1

Building a group biography

So, a lot of them, whoever helped, helped each other, started working in the market garden and some of them decided why not? This sounds alright … And it was a very small community then, everybody knew each other and became friends because even in Italy where they come from, it was all very close as well.

—Adrian Tonellato, 2016¹

Plate 1.1: Adrian Tonellato, Frogmore Road, c. 1951

Source: Photo supplied by Assunta Giovannini nee Tonellato.

The history of a small, disparate group of migrants from the north-east of Italy who arrived in Australia in the late 1920s begins with a box. The simple pine box, known as a half-case, was the artefact that led me to research a cohort of Veneto migrants who became market gardeners on the western plains of Adelaide in the interwar years. The half-case, used by market gardeners to transport and sell their tomatoes at the market, was critical to the commercial sustainability of the migrant community.

The half-case is a compelling material object and a symbol for the group biography of 19 Italians. Seventeen single men and a married couple with an infant arrived without resources, plans or prospects and, within 10 years, had established a self-reliant community in the peri-agricultural area between the city and the sea. They had migrated from eight villages in two different provinces in the Veneto region and not all had known each other before migration. However, they had in common their origins as contadini (peasant farmers) and shared the experience of poverty and the devastation of their villages during World War I. After their arrival in Adelaide, they confronted the uncertainty and unemployment that characterised the Great Depression. Yet, during the 1930s, the veneti gradually recognised the opportunity to lease agricultural land 8 kilometres west of Adelaide City, within comfortable reach of the wholesale fruit and vegetable market. They drew on their shared skills as peasant farmers to live and work in the market gardens and create a community that was like a small paese (village), which sustained their families and subsequent Veneto arrivals for more than five decades.

I was drawn to explore the biography of the small community through a deep interest in, and curiosity about, Italian migrants and market gardens in the western suburbs of Adelaide. An opportunity to develop an understanding of the community and the context of market gardening was made through a connection to an elderly Italian man, Angelo Innocente, the father of a friend, Aida, who had manufactured pine half-cases for vegetable growers. Angelo and his wife, Elsa, collected the pine from a mill about 60 kilometres from Adelaide and processed it at the small factory near their home, making up to 1,000 boxes a day. At the end of each working day, Angelo delivered the half-cases to market gardeners in the western suburbs and the agricultural area north of Adelaide.

Plate 1.2: Angelo Innocente testing alcohol content for his wine, Lockleys, March 2010

Source: Madeleine Regan.

Angelo Innocente migrated to Australia in 1950 from a small village in the province of Treviso and was part of the wider Veneto community in Adelaide that included the first generation of Veneto market gardeners. I was interested in his role in supplying half-cases to cohorts of Italian, Bulgarian and Greek market gardeners in the Adelaide metropolitan area who contributed to commercial food production until the use of pine was superseded by new materials.

In 2007 I encountered the box again when I met Johnny and Eleonora Marchioro, who were commercial market gardeners at Bolivar, about 20 kilometres north of Adelaide.² The Innocente and Marchioro families had been close neighbours, and a godparent relationship strengthened the bonds when Aida Innocente was born in 1956. Johnny had grown up and worked in his parents’ market garden at Lockleys, which is now a suburb of Adelaide. In 1965 he married Eleonora Ottanelli and they moved to Bolivar and worked together to establish their own market garden. Johnny’s father had migrated from the Veneto between the wars and developed market gardens adjoining other Veneto families in the 1930s in a locality that the community named Lockleys. From the 1950s, most Veneto market gardeners bought the boxes manufactured by the Innocente family to sell tomatoes and celery at the market. The Marchioro family has retained a few half-cases as material reminders of, and symbolic links to, Johnny and Eleonora, who carried on the market-gardening tradition of the first generation and embodied the contadino heritage. The half-case is a tangible object that signifies the belonging and continuity of a migrant family’s cultural practice as market gardeners.³

Plate 1.3: Pine half-case belonging to Giancarlo (Johnny) and Eleonora Marchioro

Source: Alex Bennett.

Map 1.1: Johnny Marchioro’s mud map drawn in 2007

Note: Names of market gardeners including Anglo-Australian families are identified on the map as well as the locations of farms, roads and the River Torrens.

Source: Johnny Marchioro

A second object that drew me into the history of the Veneto market gardeners was a mud map drawn by Johnny Marchioro in 2007 as he told me about growing up on the market gardens at Frogmore Road. To illustrate the neighbourhood, Johnny identified Italian (and some Anglo-Australian) families who worked market gardens in the western suburbs close to the River Torrens—the most reliable source of water on the Adelaide Plains—and who lived on their properties within a radius of about 3 kilometres.

Through the map I learned about a place in the western suburbs that was new to me because, by 2007, the area had long been a densely populated inner suburb with no evidence of the previous intensive agricultural activity. Johnny also described the first-generation community of Veneto market gardeners who had made a living on the land and shared a heritage that linked back to the traditions of the Veneto region. Between the wars, the market gardeners in the Lockleys area were a blend of people with different origins who worked and lived on their properties of variable dimensions. The group included Italian families from different regions, returned World War I servicemen who had been granted soldier-settler blocks, other Anglo-Australians who had orchards and a few dairy farmers.

As I followed my interest in interviewing Angelo Innocente, I was drawn in the first instance to learn about his experience of manufacturing half-cases and his connections with market gardeners in Adelaide and imagined it as a one-off opportunity. I was aware of the first generation of Italians who had migrated to Australia after the war and began reading some of the migration histories to gain a context for this period.⁴ However, I realised a new possibility after meeting Johnny and Eleonora and hearing from Johnny that he had maintained close friendships with the sons and daughters of market-gardener families whose fathers had migrated from the Veneto in the 1920s. I became conscious of a more complex history of migrants and market gardening in the western suburbs of Adelaide through the mud map that identified families, the locations of their farms, roads and other features in the context of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. It led me to examine a wider context of Australian migration history and consider the literature about Italian migration before World War II and issues relating to the experience of Italian communities.

Historiography

The migration and settlement of southern European migrants after World War II have been the primary focus of Australian migration history rather than interwar arrival and settlement. Early demographic research analysed the arrival and settlement of southern Europeans between the wars and provided context for the development of Italian communities in different parts of Australia.⁵ The limitations of the early literature on migration between the wars became obvious when I realised that it comprised essentially census and other official records rather than accounts of the settlement and development of communities and the experience of migration that were more relevant for my study.⁶ However, Price was influential in articulating issues related to chain migration and understanding how migrants from southern Europe, including Italians, chose to settle in Australia and develop close settlements before the war.⁷ Other early studies into the concentration of migrant groups, including Italians who settled in certain areas of Australia, were helpful for their examination of the relationship between chain migration and population clusters.⁸

The analysis of the post-Federation period—including the racist environment that was intensified by the Depression, the development of fascism, the crisis of World War II and the shadow cast on Italians by their designation as ‘enemy aliens’—provides a background for recognising the experience of Italian migrants before the period of mass migration and the development of multiculturalism. Through Cresciani’s scholarship, I gained an understanding of the history of Italian migration and settlement in Australia and the correlation with modern Italian history.⁹ Other Italian diaspora accounts taken from a sociological perspective address issues related to identity, intergenerational transmission of ethnicity and what it means to be Italian Australian. For example, Marino’s focus on Calabrian families in Adelaide examines differences between three generations and the formation of their distinctive identities.¹⁰

The complexity of migration history in Australia must consider the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of their land and their fatal interactions with Anglo-Celtic settlers, southern Europeans and other migrants. The racist practices legitimised by the White Australia policy followed in the shadow of earlier controls on the Indigenous population. These complexities persist today and are addressed by various scholars.¹¹ Ricatti focuses on the issue of racism in Australia in the context of Italian migration. He cites the internal Italian racism that manifests as a discrimination between northern and southern Italian people and asserts that migration history in Australia and the experience of Italian migrants must be examined in the context of a settler-colonial nation.¹²

In terms of the settlement of Italians in South Australia, O’Connor’s text provides a context for understanding the experience from the foundations of the colony up to World War II.¹³ Another study that was useful in relation to the context of Italian migrants in Adelaide examines the residential and commercial locations of Italian communities in the postwar years, many of which had existed before World War II.¹⁴

Accounts of Italian regional or provincial communities that had migrated to South Australia from the nineteenth century included first-person accounts and provided a perspective of change in those settlements. The earliest study of a regional group in South Australia explores the development of the fisher community from Molfetta in the region of Puglia and considers the issue of assimilation of families in the city of Port Pirie over time with a comparison of settlers from northern Italy.¹⁵ The value of this study is the focus on an Italian community that developed over time through a single occupation, which was useful in terms of comparing the Port Pirie fishers with the Veneto market gardeners to understand the influence of occupation on the formation of an Italian community between the wars. Chronological narratives of settlement and detailed histories of Italian communities from single villages commissioned by provincial organisations offer detailed histories of settlement in South Australia.¹⁶ These studies reference the small numbers who migrated before World War II; however, the main focus is on the narratives of much larger post–World War II Italian communities in Adelaide.

Studies that cover the presence of Veneto migrants in Australia include a general history and microhistories that examine distinctive geographical settlements. The general approach is illustrated by Baldassar and Pesman, who examine the experience of emigration as a way of being in the lives of Veneto people and trace their history and experience of settlement in various parts of Australia before 1940.¹⁷

Local studies of the settlement of Veneto migrants in the interwar years in states other than South Australia explain that chain migration was a factor in the clustered rural settlements of veneti.¹⁸ Veneto groups in Victoria and New South Wales settled in rural regions generally through chain migration and worked in a range of occupations including as wage-earners. In contrast, the Veneto market gardeners in Adelaide formed their distinctive community mostly through post-migration relationships. There are few studies of Veneto migrants in South Australia, however, the analysis of Veneto clubs and associations in South Australia before and after World War II gives an insight into the cultural and entrepreneurial inclinations of veneti from the period between the wars.¹⁹ The Veneto Club Inc., Adelaide, was established in 1974 and has published three books that record the genesis, formation and operations of the club.²⁰

I considered the importance of ‘place’ and ‘belonging’ in the context of migration in Australia and the ways that migrants, and Italian migrants in particular, create a sense of belonging through place.²¹ For example, Pascoe discusses the importance of placemaking and the development of community for Italians and argues that the opportunity to set themselves up in a particular place creates the possibilities for establishing their identity in Australia.²²

In contrast to the groups who settled in the same location through chain migration, not all of those in the Veneto cohort were known to each other and they made the choice post-arrival to follow one-by-one to the area where they could cultivate the land with the companionship of others from the Veneto.

Map 1.2: Map of the western and south-western suburbs of Adelaide, early to mid-1930s

Note: The approximate location of the Veneto market gardens, then known as St James Park, is highlighted, 8 kilometres west of the City of Adelaide.

Source: City of Charles Sturt, reproduced with permission.

I was influenced by a question asked by Canadian oral historian Alexander Freund about the use of oral history to understand the experience of migration: ‘Why not ask immigrants and their descendants themselves if we want to find [out] about their experience of migration, settlement and integration?’²³ Learning about the group of first-generation market gardeners led me to document the history of the Veneto families and community through oral history interviews.²⁴ After beginning the interviews, I soon became aware of my position as an outsider.²⁵ My early attempts were tentative because, as a fifth-generation Irish-Australian woman, I did not have the experience of what it meant to be an Italian Australian and I was considerably younger than most of the ‘narrators’, several of whom were born in the 1920s.²⁶ At the time, I did not know much about market gardens and the history of primary production in South Australia. While I felt the limitations of being an outsider, I also understood the advantages of not being a community member, which included being detached from personalities and context and the opportunity to learn from narratives rather than taking knowledge for granted as an insider.

Early steps: Documenting the history of the market gardeners

My early aims were ‘documentary in intent’, which Linda Shopes contends is a starting point in a community oral history project.²⁷ However, she encourages oral historians to go beyond and explore the significance of what narrators recall about the events or historical periods that they recount in their interviews. Through the combination of oral histories, archival materials from Australia and Italy and published records of the interwar years, the group biography bridges intimate and national histories of migration.²⁸

Like Shopes, other oral history scholars argue for critical engagement when undertaking a community project and defining its purpose. This approach includes considering the selection of a range of narrators and the imperative to address the context of historical periods related to the narrators’ accounts. They caution against compiling a simple celebratory document about the past using oral history interviews.²⁹ I asked narrators to remember the past through their experiences of being a member of a Veneto family who had commenced working market gardens in the period between the wars. The initial focus of the project was on gathering recollections of the place and the physical environment at Lockleys in which the Veneto group lived and worked. The scope of the project expanded when I formed a ‘reference group’ with Johnny Marchioro and two other narrators whose fathers were first-generation market gardeners.³⁰ They suggested new candidates for interviews, and we discussed the themes that arose from the interviews and reflected on the information in the narratives, which resulted in an exhibition in 2011 that we organised with support from the local council and a grant from Multicultural SA. The collaboration progressed and became a community oral history project that continued to develop far beyond the formal research phase.³¹

Plate 1.4: Veneto market gardeners’ exhibition, Findon, South Australia, August 2011

Note: Seated, from left to right: Angelo Innocente, Mary Tonellato nee Zoanetti, Guido Rebuli, Aldo Rossetto and Nina Quaresima nee Fazzalari.

Source: Di Kidd.

In the reference group, we began to generate a form of historical consciousness about the Veneto market gardeners and the community at Lockleys. Anna Green identifies three elements of orientation in intergenerational family projects that build historical consciousness: temporal, moral and place or physical environment.³² The interviews incorporated the element of time—the evidence of continuity and change over the years in the market gardens at Lockleys. The issue of morality was addressed in questions about the observance of the Catholic faith and contadino values of hard work and compliance with family structures. All narrators recalled the place and the physical environment through their accounts of work on the family market garden. In the group biography, a fourth dimension of orientation has been added because narrators spoke about Lockleys as more than a physical place that was emotionally significant.³³ They attributed to Lockleys the meaning of a community, a network of paesani (villagers) that had enduring significance over three generations. There are limitations to intergenerational oral history projects that are evident in the group biography of the Veneto market gardeners because it was not viable to have an even spread of narrators representing each generation.

Three generations of voices

I learned about three distinct generations in the Veneto market-gardener community. Those in the first generation were aged between 17 and 41 years when they arrived in Australia. Some were married and had left their wives and children in Italy until they gathered sufficient resources to bring them to Adelaide.³⁴ Others married after arrival and one man in the first generation remained single. A second level, the ‘1.5 generation’, was new to me because I had previously understood that the Veneto migrants had formed two generations: those who were born in Italy and those born in Adelaide. The 1.5 generation describes children up to the age of late adolescence who migrated in the company of their parents.³⁵ Sons and daughters born in Australia to parents in the first generation or in the 1.5 generation form the second generation. The voices of the narrators are differentiated and communicate experience in distinct periods in the three generations from the late 1920s to the present.

In an oral history study of a group of first-generation Campanian migrants who settled in Adelaide after World War II, participants were able to provide pre-migration and post-migration accounts of their lives. Recording first-generation narratives of migration provides benefits for understanding the circumstances of life in villages in Italy in contrast with settlement in Australia and evidence of ‘the multiple and complex ways that transnational migration reconfigures an individual’s sense of belonging, family networking, formation of social bonds and enactment of community cultural traditions’.³⁶ Documentation of observations, reflection and emotion in the life before migration and the experience of settlement are particular to the first generation.

For me, it was too late to meet any of the first generation as they had already died, so I recorded memories of family life through their children, in both the 1.5 and the second generations.³⁷ However, the unexpected discovery of interviews recorded in 1984 with a first-generation couple, Vittorio and Angelina Marchioro, was a beneficial addition to the spoken history of the community.³⁸ Listening to the two Marchioro interviews provides a basis for understanding the experience of Italian migrants between the wars, the role of parents and the imperative of building a future for their children in Australia.

Vittorio and Angelina were in their seventies when interviewed, and they reflected on the hardship, or la miseria, they endured in Italy, living in poor farming households that had been disrupted by World War I, where it was common to send even young children away to employment to contribute to the family economy. The respective accounts of their early existence in Australia illustrate the desperation of poverty for Vittorio, who was without regular work for several years before he partnered with his brother and sister-in-law to lease land for market gardens at Lockleys. Angelina Marchioro’s memories of her first years as a proxy bride when she knew no one else in Adelaide reflect the loneliness and sorrow of leaving her family to marry an unknown man in Australia and begin a new life.

Plate 1.5: Angelina and Vittorio Marchioro, c. 1937

Note: The images were taken separately—Angelina in Malo, Italy, and Vittorio in Adelaide—before their proxy marriage.

Source: Photo supplied by Johnny Marchioro.

In their interviews, Vittorio and Angelina assert their happiness as elderly migrants, settled comfortably in Australia 50 years after arrival, and their appreciation of the security and wellbeing of their two sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren residing in Adelaide. They also express contentment in being among paesani and living on the land they had bought for their market garden more than three decades previously. Angelina explained her sense of equilibrium: ‘We got Italian people all around from there down the street, my house is in the middle of the garden.’³⁹ At the end of the interview, Angelina summarised their lives in Adelaide: ‘Everything going better and better.’⁴⁰

Marino’s study of Calabrian-Australians living in Adelaide extends to three generations: those who arrived as migrants after World War II, their children and their grandchildren, who were born in Adelaide.⁴¹ Marino analyses the differences in perceptions of the ethnicity of the three generations, contrasting the challenges for the first cohort with the experiences of their children, who feel they live a conflicted life between two worlds: the family and the environment beyond, like school. This finding reflects that of an early study of second-generation Italian Australians by Vasta, who emphasised that the formation of identity can be complex because of competing influences from family and the world beyond the culture of the home.⁴² Further, the category of the second generation is often a ‘subjective’ definition because of multiple identities that individuals may embody as a result of family migration and, in Australia, the influence of multiculturalism.⁴³ Those in the second generation are the recipients of the family enculturation of ethnicity even as they negotiate the environment of school, peer group and working life.⁴⁴ In his study, Marino reports a marked distinction with the grandchildren, the third generation, who have been shaped by different interactions and a more inclusive experience of schooling that could be linked to a more multicultural context. The third generation experiences a positive feeling of ethnicity expressed as pride in their sense of being Calabrian-Italian in Australia.⁴⁵

The voices of the 1.5 generation are neglected in most migration studies because this cohort is not considered to have agency in the decision to migrate and their authority to speak is therefore not so valued. Yet, the 1.5 generation bridges the experiences of a child in a migrant family in the home of origin with the experiences as an adult in the new country.⁴⁶ In this study, the voices of the elderly 1.5-generation narrators nuance the experience of migration because they speak of their origins and some provide memories of their childhood in fascist Italy. They also reflect on their coming of age during World War II in Adelaide when Italy and Australia were enemies, and the narrators describe their working lives as adults—most of them as market gardeners. Echoing the research of Rumbaut, I found that the experiences of most of the 1.5 generation were closer to those of the first generation than of the cohort born in Australia because of their direct link to, and memories of, the home country.⁴⁷ In the Veneto families, sons and daughters in the 1.5 generation assisted their parents in the market gardens before they married, bought their own properties and maintained market gardening as a livelihood in the same locality.⁴⁸ The configuration of the 1.5 generation living close to their parents reflects the intimacy of generations who shared households in the Veneto region.

A span of 26 years explains the differences in experience and memories within the second generation. Some who were born in the late 1920s or during the 1930s had memories of their parents when the market-gardener community was young. For example, Lina Rismondo nee Marchioro, born in Adelaide in 1927—the year that 15 of the Veneto market gardeners arrived—could remember lone men who met socially at the place where Angelo Piovesan and Secondo Tonellato were neighbours on Frogmore Road. Lina was six or seven years old when she witnessed early social gatherings, and her memories evoke the practice of Veneto traditions and customs that provided comfort for the new migrants. She recalled the frequent occasions that drew the men together when her mother was the only woman in that small cluster of veneti:

At least twice a week the men would go there of a night-time and Mum would be roasting some chestnuts and the men would be singing, and that was lovely. I can still hear them singing … and I know there was seven … and there was another, Mr Atto Rossetto, he used to come from the city to come down and spend the evening with these men, you know, they were all bachelors, and they all knew each other … Oh, the singing was beautiful. I can still hear them singing. I feel as though I can remember them all standing out with their arms around each other’s shoulders, you know, singing away [laughs] … [M]y mother was the only woman.⁴⁹

Lina’s memory of the early group of Veneto men singing songs from their childhood and her mother’s role in creating the intimate domestic activities provides an insight into the nostalgia of those men, who nurtured strong emotional bonds to their origins and the families they had left behind. The image of roasting chestnuts is a transnational marker of a food tradition and an example of domestic material culture brought to Australia by the first generation. It is possible to appreciate the group of men savouring the familiar sensory experience of the smell and taste of roasted chestnuts and associating it with their memories of the Veneto and the comfort of sharing seasonal food in the company of family.⁵⁰ When Lina refers to ‘bachelors’, she includes the lone men who had arrived without wives. Later in the interview, she gives details of the men who had been married in Italy and those who married after settling in Adelaide.

On the other hand, those second-generation narrators who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s recalled a community that had existed for more than 20 years, with established patterns of working life and social interactions. By the time the second generation formed memories, the paesani—the people in the close network of veneti at Lockleys—had established themselves as market gardeners, lived through the war years in Adelaide and incorporated a younger generation of Veneto migrants who arrived in Australia after the war.

Memory and connections to the first generation

Contrasting the themes in the interviews recorded with the two members of the first generation with those of the 1.5- and second-generation narrators, I was alerted to the emotional reframing of intergenerational memory. Children of the first generation were familiar with the experiences of their parents as disadvantaged migrants and the progression to successful small business owners, and some transmitted the memories of challenges their parents faced. It was helpful to understand the concept of inherited memory within families developed by memory studies scholar Marianne Hirsch. Her research refers to memories formed by the children of those who survived the Holocaust and who ‘remembered’ through the stories their parents told the images or behaviours that originated beyond their own experience and that became ‘postmemory’.⁵¹

In the context of ‘postmemory’, the second generation undertakes the role of transmitting memory as an intergenerational task. The descendants of the first generation of the Veneto market gardeners, the 1.5- and second-generation narrators, recall their childhood and convey a strong connection to the circumstances of their parents’ lives. They also recall the experience of their fathers and mothers, who endured the fragmentation of family through migration, the early years of marginalisation and hardship in the Depression and the challenges of establishing themselves in a new country.

Plate 1.6: Ermenegilda Simeoni listens to her oral history interview, Riese Pio X, Italy, October 2018

Source: Madeleine Regan.

The voices of the first, 1.5 and second generations bring together individual memories and create a communal account of the experience of migration and settlement of the market-gardener families at Lockleys. They articulate the experiences of their families working their new land, bartering for glasshouses, selling vegetables at the market, celebrating in packing sheds and establishing a stable community within an often politically hostile and economically challenging new world. These experiences of family and community life created emotional responses in the narrators. There is nostalgia for some in recalling the origins of the first generation, emotional connections to other families, the rituals of working the market gardens and the celebrations and structures that held the community together as a paese at Lockleys. The descriptions of the 1.5 and second generations reflect the post-settlement experience: work and community within the identity of the family—an area of Italian Australian and migration research studies that has been under-researched.⁵²

Narrators often express nostalgia for a lost life and regret that the first-generation men and women are no longer alive and the community they had known no longer exists.⁵³ The past is idealised and the paese is associated with security, order and the companionship of paesani or people who came from the same or similar villages in the Veneto and shared the contadino heritage. The image of home with links between place, family and community conveys ‘a sense of belonging … an apparently comforting bounded enclosure’.⁵⁴ It was this sense of belonging that the Veneto market gardeners created in their families on their respective landholdings and within their close-knit community at Lockleys. Marino identifies the same experience of belonging created by Italian regional groups in Adelaide because of their social and economic needs. He asserts that they built ‘a sense of “common place”, where paesani have continued to live closely with one another, drawing imagined boundaries through the maintenance of their social relations’.⁵⁵

A bridge between the past and the present

After gathering 27 interviews with the 1.5- and second-generation narrators, and knowing that oral history recordings often end up sitting on archive shelves, I looked for additional ways to broaden access to the project for a larger audience.⁵⁶ In 2014, I received funding to create a website to incorporate the sound files of the growing number of interviews, transcripts, family photos, maps and other documents that represent family and community memories of the market gardens.⁵⁷ The website has become a link between the past and the present for the descendants of the Veneto market gardeners. In place of the physical market gardens, there is a virtual point of reference where the descendants can access an archive of memories in recordings of oral history interviews and images of working and cultural lives and the paese created by the community at Lockleys.

The website facilitates the expression of a strong emotional attachment to the place where the community had its origins in Adelaide. It transmits the history of the Veneto families as migrants, market gardeners and memory-makers. Second-generation family members are the main contributors to the website, seeing it as a valuable way to share family and community histories, and community members report listening to interviews recorded by other narrators and looking at other features, especially the family photographs.

Building a group biography

My approach to examining the Veneto market gardeners at Lockleys is through a fine-grained group biography that examines family and community life. Barbara Caine argues that group or collective biographies are useful means of focusing on a cohort such as an ethnic group whose lives are on the margins of previous historical writing.⁵⁸ Group biography enables an examination of the dynamics of race, gender and class within a given period. The documentation of the Veneto community, the market gardens and the paese provides evidence of family lives, changes in the physical work involved in market gardening, the significance of land, the impact of World War II on individual families and the formation of a community that developed bonds as proxy relationships for the families left behind in the Veneto region.

The formation of a migrant community

The group biography incorporates the pre-migration and post-migration circumstances of the Veneto market-gardener families. This book explores the regional identity of a group of Veneto migrants who shared a single occupation as market gardeners, lived close to each other and developed a paese between the wars. The Veneto market-gardener community is distinctive because it was not formed through chain migration, which was the usual pattern of migration and settlement of Italians and other southern Europeans in Australia from the nineteenth century.⁵⁹ The Veneto group formed their paese with the social and emotional benefits of a small, harmonious community and did not establish an institutional, organisational centre. There was no Italian church, community hall, Italian shop or osteria (neighbourhood bar) in Lockleys in the 1940s and 1950s. The families formed their own network and maintained their self-reliance without having to relinquish their identity to Anglo-Australian culture.

The history of the Veneto group departs from other Italian migration studies in Australia in its close examination of a distinct community whose members remained market gardeners in the same location in Adelaide from the interwar years to more than five decades later. This book documents the Veneto market-gardener community from their arrival in Australia in the late 1920s to the sale of the market gardens in the 1960s and 1970s. The following eight chapters form a chronology that reveals the experience of the community over that period. Chapter 2 describes the circumstances in the early years after the Veneto migrants arrived in Australia and outlines the trajectory of the men, from transient working lives in the Depression to their role as market gardeners. It provides an overview of the strategies they used to achieve stability through reunions with wives and children or taking the step to marry and form nuclear family households. Chapter 3 explores the ways that the Veneto market gardeners adapted the contadino imperative to occupy and cultivate land and begin the process of establishing themselves and achieving sistemazione (the process of settling and establishing themselves in a new country). This included taking opportunities to negotiate the land-tenure system in South Australia and eventually becoming landowners, in the 1950s.

In Chapters 4 and 5, the focus is the cohesion of the market-gardener community and the desire to maintain the boundaries of the paese at Lockleys. Chapter 4 explores the creation of the family labour unit, changes in gendered roles and the separate positions of the 1.5 and second generations in the structures of the market gardens. Chapter 5 examines the everyday lives of the Veneto market gardeners and the significance of proxy family relationships that assisted intergenerational connections for the second generation. It also examines interactions outside the paese, including the influence of the Catholic Church.

Both Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 examine changes that tested the community. Chapter 6 investigates the impact of the war years and the imposition of regulations after Italians became ‘enemy aliens’. It describes some of the challenges the community confronted and acknowledges the strength and sense of belonging held in the paese. In Chapter 7, the differences between the first, 1.5 and second generations are explored in relation to the contadino heritage. The discontinuity is most obvious among the second generation, who took pathways away from the market gardens.

Chapter 8 develops the theme of change and explores the transformations that occurred in the paese of the Veneto market gardeners. The gardens were imbued with significance because of the strong network of paesani established by the first generation. The connections continued into the 1.5 and second generations and a virtual dimension of the paese has been formed through the existence of the website.

Chapter 9 considers the distinctive aspects of the Veneto market-gardener paese and illustrates the ways in which the second and third generations have held the market gardens as the heart of the history of the Veneto community even after nine decades. The continuity extends to descendants who live in Italy and maintain connections to the market gardens and the community through virtual means.

Images from family photograph albums in the following chapters convey a sense of intimacy in the portraits of individuals and groups and in the activities that were part of the daily lives of the market-gardener households. The photographs capture the presence of generations in the paese and offer a material record of the existence of the market-gardener community.

Framing the history of the Veneto market gardeners

Oral history interviews with descendants of the first-generation Veneto market gardeners illuminate the experience of families who faced the Depression, fascism, World War II and the racialised environment of the White Australia policy era. The Veneto families encountered postwar adjustments when large numbers of non-British migrants, including Italians escaping war-affected Italy, arrived and were welcomed in the paese. The first generation endured practices of assimilation in the implementation of Australian immigration policies.⁶⁰ They also witnessed and participated in the hopeful new direction of multiculturalism and its more inclusive environment that offered migrant groups greater visibility through the formation and government support of ‘ethnic’ associations. Withstanding discrimination and marginalisation in the first decades after settlement at Lockleys, the community prospered and created a sense of belonging and identity on, and through, their market gardens.

Attachment to the land is an important thread in the group biography of the community of Veneto market gardeners and their descendants. The narrators ascribe three meanings to the association of the market gardens with the formation of a new kind of community or new form of paese. First, the market gardens represent the land that became the economic foundation for the families and their place of permanent settlement. The second meaning relates to their identity as cultivators of the land, which connected the first generation of Veneto men and women to their contadino heritage in the Veneto, where, for most, it was impossible to own land because of historical structural impediments to proprietorship. The third meaning provided by the narrators enables them to reconstruct the market gardens as a space that transcended the physical and became an emotional and social site of attachment.

A new strand of migration history

The pine box and mud map that prompted my research are symbolic and material features threaded throughout the following chapters. The half-case symbolises the shared occupation of the Veneto market gardeners and their use of land. The mud map contextualises the location of the physical and relational paese at Lockleys. The individual and collective biographies of the Veneto families are woven into the narrative through the quotations from oral histories. The website features in the group biography as a transnational archive that preserves and develops the continuity of the community’s history.

The market gardens enabled the self-contained community to build a new identity and their attachment to the land represented an economic and emotional anchor for their settlement and flourishing in Australia. The group biography of a homogeneous, family engaged migrant group demonstrates the initiative, unity and vision that can enable an immigrant community to flourish and integrate into Australian society over three generations. This intergenerational history of market gardeners at the fringe of urban space raises new questions in migration history in Australia about the role of place in adjustment processes, resilience and belonging.

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1. 1 Adrian Tonellato interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/35, 30 January 2016: 54.

2. 2 Johnny Marchioro is formally known as Giancarlo Marchioro.

3. 3 See Ilaria Vanni Accarigi, ‘Transcultural Objects, Transcultural Homes’, in Reimagining Home in the 21st Century, eds Justine Lloyd and Ellie Vasta (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017), 192–206, at 193–94.

4. 4 For examples of general historical perspectives of Italian migration to Australia, see: Robert D. Pascoe, Buongiorno Australia: Our Italian Heritage (Melbourne: Greenhouse Publications, 1987); Julia Church, Per l’Australia: The Story of Italian Migration (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2005). For a text focused on the migration of Italians to South Australia, see: Desmond O’Connor, No Need to be Afraid: Italian Settlers in South Australia between 1839 and the Second World War (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1996).

5. 5 Charles A. Price, Southern Europeans in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963); Wilfrid David Borrie, Italians and Germans in Australia: A Study of Assimilation (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1954). An earlier text provided a sharply racist study of Italians (and other non-British groups) within the context of the White Australia policy: Jens Lyng, Non-Britishers in Australia: Influence on Population and Progress (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1935 [1927]).

6. 6 This is a point also made by Simone Marino, ‘Thrown into the World: The Shift between Pavlova and Pasta in the Ethnic Identity of Australians Originating from Italy’, Journal of Sociology 57, no. 2 (2021): 231–48, doi.org/10.1177/1440783319888283, at 235.

7. 7 Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 107–12; Charles A. Price, ‘Southern Europeans in Australia: Problems of Assimilation’, International Migration Review 2, no. 3 (1968): 3–26, doi.org/10.1177/019791836800200301.

8. 8 Frank Lancaster Jones, ‘The Territorial Composition of Italian Emigration to Australia, 1876 to 1962’, International Migration 2, no. 2 (1964): 247–65, doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.1964.tb00632.x; Frank Lancaster Jones, ‘Ethnic Concentration and Assimilation: An Australian Case Study’, Social Forces 45, no. 3 (1967): 412–23, doi.org/10.2307/2575200.

9. 9 Gianfranco Cresciani, The Italians in Australia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

10. 10 Simone Marino, Intergenerational Ethnic Identity Construction and Transmission among Italian-Australians: Absence, Ambivalence and Revival (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48145-2; Marino, ‘Thrown into the World’.

11. 11 Francesco Ricatti, Italians in Australia: History, Memory, Identity (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2018), doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78873-9; Francesco Ricatti, ‘The Emotion of Truth and the Racial Uncanny: Aborigines and Sicilians in Australia’, Cultural Studies Review 19, no. 2 (2013): 125–49, doi.org/10.5130/csr.v19i2.2839; Helen Andreoni, ‘Olive or White? The Colour of Italians in Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 7 (2003): 81–92, doi.org/10.1080/14443050309387853; Catherine Dewhirst, ‘Collaborating on Whiteness: Representing Italians in Early White Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 32, no. 1 (2008): 33–49, doi.org/10.1080/14443050801993800; Joseph Pugliese, ‘Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context: For a Decolonizing Migrant Historiography’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 23, no. 1 (2002): 5–18, doi.org/10.1080/07256860220122368, at 6–18; Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970 (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2008).

12. 12 Ricatti, Italians in Australia, 66–71. See also Ruth Balint and Zora Simic, ‘Histories of Migrants and Refugees in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 49, no. 3 (2018): 378–409, doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2018.1479438, at 378–86; Anna Green, ‘Intergenerational Family History and Historical Consciousness’, in Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field, eds Anna Clark and Carla L. Peck (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 200–11, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw04bhk.19, at 208–9; Lorenzo Veracini, ‘On Settlerness’, Borderlands 10, no. 1 (2011): 1–17; Jayne Persian and Karen Agutter, ‘European Post-War Migrants and Indigenous Australians: A History in Fragments’, History Australia 18, no. 1 (2021): 112–29, doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2021.1878912.

13. 13 O’Connor, No Need to be Afraid.

14. 14 See Angela A. Alessi, ‘Reimagining Italian Spaces: La Fiamma as a Lens to Explore the Development of the Italian Community in Adelaide, South Australia, between 1947 and 1963’, in Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press, eds Catherine Dewhirst and Richard Scully (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 107–25, doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67330-7_6.

15. 15 J.E. Bromley, ‘The Italians of Port Pirie’ (MA thesis, The Australian National University, Canberra, 1955).

16. 16 See, for example, Daniela Cosmini-Rose and Desmond O’Connor, Caulonia in the Heart: The Settlement in Australia of Migrants from a Southern Italian Town (Adelaide: Lythrum Press, 2008); Don Longo, ed., Terra Lasci, Terra Trovi: From Molinara to Adelaide—The History of a Southern Italian Community in South Australia 1927–2007 (Adelaide: Molinara Social and Sports Club Inc. and Lythrum Press, 2010); Antonio Mercurio and Angela Scarino, We Left: Narratives of the Sangiorgesi in South Australia = E Partimmo: Narrazioni die Sangiorgesi del Sud Australia (Adelaide: San Giorgio la Molara Community Centre, 2004); Michael Peter Corrieri, Italians of Port Pirie: A Social History (Port Pirie: Our Lady of Martyrs, Port Pirie Italian Community, 1992).

17. 17 Loretta Baldassar and Ros Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians: Veneto Migrants in Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2005). Rosoli argues that migration was a common feature in the lives of the veneti, who accounted for nearly 12 per cent of all Italian emigrants between the 1870s and the 1970s (in Baldassar and Pesman, p. 22).

18. 18 See Annamaria Davine, Vegnimo da Conco Ma Simo Veneti: A Study of the Immigration and Settlement of the Veneti in Central and West Gippsland 1925–1970 (Melbourne: Italian Australian Institute, La Trobe University, 2006); Diana Ruzzene Grollo, Cooper’s Creek Gippsland: The Trevisani (Melbourne: Mure, 2004); Rina Huber, From Pasta to Pavlova: A Comparative Study of Italian Settlers in Sydney and Griffith (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1977); Lesley Jenkins, Power of the Land: A Social History of Italian Settlement in Lismore (Mullumbimby: L. Jenkins, 1993).

19. 19 Desmond O’Connor, ‘Club e Associazioni dei Veneti nel South Australia [Clubs and Associations of the Venetians in South Australia]’, in Veneti d’Australia, eds Luciano Segafreddo and Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien (Ravenna, Italy: Angelo Longo Editore, 2005), 177–87.

20. 20 Veneto Club Adelaide Inc., In 84 Domeniche nasce il Veneto Club: Ricordi, Appunti e Riflessioni sugli Eventi dal 1971 al 1974 [The Veneto Club was Born in 84 Sundays: Memories, Notes and Reflections on Events from 1971 to 1974]; Veneto Club 25th Anniversary, 1974–1999 (Adelaide: Veneto Club Adelaide Inc., n.d.); Veneto Club with assistance from Madeleine Regan, History of the Veneto Club Inc., Adelaide 1974-2024, Veneto Club Inc., Adelaide, Openbook Howden Print and Design, Adelaide, 2024.

21. 21 Robert Pascoe, ‘Place and Community: The Construction of an Italo-Australian Space’, in Australia’s Italians: Culture and Community in a Changing Society, eds Stephen Castles, Caroline Alcorso, Gaetano Rando, and Ellie Vasta (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 85–97. For discussion of ‘emplacement’ as a physical and emotional state that involves the processes of belonging as they adapt to their new country, see Ricatti, Italians in Australia, 37–39.

22. 22 Pascoe, ‘Place and Community’.

23. 23 Alexander Freund, Oral History and Ethnic History, Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada Series Booklet No. 32 (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 2014), 24.

24. 24 Sixty-five oral history interviews and more than 140 hours of recordings of interviews for the Italian market-gardener project have been deposited in a series in the J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection in the State Library of South Australia (OH 872) since 2008. They include recordings by two other interviewers. The library’s ‘Conditions of Use Form for Oral History Interviews’ specifies joint ownership of the copyright with the person who is interviewed and with the library. This includes the right to use the interview in different circumstances. In allowing the interview to be made available to the public, the narrator can place restrictions on its use.

25. 25 An issue examined by several oral historians—see, for example: Paul Thompson and Joanna Bornat, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 211–12; Amy Tooth Murphy, ‘Listening In, Listening Out: Intersubjectivity and the Impact of Insider and Outsider Status in Oral History Interviews’, Oral History 48, no. 1 (2020): 35–44; Louise Ryan, ‘Inside and Outside of What or Where? Researching Migration through Multi-Positionalities’, Forum, Qualitative Social Research 16, no. 2 (2015).

26. 26 I use the word ‘narrators’ to describe the people interviewed for this project in preference to ‘interviewees’. ‘Narrator’ assigns more authority and agency to the person telling their story in an oral history interview.

27. 27 Linda Shopes, ‘“Insights and Oversights”: Reflections on the Documentary Traditions and the Theoretical Turn in Oral History’, The Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (2014): 257–68, doi.org/10.1093/ohr/ohu035, at 260.

28. 28 Anna Clark, ‘Private Lives, Public History: Navigating Australian Historical Consciousness’, in Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field, eds Anna Clark and Carla L. Peck (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 113–24, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw04bhk.13.

29. 29 See, for example, Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), doi.org/10.4324/9780203849033, 153–74; Joanna Bornat, ‘Two Oral Histories: Valuing Our Difference’, The Oral History Review 21, no. 1 (1993), 73–95, doi.org/10.1093/ohr/21.1.73; Thompson and Bornat, The Voice of the Past, 21–22, 286–97; Alistair Thomson, ‘Oral History and Community History in Britain: Persona and Critical Reflections on Twenty-Five Years of Continuity and Change’, Oral History 36, no. 1 (2008): 95–104; Linda Shopes, ‘Oral History and the Study of Communities: Problems, Paradoxes and Possibilities’, The Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (2002): 588–98, doi.org/10.2307/3092177.

30. 30 The group, including the wives of the narrators, evolved over several years. The three men assisted with public presentations about the history of the Veneto market-gardener community.

31. 31 See Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York, 1990); Linda Shopes, ‘Oral History and the Study of Communities’; Thompson and Bornat, The Voice of the Past, 360–72; Abrams, Oral History Theory, 158–59; Katherine Fobear, ‘Do You Understand? Unsettling Authority in Feminist Oral History’, Journal of Feminist Scholarship 10, no. 10 (2016): 61–77, at 74–75.

32. 32 Green, ‘Intergenerational Family History and Historical Consciousness’.

33. 33 ibid., 208.

34. 34 It was a common migration practice for lone men to arrive first; the wives and children followed them and then elderly parents often joined the family unit. See Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 112–13.

35. 35 Ruben G. Rumbaut, ‘Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immigrant First and Second Generations in the United States’, International Migration Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 1160–205, doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00232.x.

36. 36 Diana Glenn, ‘Writing Campanian Lives: Considerations of Transnational Identity and Belonging’, Forum Italicum 47, no. 1 (2013): 150–66, doi.org/10.1177/0014585813478924, at 151.

37. 37 Between 2017 and 2024, 20 narrators—a mix of 1.5 and second generations—died.

38. 38 Vittorio and Angelina Marchioro recorded interviews in 1984 with Michael Tsounis for the Migrant Oral History Project (Social History Museums), deposited in the J.D. Somerville Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 12/1. I coincidentally discovered the interviews when I was well into my research.

39. 39 Angelina Marchioro interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 12, 13 March 1984: 11.

40. 40 ibid., 18.

41. 41 Marino, Intergenerational Ethnic Identity Construction.

42. 42 Ellie Vasta, ‘The Second Generation’, in Australia’s Italians: Culture and Community in a Changing Society, eds Stephen Castles, Caroline Alcorso, Gaetano Rando, and Ellie Vasta (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 155–56. For a study of gender and development of sexuality in a group of second-generation Italian Australian young people in Perth, see also Loretta Baldassar, ‘Marias and Marriage: Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality among Italo-Australian Youth in Perth’, Journal of Sociology 35, no. 1 (1999): 1–22, doi.org/10.1177/144078339903500101, at 1–20.

43. 43 Zlatko Skrbis, Loretta Baldassar, and Scott Poynting, ‘Introduction—Negotiating Belonging: Migration and Generations’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2007): 261–69, doi.org/10.1080/07256860701429691, at 262–63.

44. 44 Emanuela Sala and Loretta Baldassar, ‘Time to Revisit the Family in Italian-Australian Studies: Charting a Way Forward’, Flinders University Languages Group Online Review 5, no. 2 (2017): 6–7.

45. 45 Marino, Intergenerational Ethnic Identity Construction, 103–40.

46. 46 The experience of the child migrant ‘being in between “two cultures”’ is captured in a study in which the author reflects on the loss of what and who was left behind in England when her parents settled their family in Adelaide in the late 1960s. There is emphasis on the child’s lack of agency in the family’s decision to migrate. See Annmarie Reid, ‘Ella’s Clippy Mat: Progging the Memories of Migrants from England’s North East’ (PhD diss., University of South Australia, Adelaide, 2015), 362–63.

47. 47 See Rumbaut (‘Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts’, 1167), who refined the category of adolescents aged between 13 and 17 years as a ‘1.25 generation’.

48. 48 This was also the case for most of the 1.5-generation women who worked with their husbands on the market gardens.

49. 49 Adelina Rismondo nee Marchioro interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/9, 9 June 2010: 8–9.

50. 50 Olivia Hamilton, ‘Senses of Home’, in Reimagining Home in the 21st Century, eds Justine Lloyd and Ellie Vasta (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017), 179–91, doi.org/10.4337/9781786432933.00021, at 183–84.

51. 51 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–28, doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2007-019.

52. 52 See Sala and Baldassar, ‘Time to Revisit the Family in Italian-Australian Studies’; Alexandra Dellios, ‘“It Was Just You and Your Child”: Single Migrant Mothers, Generational Storytelling and Australia’s Migrant Heritage’, Memory Studies 13, no. 4 (2018): 586–600, doi.org/10.1177/1750698017750000.

53. 53 For discussion of memory and imagination, see Michael Janover, ‘Nostalgias’, Critical Horizons 1, no. 1 (2000): 113–33, doi.org/10.1163/156851600510453. For nostalgia and the experience of Italian migrants, see Robert Orsi, ‘The Fault of Memory: “Southern Italy” in the Imagination of Immigrants and the Lives of their Children in Italian Harlem, 1920–1945’, Journal of Family History 15, no. 1 (1990): 133–47, doi.org/10.1177/036319909001500108; and Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)’, Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 41–64, doi.org/10.1177/02632769922050548.

54. 54 Doreen Massey, ‘A Place Called Home’, in The Doreen Massey Reader, eds Brett Christophers, Rebecca Lave, Jamie Peck, and Marion Werner (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing Limited, 2018), 1701–172.

55. 55 Marino, Intergenerational Ethnic Identity Construction, 9.

56. 56 Luisa Del Giudice, ‘Italian-American Oral History and Its Digitized Sites’, Italian American Review 3, no. 2 (2013): 154–65, doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.3.2.0154.

57. 57 I received a Cultural Heritage Grant from the City of Charles Sturt for the design and implementation of the website, which was launched in May 2014. See: www.venetimarketgardeners1927.net.

58. 58 Barbara Caine, Biography and History, 2nd edn (London: Red Globe Press, 2019), 2–3.

59. 59 For a definition and depiction of types of chain migration, see Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 107–12; Lancaster Jones, ‘Ethnic Concentration and Assimilation’.

60. 60 Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster, A History of South Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), doi.org/10.1017/9781139196352, 152–53; Gwenda Tavan, ‘The Dismantling of the White Australia Policy: Elite Conspiracy or Will of the Australian People’, Australian Journal of Political Science 39, no. 1 (2004): 109–25, doi.org/10.1080/1036114042000205678.