Bergamaschi (the cemetery of those from Bèrgamo in Lombardy) and many Italians were buried in the cemetery there (Gentilli 1983:51, Baldassar 2001:67).
Mining predominated in W.A until 1921 (peaking at 70% in 1911) and during this time most Italians were concentrated in the mining centres of Kalgoorlie, Boulder and Wiluna in Western Australia. There was a marked predominance of men in this period, reflected in the demographic history of Italo-Australia in general. The imbalance between the sexes in the first quarter of the 1900s was greatest in Western Australia, due to the younger age of the settlements and the inhospitable conditions of the Kalgoorlie gold-mines, which attracted the largest concentrations of Italians in the State (Gentilli, 1983:18). Of the 461 married Italians living in Western Australia in 1901, 380 had left wives back in Italy (Gentilli 1983:45). Known as the vedove bianche or white widows, most had no intention of joining their husbands. Migration was seen by most Italians as an economic strategy employed by the family to improve life in Italy and nearly all of the men, initially at least, intended to repatriate.
Among the earliest labour migrants who came searching for work were a handful of liberal and republican refugees of the revolutions of 1848, the first of a number of political refugees encouraged to leave Italy by Italian authorities who saw emigration as a safety valve against political unrest. There were also a number of fishermen who began arriving in 1885 including 64 from Capo d’Orlando in Sicily and 66 from Molfetta on the Adriatic coast of Apulia. They established a fishing community at Point Peron and Fremantle, formed the Rockingham Fishing Company and sold their catches in Perth (Stransky in Jupp p 493). In the early 1910s they moved to South Fremantle and settled in the Fitzgerald Terrace area. The company existed until after the Second World War and descendants of these early fishermen continue to feature in the Fremantle Fishermen’s co-operative, one of the state’s major foreign currency earners tied to the rock lobster market (Stransky in Jupp p493). Italians fishermen also worked out of Geraldton.
Aside from the miners and fishermen, at this time some 500 Italians worked as labourers cutting timber in the South West and in charcoal production, and a few even managed to buy and work their own land (Stransky in Jupp 1983:493).
The first wave of labour migrants (1920s-1930)
Into the rather divisive climate created by the White Australia Policy, the first significant numbers of Italian immigrants began arriving after the First World War. Pushed out of Italy by severe economic difficulties and rising political disquiet and propelled towards Australia by the 1921 and 1924 US immigration restrictions as well as the growing propaganda about good wages and working conditions. Despite Australia’s need for workers and Italy’s need for emigration, the Australian Federal Government set a quota for Italian migration at 2 per cent of white English-speaking arrivals in order to placate fears that a larger intake would undermine the Anglo-Australian character of the population
One result of these new migration patterns was that women began migrating in much greater numbers with females representing a record 43 per cent of arrivals of the total Italian immigration to Australia between 1931 and 1940, as against 16 per cent for the period 1922-1930. In this period, the Italian born population in WA was evenly distributed between the three major land-use regions: mining, agriculture and metro area. Italian communities developed in Wanneroo and Balcatta in the metro area, were families had settled in the late 1920s on lands vacated by those British brought out under the Empire Land Settlement Scheme (Stransky in Jupp 493). Rural communities took shape in Hamel, Waroona, Brunswich and Harvey in the south-west. In 1933 the census recorded 4 588 Italian in WA.
The serious economic depression that hit Australia at the beginning of the 1930s had a moderating effect on overall immigration figures such that by 1945 and the outbreak of the Second World War, the Italian community was estimated at less than 40 000, approximately 75 per cent of whom were born in Italy. Although there were slightly more northerners than central and southern Italians, the vast majority came from similarly impoverished provinces that were not new to migration – Alessandra in Piedmont; Sondrio, Bergamo, Brescia and Mantua in Lombardy; Vicenza, Treviso and Belluno in the Veneto; Udine in Friuli; Lucca in Tuscany; Bari in Apulia; Reggio di Calabria in Calabria; and Messina and Catania in Sicily (cf Cresciani in Jupp, 2001:501)..
In Western Australia a third of the Italian born population lived and worked in agricultural regions. This proportion fell dramatically around 1956 (by which time the proportion in mining had fallen to less than 10%) and by 1961 the Italian-born were already more urban than the general W.A. population would be 10 years later (Gentilli 1983:20). Urban dwellers were employed in a range of industries including fishing, food, garment and construction with very high rates of self-employment (52.8 per cent in 1933). Their occupational and residential concentration tended to fuel hostility and prejudice from the majority population. Kalgoorlie, a mining town in Western Australia, is a key historical site in the history of racisms against Italian migrants. Mob rioting against Italian residents took place in August 1919 and in January 1934, resulting in the destruction of property, many casualties, and even some deaths.
Mass Migration (post-Second World War)
Post war emigration was to be the major and most significant role Australia played in the history of the wider Italian diaspora. In this period Italy became the major single source country of non-British migrants to Australia.. While Italy had always viewed Australia’s immigration policies as racist, they also saw Australia as a ‘land of opportunity’..
Eventually though, Australia’s need for immigration and defence, the drying up of its preferred source of immigrants, and interest from Italy, saw diplomatic relations, which had been broken since 1940, resume in July 1948 with discussions about the possibility of admitting ‘northern’ Italians, although the intake of some ‘southern’ Italians thought to be suited to work in the tropics, was also considered..
Unlike in the pre war periods, the bulk of the post war entries were from small towns and villages in rural areas of southern regions - Sicily, Calabria, the Abruzzi and Campania. People migrated primarily in search of a living and a better income, although, like the vast majority of earlier Italian migrants, they ultimately intended (initially, at least) to establish themselves back in the homeland.
Migration from Italy began to dwindle by the 1970s coinciding with the impact of the ‘economic miracle’ in Italy, which reduced the need for long-distance migration. In the same years, Australian policies changed to a more focused selection based on skilled migration, luring in Italians (and others), with sometimes deceiving prospects of desirable improvements.
After World War 2, large imports of persons displaced by conflicts and those pushed by poverty led to a mixture between two categories of migrants. Policies directed both the poor rural people and the educated cosmopolitan elites into mainly manual work for a two-year period. This response to a shortage of labour is comparable to the call for convicts to WA in the mid-nineteenth century, while specific requirements may resemble the import of indentured labour, with the promise of later independence.
People from relatively privileged backgrounds had also come in the post-war period, mainly among the large number of Julian refugees, but most Italians migrated from impoverished, peasant-worker origins, be these the miseria of the depressed northern regions including Piedmont and Veneto or of the mezzogiorno, especially Sicily, Calabria and Abruzzo, as discussed in the following sections, also in relation to aspects of settlement, identity and community.
For lifestyle and love (post 1970s)
The dismantling of the White Australia policy in the 1970s saw the removal of any official criteria based on notions of race or colour in the immigration program but coincided with increased restrictions and a reduction in overall immigration numbers.
Italy is now one of the most developed and affluent countries in the world, and has become a place of immigration from beyond its borders, since the demographic balance changed, with fewer births and less emigration. Thus Italians moving to Australia in recent decades have been often motivated by love more than money, through personal attachments to Australian citizens, a passion for the place or a specific type of activity, including the general category of ‘adventure’, artistic and religious vocations, like their predecessors of one hundred years earlier.
The post 1970s arrivals do, however, contribute to a vibrant Italian cultural diaspora characterised by multiple identities and ties to Italy, Australia and Italian settlements in other countries. It has only been in this recent period that an ‘Italian-Australian community’ has developed through a combination of factors including the success of multicultural politics with its positive focus on ethnic identity, the maturation of the second-generation and the rising international profile of Italy, all of which have contributed to the development of a consumable, popular and marketable italianità.
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