3

Attachment to land

The whole area was all market garden, you know. Well, I suppose they had to get a living somewhere … When they come here they couldn’t understand much, speak much English, didn’t know what to do, so they had to start off something because over there [in Italy], they only had little gardens too, and where we come from [in the Veneto] they used to plant once a year because you’d get the snow that high, every year, I still remember the snow there.

—Lino Tonellato, 2010¹

As Lino Tonellato reflected on his father’s early days as a market gardener at Lockleys, he easily reconstructed the landscape where the first generation of veneti had lived as contadini with their families in the Veneto region. Lino, who was 84 years old when interviewed, remembered the land in the province of Treviso, and his focus on climate reflected a cultivator’s awareness of seasons. He connected ideas about land use and agricultural practices in the Veneto with the experience of the first generation and their efforts to gain a livelihood in family run market gardens at Lockleys. He noted that the climate and geography in the subalpine area of the Veneto were different from the western district of Adelaide. Lino captured the narrative of the Veneto market gardeners, the initiative to preserve their contadino heritage of working the land and the adaptations required to establish commercial market gardens in Australia. He provided a gendered view of work, focusing on the male perspective and, as one of the 1.5 generation, conveyed familiarity with the Veneto region.

The path to settlement and ownership for the first generation of the Veneto market gardeners was not simple or quick. Yet, the group successfully negotiated the means to access and work the land and reached their goal of becoming self-employed market gardeners during the 1930s, and landowners by the mid-1950s. This chapter addresses the adaptation of Veneto values and practices through transcultural strategies and the formation of group identity through attachment to land.

Plate 3.1: Lino Tonellato, Adelaide, 2014

Source: Michael Campbell.

The convergence of the veneti on fertile land at Lockleys that they developed as market gardens is explained by four factors. First, their origins as peasant farmers in the Veneto provided the motivation and knowledge to live and work on their own land. Second, the group recognised that it was possible to occupy and secure land through the South Australian land tenure system. The third factor is the role of the family as a labour unit, including husband, wife and children—a feature of many early rural settlements of Italian groups in Australia.² Fourth, the contadino tradition of living in a proximate community explains the formation of an enduring, close settlement of families who shared the same occupation in a paese or small village-like cluster within 3 kilometres of one another at Lockleys. While the proximity of the families supported the adjustment of the first generation, the density of the Veneto market-gardener settlement was considered a problem by the Anglo-Australian community, who saw the group as distinctly separate and undesirable.³

The destiny of the contadino

In Italy the relationship to land defined everyday life, the past and the future for the contadino. Families had worked the land for generations in the Veneto region. In the early twentieth century, some families owned land, although inheritance was a challenge because it was impossible to expand landholdings to accommodate increasing numbers of the new generations. When land was carved up to support independent subfamily groups, opportunities to increase the livelihood from harvests were insufficient for large households.⁴

Plate 3.2: Angelina and Secondo Tonellato outside the house where the Tonellato family grew up, in Caselle di Altivole, Italy, 1962

Source: Photo supplied by Assunta Giovannini nee Tonellato.

The example of the large Ballestrin family illustrates the extent of poverty in the Veneto between the wars that prompted the migration of extended families. Although it was not the experience of other Veneto market gardeners, the two Ballestrin families in the first-generation group gradually sponsored other members and built a large extended family of three generations in Adelaide before World War II.⁵ Four members of one family arrived within three years, 1937 to 1939, including the widowed mother of two men who had migrated in 1927. Egidio (Jimmy) Ballestrin explained that his father was ‘called’ to Adelaide by his two brothers because the intergenerational household at Vallà was unable to provide adequate food, work and space for all the family:

They were a very large family, and also a very large extended family living with them, and they had some land but couldn’t make ends meet because of the fact that there were just too many. There was all his brothers and sisters … nine of them in all, and also the older children started reproducing and having the children or the grandchildren, if you like, live there with them, and there just wasn’t enough to go around … Two of his older brothers, which was Antonio and Isidoro, came to Australia in 1927, and in doing so, then also asked … his other brothers to come out and he came out in the early ’30s.⁶

Within the Lockleys market-gardener community, the reunion of the extended Ballestrin family re-created the traditional intergenerational arrangements and was the closest example at Lockleys to the family model of chain migration followed by most other Italian migrants in Australia.

The imperative to work the land was shared by the Veneto market gardeners. In his interview, Aldo Rossetto confirmed that on the passenger list on the ship on which his father and uncles arrived in 1927, the most common occupation described people who worked the land:

I noticed on the Carignano list of passengers, it had all ‘gardeners,’ ‘gardeners,’ ‘gardeners;’ along every name they were all market gardeners. They cultivated land as peasants in Italy, lived off the land, and obviously that was the way to go.⁷

Aldo indicated the inevitability of the Veneto cohort applying their knowledge and skills as cultivators of land in Australia. The Great Depression had delayed the process of the first generation of veneti putting down permanent roots. However, the group progressively took up leases in the Lockleys area through the 1930s. There the market gardeners differed from other Veneto groups who had settled in Australia between the 1920s and 1970s, who moved through four stages of development in achieving sistemazione: temporary work in mining, then agriculture, movement from rural to urban life and employment, to the final stage of self-employment.⁸ At Lockleys, the first generation moved to the second and ultimate stage of their working lives as market gardeners, and most remained in that occupation well into the 1970s.

Land at Lockleys

The veneti settled on leased properties of between 1.2 and 8 hectares on the northern side of the River Torrens between the City of Adelaide and the St Vincent Gulf. The floodplain and alluvial soil had provided a rich abundance of food for the Indigenous peoples of the area, who had for thousands of years used the river as a source of water and food and its surrounds for cultural practices such as burial sites.⁹ The river had been a natural corridor between the hills above the plain and the sea in the west. After colonial settlement in the second half of the 1830s, English settlers developed broadacre farms near the River Torrens in the Lockleys area and records of land titles indicate that subdivision of the large farms had begun by at least the 1890s, when a landholding of 60 hectares was divided into smaller parcels.¹⁰

Plate 3.3: Aerial photo showing the approximate location of the Veneto market gardens, 1935

Source: City of Charles Sturt, reproduced with permission.

By the 1930s when the veneti took up leases, the area was a mix of large landholdings under crops such as lucerne, dairy farms, small intensive vegetable farms and orchards. Tomatoes were grown in glasshouses in the Lockleys–Fulham area—a method pioneered by an Englishman, Thomas Skuse, who had arrived in the colony of South Australia in 1865.¹¹ At that time, apart from the colonial families, small plots of land were leased to Chinese men who grew vegetables for sale at the market from at least the late nineteenth century. After World War I, some returned soldiers were allocated land and Italians from regions including Campania and Calabria worked market gardens in the same area.

The location of the leaseholds secured by the Veneto group close to the River Torrens and about 8 kilometres from the wholesale vegetable market promised optimum conditions for the contadini to work land for themselves and establish commercial market gardens. While the river provided water, the earliest years were marked by extensive flooding, which ruined crops, until the government modified the course of the river in the late 1930s. In an article about the experiences of the Tonellato family, the author referred to the River Torrens as ‘unpredictable which in dry times, was like a creek painted on canvas, played up when it freely flooded the land destroying the harvest of the farms there’.¹² The desire for land presented risks and uncertainty that were ameliorated by the security of the community.

The veneti, land and market gardens

The compact area in which the Veneto market gardeners lived and worked provided physical and social security and a sense of separation from the Anglo-Australian world. The gardens were divided by thick hedges of boxthorn, pine trees or bamboo along tracks that extended away from made roads. Accommodation on the landholdings varied from an early tent dwelling, a former cowshed and iron and wooden shacks that could be dismantled and moved easily, to a large colonial villa acquired by Gino Berno, one of the Veneto market gardeners, during the war. One first-generation woman, Adele (Lina) Bordin, arrived in 1930 to join her husband, Gelindo Rossetto, and found her accommodation was a tent: ‘[A] hovel—bare and empty—with no gas, no firewood, no electricity and no floor.’¹³

Plate 3.4: Gelindo, Lina and Romeo Rossetto, Lockleys, c. 1932

Source: Photo supplied by the Rossetto family.

Secondo Tonellato solved the problem of housing his wife and five children when they arrived in 1935 by purchasing a disused railway carriage from the South Australian Railways and transporting it to his land at Lockleys. The carriage, or vagòn, was a significant landmark in the Veneto community and all narrators recalled its presence near Frogmore Road. The story told most often about its origins was that it was built as the royal train for the tour in 1927 of the Duke and Duchess of York (who later became King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). One of Secondo Tonellato’s granddaughters, Sandra Conci nee Santin, remembered what her mother, Rosina, had told her about coming to live in Adelaide in 1935 as a child:

I know that … she was 12 when she came out. Nonno came out about, I reckon he came out seven or eight years before she did and then she came here and that’s when they moved into that carriage because that was the house, he brought out all his family then in 1935.¹⁴

Plate 3.5: The Tonellato vagòn, Lockleys, 1935

Note: The photo was taken when Elisabetta joined her husband with their five children in June of that year.

Source: Photo supplied by Assunta Giovannini nee Tonellato.

Close occupationally based communities separated from the Anglo-Australian population were evident in other Italian migrant group settlements between the wars. For example, a small group of Sicilian migrants leased market gardens near Geelong in Victoria between 1929 and 1949 although there were just six families who had come from the same village.¹⁵ Settlements of veneti existed on farms in the Griffith area in the Riverina of New South Wales and in the Gippsland region of Victoria, where they were more scattered and included the self-employed and wage-earners.¹⁶ The Molfettese fishers in the regional South Australian city of Port Pirie developed a strong community and occupational identity from the late nineteenth century.¹⁷ At Lockleys, the network developed by the market gardeners was a more opportunistic endeavour than the communities formed through chain migration because the Veneto group established themselves without relying on existing social structures.

A group of market gardeners from north-eastern Bulgaria who had arrived in Adelaide in 1928 began leasing land in the early 1930s at Fulham Gardens, about 2 kilometres west of Lockleys.¹⁸ Like the veneti, the men who had been agricultural workers in Bulgaria created a close community and worked hard to establish their gardens before they brought their wives and families to join them, or they married once in Adelaide. In contrast to the Veneto market gardeners, who created their paese at Lockleys without a physical hub, the Bulgarian group at Fulham Gardens built a centre and a church for the wider Bulgarian community in the late 1940s.¹⁹

Although there were other market gardeners in the locality, the Veneto families formed a physically and socially separate paese at Lockleys. The Anglo-Australian market gardens were mostly on the periphery of the Veneto settlement and one Anglo-Australian narrator, Rae Ballantyne, recalled that his family had no significant interactions with the Italians. He described the area: ‘There was isolated houses here and there … so there was no social life, I suppose, nothing at all.’²⁰ In contrast, the sons and daughters of the first generation of Veneto market gardeners remember the composition of the area differently and identify families in their own community. For example, Romano Marchioro, a second-generation son born in 1942, distinguished other Veneto families, adding details about their kinship and emphasising that the Anglo-Australians were the exception in the area: ‘Well, there was the Tonellatos, there was the Piovesans and the Ballestrins and Zalunardo; he was my godfather. They were all in that area … all Italians. There weren’t too many Australians around there.’²¹

The 1.5- and second-generation narrators spoke about the significance of land for their parents. From a distance of 70 years, they provided precise details about the family market gardens, recalling locations, physical features such as the River Torrens, bridges, positions of roads and tracks, ownership of land, boundaries of boxthorn and bamboo, varieties of crops, numbers of glasshouses and the few houses in comparison with open and farmed land. In an aerial photo from the late 1950s, the narrators identified at least 40 individual family farms, including those owned by Anglo-Australians, Chinese, Veneto and other Italians. The nucleus of Veneto families was always their starting point when viewing photos and maps of the area.

Map 3.1: Map drawn by Lino Ballestrin showing Veneto and other market gardeners in the Lockleys area, 1940s–50s

Note: Some families are not identified west of Frogmore Road between Grange Road and Valetta Road.

Source: Map drawn and supplied by Lino Ballestrin.

Occupying land as market gardeners

Before World War II, most Veneto market gardeners had engaged with the land tenure system in South Australia as lessees. The first generation demonstrated agency and competency as they engaged with the administrative structures in Australia as migrants who had experienced mobility and insecurity in their first years after arrival.²² The case of the first Veneto man to own land for a market garden illustrates the challenge of achieving ownership in the 1940s for someone born in Italy. It also demonstrates the advantage of naturalisation in facilitating access to Australian law and acting on behalf of kin to purchase land during the war years. However, the advantage abated when the government restricted the rights of Italians after Italy entered the war with Germany.

An old colonial family, the Butterfields, had owned large landholdings in what was known as the Lockleys and Fulham localities along the River Torrens. In 1942, a Butterfield son sold 6.5 hectares at St James Park (also known as Lockleys) to Gino Berno, who was naturalised in 1938. Gino’s cousins Alberto and Pietro Berno had worked as farm labourers on the Butterfield property since about 1930 but were prevented from buying land because they were not naturalised at the time the property was offered for sale. The brothers had first applied to be naturalised in September 1939 and were notified 13 months later that their applications were unsuccessful. When they reapplied in 1944, their applications were rejected on the grounds that the war prohibited the naturalisation of enemy aliens.²³ It is not clear why the brothers did not take the step to become naturalised before 1939 or how the decision was made to sell the property to Gino.

Gino Berno’s purchase of land was an extraordinary step for a contadino whose family experience of land occupation in Italy had been constrained by the mezzadria system, which did not permit landownership. It was also remarkable because the purchase was an example of the resourcefulness of the Berno brothers, Alberto and Pietro, who had become involved in negotiations that tested the rigorous wartime regulations. The land transaction became the subject of an extensive investigation by the Attorney-General’s Department because of a potential breach of the National Security (Land Transfer) Regulations of 1940, which severely restricted the right of ‘enemy aliens’ and even naturalised people of enemy origin to acquire land during the war. The Berno brothers were suspected of providing the funds for the sale and Gino was accused of ‘dummying’ for his cousins. Dummying was an offence under the regulations, which were enacted during the war to preclude enemy aliens from entering into land transactions.

The Commonwealth Investigation Branch questioned the exchange of the large sum of £2,100—the price of the land finalised in May 1942. The government investigator was especially suspicious of the ‘mortgage’ of £1,600 that had been handed over in banknotes in a lawyer’s office. In the Anglo-Australian world, large amounts of cash would generally have been handled by banks whereas the veneti were not used to possessing money or entrusting the management of their finances to an institution like a bank. In discussion with members of the 1.5 generation, I learned that even in the 1960s some first-generation veneti in Adelaide negotiated loans within families or within the Veneto community because they trusted paesani more than banks.²⁴ The investigators examined Gino Berno’s financial history to establish the improbability of his capacity to possess such a large sum of money. While Gino signed the contract in April 1942, the government investigation continued until October 1943, even as crops were planted and harvested on the land.²⁵

Antipathy towards Italians in the wider community influenced the results of the investigation. The negativity was particularly evident in an area like Lockleys where the concentration of Italian market gardeners, including the veneti, had increased during the 1930s. Across Australia, the clustering of small-scale migrant farmers in some suburban areas made them conspicuous in the 1940s.²⁶ By July 1942, public opinion had been inflamed and the Commonwealth attorney-general invited citizens to report unlawful land transfer arrangements by enemy aliens or naturalised persons of enemy origin.²⁷ The public invitation prompted an Anglo-Australian resident of Lockleys to write a detailed letter outlining a case against Italians taking over the area. The resident had previously worked land that Gino Berno purchased and had been required to relinquish the dwelling in which he had lived because of the transaction.

The complainant set out his objections, accusing the ‘unnaturalised enemy aliens’—the Berno brothers—of having illegally acquired the land and a large house on the property and describing what he saw as ‘this Italian menace, they are allowed to build wood & iron shacks and live in filthy conditions’. The letter alleged that the Italians were not paying taxes and called for action on behalf of ‘our Australian boys away fighting for their country’, whom he believed should have had preference in matters of land purchases.²⁸ The lengthy investigation of Gino Berno and his cousins extended to other members of the Veneto community who were questioned about their relationships and knowledge of the financial position of the extended Berno family. However, the testimonies of three Veneto witnesses in the community were dismissed as worthless. Ultimately, the Attorney-General’s Department found that it could not prove a breach of regulations and the case against Gino Berno and his cousins was not upheld.²⁹ Nonetheless, the allegation of dummying remained an obstacle when the brothers endeavoured to apply for naturalisation in later years.

Disputes about ownership of property also impacted another family in the Veneto group who had applied to lease part of the same property acquired by Gino Berno. Giovanni Santin, a member of the first generation, had moved to Adelaide from country South Australia with his wife and four children in 1941 and leased land across the River Torrens from the Veneto market gardeners for two years. When Giovanni was naturalised in December 1939, his wife, Costantina, and their children were also deemed British subjects. In May 1943, Giovanni applied to lease a section of land from Gino Berno on Valetta Road. However, the application was the subject of another investigation into a possible breach of the National Security (Land Transfer) Regulations because Gino Berno did not have the authority to allow a person to sublet land without permission from the attorney-general. Giovanni’s ambition to lease land close to other veneti demonstrated his belief that he might later be able to purchase a property large enough to work with his three sons.

The extensive investigation into the circumstances of the subletting of land involved interrogation of Giovanni Santin and his three sons, who had been observed working the 1.4 hectares they had applied to lease. The absence of a formal contract between Gino Berno and Giovanni Santin was regarded as a problem. The authorities would not have been satisfied with verbal agreements about leases and land ownership because the Torrens title system had been adopted in South Australia to identify ownership and transfers of ownership on a certificate of title, avoid disputes over proprietorship and ensure equitable taxation arrangements. The Berno–Santin agreement would have been based on understandings common in the Veneto region. Verbal agreements were considered binding and sound and there was no belief in formal legal contracts.

During the investigation, one of the Santin sons claimed his right to lease and work the land as a ‘British subject’ because he had been called up and released by the army to cultivate vegetables during the war.³⁰ The investigation officers highlighted the ‘duplicity’ and ‘unreliability’ of the Veneto market gardeners involved in the case; however, after a considerable period, the lease was finally approved. The six members of the Santin family and Gino Berno and his wife and their two sons jointly occupied the large house on the property on Valetta Road. In 1950 the Santin family bought their own, larger property on Frogmore Road within 2 kilometres of the Berno land.

Denial of an application to own land

In a different case, the attorney-general refused an application to purchase land made by a Veneto market gardener who had been naturalised in 1939. After leasing 1.8 hectares in the Lockleys area for several years, Gelindo Rossetto and his wife, Lina, aspired to own their own land for market gardens. In 1942, Gelindo applied to purchase 3.6 hectares on Frogmore Road, near other veneti. Gelindo was able to cover the asking price of £2,600 with a 10 per cent deposit and stated that he could make a cash payment of £1,600, which included a loan of £220 from his brother-in-law. The report that informed Gelindo of the rejection of his application implied criticism of the verbal agreement.³¹ Gelindo’s income from both his mica mine and his market garden was robust and would have satisfied the requirements of repaying the bank loan.

Plate 3.6: Gelindo Rossetto’s letter to the attorney-general requesting early consideration of his application to buy land for his market garden, 13 August 1942

Source: Investigation Branch, Central Office, Melbourne and Canberra, A12217, Alien Land Transfer files, single number with L [Land] prefix, 01 Jan 1940 – 31 Dec 1946, L6307, Gelindo Rossetto—purchase of property Findon, SA, 1942–1942, NAA, 23.

Gelindo’s experience as part-owner of a mica mine gave him the confidence to request a speedy response to his application to purchase the land at Lockleys. His determination is evident in two letters he wrote to the Commonwealth attorney-general. Gelindo requested that the application be approved quickly because the lease on the property he was working was due to expire and he needed to relocate his glasshouses to the new property in time for the tomato-growing season.³² In the letter dated the same day as his application, Gelindo explained the imperative to move his glasshouses.

Gelindo’s plan to set up his new market garden included employing his youngest brother and another Italian man to work the land while he worked in the Northern Territory at his mica mine—a labour model that echoed customary structures of co-working land in the Veneto region. His absence from the market gardens suggests a parallel to the role of the padrone, who owned land and contracted contadini to work for him in return for half the produce under the mezzadria system. Although he received considerable income from the mica mine, Gelindo wanted to keep his connection to working the land by purchasing and cultivating a market garden when he returned to Adelaide for seasonal tasks such as planting and harvesting. In addition to imitating the role of a padrone, Gelindo was also reshaping the Veneto’s traditional seasonal employment model.

In November 1942, after an inquiry by the Investigation Branch in Adelaide, the Attorney-General’s Department notified Gelindo Rossetto that the contract of sale had been refused under the National Security (Land Transfer) Regulations.³³ While the Investigation Branch conceded that there was no evidence to suggest that Gelindo was disloyal or of poor character, the decision rested on three facts that adversely affected his ambitions. First, in 1942, the war was a factor because the Australian Army was engaged in combat with the Japanese Army in New Guinea and fear in the community had increased since the bombing of Darwin earlier that year. Second, the land Gelindo aspired to purchase on Frogmore Road, close to a bridge, was classified as being in a strategic frontline military location should an invasion occur, and the report acknowledged that plans had been formed to remove the Italian families in such circumstances. Finally, four Anglo-Australian market gardeners in the area who belonged to the local Lockleys sub-branch of the Returned Soldiers League and were soldier–settlers campaigned against the right of Italians to purchase land and wrote testimonies outlining strong concerns about the enemy aliens. Two statements also referred to the Bulgarian market gardeners in the district, implying that Bulgarians were also a threat to Anglo-Australian property owners.³⁴

The campaign against enemy aliens mirrored the hostile views of World War I veterans in other parts of Australia where southern European communities had established market gardens or farms close to soldier settlers and/or had bought the land that soldier settlers abandoned as unviable.³⁵ The four local soldier-settler market gardeners condemned the large number of Italians, whose ‘behaviour at all times was most offensive’ and who could potentially sabotage local bridges and munitions factories in the event of an invasion. The returned soldiers portrayed the area as an ‘Italian colony’ where previously there had been only British residents.

The statements of the soldier settlers echoed contemporary public opinion built on racism, wartime insecurity, fear and nostalgia for an Anglo-Australia already changed by the presence of southern European migrants. The inspector in the Adelaide office of the attorney-general pointed out errors in the statements, such as the gross overestimation of the number of Italians in the area, and confirmed that Italians had applied for land transfer in many locations across the state. Yet, the report also contained opinions that mirrored prevailing anti-Italian sentiments. It included details about the lives of the Veneto market gardeners, such as their perceived low living standards.³⁶ It also censured their long working hours—practices that were seen to threaten Anglo-Australian employees. The fears of the petitioners proved sufficient for the Australian Government to deny the application and Gelindo and Lina continued to lease the small landholding for their market garden. Gelindo maintained his involvement in the mica mine in the Northern Territory—another version of asset ownership in Australia.

Land and minerals in the Northern Territory

The Veneto tradition of seasonal and ‘out’ work provided the model for two Veneto men to regularly leave their market gardens in the care of their wives, other kin and neighbours while they worked on mica mines in the Northern Territory. Although they did not have mining experience, the desire for land, security of employment and income motivated many Veneto men to mine for mica in the remote desert.³⁷ The mines were about 1,700 kilometres north of Adelaide and 200 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. Numbers of veneti in the wider community in Adelaide worked in the mica mines, including several married couples who lived and raised children there. Although Gelindo Rossetto and Angelo Piovesan came from different villages in the Veneto, they had become close friends through the market-gardener group at Lockleys and their bonds were strengthened when Angelo became godparent to one of Gelindo’s sons.

In the mid- to late-1930s, after leasing land for market gardens and settling their wives and small children on their properties in Lockleys, the two men saw a financial opportunity to own shares in a mica mine. Dino Piovesan explained his father’s reason for working in the mine:

Dad went up to the mica mines for a short time, to get some money, to earn a little bit better living because the market garden was only just set up and wasn’t producing much income.³⁸

The financial return from mining was particularly lucrative during the war because mica was used in electronic equipment, thermal insulation and airplane instruments. It had been mined in small-scale operations from the late nineteenth century in the Harts Range and Italian miners, many from the north of Italy, were a large presence on the mica fields, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s.³⁹ The extended Veneto market-gardener community was involved in the mica treatment chain, from its extraction, hand-cutting and transportation to Adelaide, where it was processed in a factory owned by a Veneto man who employed many young Veneto women in the 1940s and 1950s.

Plate 3.7: Gelindo Rossetto at the Spotted Tiger mica mine, Northern Territory, 1930s

Source: Photo supplied by the Rossetto family.

The prospects for attaining sistemazione were more likely for market gardeners than for miners because the cultivation of vegetables continued to meet demand and was undertaken within a stable community environment, whereas mica mining was dependent on specialised demand and involved working in a remote location with the emotional cost of separation from family.⁴⁰ Gelindo and Angelo accepted the isolation and demanding work in the mines and managed cycles of planting and harvesting in their market gardens with visits and assistance from family members, paesani and paid workers.

The impact of distance and separation was a challenge for miners when a family experienced difficult circumstances in Adelaide, as reported by Gelindo’s daughter Lena, who recalled a crisis:

Then my Dad went up to the Harts Ranges, he was away for a few years, but he used to come home now and then, but the aeroplane used to take about 12 hours from Alice Springs to Adelaide … As a matter of fact, when my eldest brother died on the 1st of November [1938], my Dad was still in Harts Ranges, and it was hard to get messages to him. Somehow or other, somebody from Alice Springs had to go to the mine and tell Dad that my brother was dying. He tried to get back to Adelaide before he died, and the doctors in the Children’s Hospital kept him on oxygen to keep him alive until my Dad arrived back.⁴¹

Gelindo Rossetto and Angelo Piovesan were naturalised in the late 1930s and, although they had mined at Harts Range before the war, they were initially prohibited from holding a miner’s right because of the National Security (Land Transfer) Regulations, which also applied to naturalised enemy aliens. In 1941, permission was granted to Italians and other enemy aliens to take up mining rights, probably to meet the increased demand for mica during the war. In that year, Gelindo and Angelo reapplied for mining approval with two other Italians and an Anglo-Australian man; the application was approved by the Investigation Branch in Canberra. Gelindo’s application to purchase land for a market garden was refused in 1943 when he used the same administrative processes associated with the National Security (Land Transfer) Regulations. The difference in the two applications related to the use of land: the mine was producing mica that was an essential commodity required for the war effort. The cultivation of fresh vegetables, particularly during the war years, was also essential; however, the enemy alien threat to homogeneity was viewed as a greater risk in the urban area of a state capital and partially explains the government’s drive to regulate land transfers to Italian migrants. While Gelindo did not return to full-time work in the garden, Angelo returned and worked the market garden at Lockleys with his wife and sons until his sudden death in 1949.

From leaseholds to ownership

From the 1930s, the veneti leased plots of land mostly under annual agreements. Some narrators recalled a regular childhood task of taking the rent money to a landowner at Lockleys on behalf of their parents. The image of the child delivering rent to landowners echoes the padrone–contadino relationship within the mezzadria system in the Veneto. It was never possible for a contadino family in the mezzadria structure to earn an income from the tenancy arrangements since it was a life of subsistence. However, as tenants in Adelaide, they could earn an income from the land they leased and were able to improve and increase production and accumulate funds to eventually purchase their properties.

Ownership of land for the Veneto market gardeners was a definite step towards stability, permanency and the formation of identity in Australia.⁴² The turning point for the Veneto market gardeners at Lockleys occurred after the war when the regulations restricting enemy aliens from purchasing land were reversed and families moved from being tenants to owners.⁴³ Acquiring a certificate of title demonstrated ownership of freehold land in perpetuity—a significant goal for the migrant families. In his interview, Bruno Piovesan used the example of his family to interpret the process of determining ownership of property. He traced transactions from leaseholds in the 1930s to the time when the first-generation, and some of the 1.5-generation, families bought their land, to the 1960s, when landowners began to subdivide their land:

In those years the occupiers of the land had first option to purchase. Of course, we had five acres [2 hectares] and that was it; other people had twelve acres [5 hectares]. But when they come to survey it with proper means, with better means than they had in those years [when land was subdivided for leaseholds], people finished up with thirteen, fourteen acres [5.2–5.7 hectares] for their ten acres [4 hectares]. We finished up with about six acres for five acres [2.5 for 2 hectares] … But [it] didn’t make any difference anyway, in those years, you occupied that area and that’s what you kept.⁴⁴

Adapting contadino traditions of landownership

In the 1950s the Veneto families bought land using contractual partnership arrangements that differed markedly from the patriarchal structures of the contadino working households. In the Veneto region, the male head was dominant in all aspects of the household, in the fields, in financial matters and in decisions about labour and crops. Adult men were under the authority of their fathers in roles of ‘superordination–subordination’ and if a family lived on and worked the land, sons were unable to ‘own’ it until the death of their father.⁴⁵ In the Tonellato family, Secondo and his four sons had worked together on leased land at Lockleys for several years until the older ones married and established their own market gardens. As married men, they acquired land separately, which they worked with their wives. Albert explained the circumstances that enabled him and his wife, Mary, to purchase land:

They [the two younger brothers] started to work with Dad. Still, me and my older brother went out; not too far out … And then [in] 1952 or ’51 we bought land on Findon Road. With no money, never had any money. Those years, friends were friends. You asked them, can they lend you a bit of money, if they had them, they’ll give it to you. And they did.⁴⁶

Albert illustrated the familial and paesani bonds and trust shared in the market-gardener community that made it possible to borrow money and become a landowner. Albert used ‘we’ to refer to himself and Mary, who worked with him on their market garden, although he was identified as the proprietor of the 2 hectares they purchased in 1950.⁴⁷

By the early 1950s, Secondo’s two youngest sons, Lino and Nano, joined him in a partnership formally written into the certificate of title as ‘tenants in common’. They signed the legal documentation for landownership as equal partners. In a further extension of the benefits of land tenure in Australia, the father and two sons sold their first property to another Italian market gardener and purchased a larger holding.⁴⁸ Not only were they landowners, but they also became vendors, creating a structure to develop a partnership between generations in a family and transforming their identity as migrants into that of capable business operators.

Unlike the patriarchal regulation and fragmentation of land among contadini in the Veneto, the market-gardener group engaged with land tenure. Some families with adequate landholdings were able to subdivide and gift a parcel to their adult children when they married. Johnny Marchioro observed this practice: ‘They took pieces of the land that their fathers were working, they started working it for themselves, so that’s how big it was.’⁴⁹

Exceptions to the configuration of landownership demonstrate the adaptations made by the first generation of Veneto migrants as they purchased land after the war. Isidoro Ballestrin bought land in 1953 with his brother and a friend as ‘tenants in common’. The case of Vittorio Marchioro and his sister-in-law, Margherita Marchioro, defied the customs of Veneto family relationships and gender hierarchies. They had first formed a partnership to lease and work the land together at Lockleys in the mid-1930s because the ill health of Margherita’s husband prevented him from working in glasshouses and he became a wage-earner. Margherita had a strong drive to work the land and, in 1937, when Vittorio married and brought his wife, Angelina, from Italy to the market garden, the arrangements for working the land continued. When Margherita was widowed in 1948, she bought a property with Vittorio as ‘tenants in common’ with a loan from an Italian man who owned a grocery shop in the city.⁵⁰

A woman signing a contract with her brother-in-law challenged the strict gendered relationships of a Veneto contadino household and transgressed the patriarchal structures of landownership that prohibited women in the Veneto region from being involved in property or financial matters. Although similar conventions about male ownership of property applied to women in the Anglo-Australian culture at the time, the incidence within the Veneto tradition of a sister-in-law and brother-in-law establishing a partnership would have been unimaginable. The partnership of the Marchioro in-laws was yet another adaptation of the Veneto model of landownership: two women and one man owned land and worked together on the same market garden.

The partnership between the in-laws allowed Margherita to achieve her ambition to live and work as a market gardener in Adelaide. Her ability to earn an income as a widow and support her three daughters placed her in a comfortable economic position and enabled her to build what her daughter Connie called ‘her dream home’.⁵¹ The market gardens provided opportunities to modify the traditional roles of women and men. The Veneto group gained benefits from the migration experience, including freedom from some gendered and paternalistic constraints on family relationships as well as the opportunity to exploit the possibilities of owning land in Australia through legal contracts. The examples of the new contractual arrangements within families and extended families for buying (and selling) land provide evidence of the agency of the Veneto market gardeners to further their aspirations to achieve sistemazione. The first and 1.5 generations demonstrated their capacity to use legal and administrative structures as a ‘transcultural strategy for orientation and emplacement’ in Australia.⁵²

The turn from patriarchal control to new parallel arrangements within the family is illustrated in a further example of transforming gender relations in land ownership. In 1953, cousins Giuseppe and Ermenegildo Ballestrin bought 8 hectares of land on the River Torrens at Flinders Park. They had leased the property from the early 1940s and chose to purchase it as ‘tenants in common’. In 1954, Ermenegildo returned to Italy to marry and brought his wife, Norina, to Adelaide. At that time, Giuseppe had been married for 20 years to Cesira and they had three children. Both women worked with their husbands on the market gardens cultivating large crops of celery and glasshouse tomatoes. In 1955, the two men applied to change the land title certificate to include the names of their wives on the documentation. They were the only couples among the Veneto market gardeners who included their wives’ names as joint legal owners of the property. While the reason for adding the women’s names is not known, it is evidence of Veneto men readjusting the priorities of male inheritance and control of land from the Veneto region to their new circumstances at Lockleys.

The desire to achieve sistemazione was a feature of the lives of Veneto families. It was a material aspiration that the market-gardener husbands and wives worked hard to attain through owning the land they worked at Lockleys. The goal of ownership was likely motivated by their contadino heritage and their strong attachment to the land.⁵³ Through ownership of property including a house, they achieved the material and symbolic aspects of sistemazione. It was a pursuit that also involved the participation of children in first-generation families.

Plate 3.8: The Ballestrin families preparing celery for sale at market, Flinders Park, late 1950s

Note: From left to right: Celso Tieppo, Cesira, Giuseppe and Lino Ballestrin, Primo Berti and Ermenegildo Ballestrin.

Source: Photo supplied by Ric and Angelo Ballestrin.

Children’s contributions to purchasing land

Those families whose children had arrived with their mothers in the 1930s were advantaged in the pursuit of land ownership because they contributed to the labour unit in the early years of establishing the market gardens. Some in the 1.5 generation worked with their parents, which created a pathway for the children to progress to become owners of their own market gardens. Men in the first generation who married after arrival in Australia had to wait until their children were old enough to add them to the family workforce. Sons recalled that they were not paid for their labour and contrasted their experience with their peers in the broader Italian community who worked for wages and had more independence from their family. The two Anglo-Australian men interviewed for the project spoke of similar circumstances: the dependence on the family work unit and its impact on young people, who were expected to give their labour to the market garden. In some Veneto households at Lockleys, the imperative to own land required children to labour in the market gardens and some daughters were required to become wage-earners to contribute to the family project.

The Zampin family

The last Veneto couple to purchase land in the 1950s was Silvano and Amelia Zampin, who had nine children. Although they had been unable to buy the property they had leased since the 1930s, the Zampins bought 1 hectare close to the Lockleys area in 1954 when their youngest, the only son, was a baby. Silvano was naturalised in 1937 and the imperative to support his large family had taken precedence over the purchase of property. In contrast to other families in the Veneto community who spoke dialect in the home, the language in the Zampin household was English.

In interviews, six Zampin daughters presented memories of their father’s role in their family life and culture, which limited their secondary education to the compulsory years. The focus for many years was ownership of land. The daughters stated that their wages contributed to the family’s endeavour to purchase land. The eldest daughter, Milva, did not complete primary school and her labour was divided between assisting her mother with the care of the younger children and working with her father in the garden. When old enough to legally enter the workforce through employment, in the Brazzale mica factory in Adelaide, Milva contributed her wages to the family fund. She recalled her parents’ achievement when they finally purchased their land and home, reporting ‘they were in heaven’. However, Milva’s priorities were different, and she looked back at the imperative to contribute to the family goal, which was attained after she had married: ‘We more or less put our money in the bank every week or Dad put our money in the bank to buy that land and I didn’t reap the benefit of it.’⁵⁴

Milva’s sisters left school at 14, the legal age at which compulsory education ended, and handed their wages to their father. He put aside a proportion to pay for their weddings. The fourth daughter, Christine, reflected on the family custom of completing only the compulsory years of schooling:

Dad said: ‘When you’re 14, you have to leave school.’ So, we just did what Dad said and didn’t complain about it because my other sisters had to leave at fourteen, so I just went along with it as well. You had no choice.⁵⁵

Plate 3.9: The Zampin family, Lockleys, c. 1954

Note: Silvano is holding Peter.

Source: Photo supplied by the Zampin family.

It was not unusual for the ambitions of children in migrant families to be subsumed by the material goals of their parents.⁵⁶

The values that Silvano brought with him from the Veneto underlined his expectations for life in Australia: work on, and ownership of, land; independence; family life; stability; and a future for his children. While Silvano married outside the Veneto community, his reliance on patriarchal structures and contadino family relationships saw him enlist his children in the plan for land ownership. The Zampins’ son, Peter, died in an accident at the age of 18—a sad event that closed the opportunity for continuity of the market garden in the next generation.

The first generation of the veneti pursued the contadino desire to cultivate land in the paese at Lockleys. The early initiative to lease landholdings, develop knowledge of methods of cultivation and crop selection enabled them to enter the market economy, work hard and later achieve prosperity when there was demand for land for housing. The Veneto market gardeners achieved sistemazione for their families through acquiring and working land. The sense of security and belonging on the land characterised the paese at Lockleys.

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1. 1 Lino Tonellato, OH 872/10, 16 July 2010: 14.

2. 2 Pascoe, ‘Place and Community’, 92–93; Jenkins, Power of the Land, 21–23.

3. 3 See Lancaster Jones, ‘Ethnic Concentration and Assimilation’.

4. 4 Huber, From Pasta to Pavlova, 19–21.

5. 5 One other family, the Santins, formed a three-generation arrangement on Frogmore Road. Three brothers and their wives worked together on the market garden. Two couples and their families shared a large house with the elderly Santin parents.

6. 6 Egidio Ballestrin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/15, 6 June 2011: 1–2.

7. 7 Aldo Rossetto interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/16, 4 July 2011: 9.

8. 8 Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 62.

9. 9 Sharyn Beth Clarke, ‘The Creation of the Torrens: A History of Adelaide’s River to 1881’ (MA thesis, University of Adelaide, 2005).

10. 10 South Australian Certificate of Title, Vol. 585, Folio 2, 1894, Property Title Registry, Land Services SA, Adelaide.

11. 11 Advertiser, [Adelaide], 5 April 1918: 9. In his obituary, Thomas Skuse was reported to have begun the practice and eventually had ‘acres of tomatoes under glass’. Tomatoes became one of the most prevalent crops in market gardens by the time of his death at 70 years of age.

12. 12 Anon., ‘C’era una volta una famiglia che viveva in un vagone … = Once upon a Time There Was a Family Who Lived in a Railway Carriage …’, Il Messaggero, [Rome], June 1986: 17 (translated by Graziella Ledda).

13. 13 Rossetto, Rain in These Shoes, 68.

14. 14 Sandra Conci nee Santin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/47, 25 August 2018: 4.

15. 15 Maria Mantello, Now and Then: The Sicilian Farming Community at Werribee Park, 1929–1949 (Melbourne: Globe Press, 1986).

16. 16 Huber, From Pasta to Pavlova; Davine, Vegnimo da Conco Ma Simo Veneti.

17. 17 Bromley, ‘The Italians of Port Pirie’; Corrieri, Italians of Port Pirie.

18. 18 Kristen Wilkins, Bulgarian Migration and Market Gardens in the Western Suburbs, Report submitted to the City of Charles Sturt and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2012), 14.

19. 19 The Bulgarians’ Educational and Friendly Society, 50th Jubilee Book (Adelaide: The Bulgarians’ Educational and Friendly Society Incorporated, 2000).

20. 20 Rae Ballantyne interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/21, 25 August 2012: 15.

21. 21 Romano Marchioro, OH 872/20, 11 June 2012: 4.

22. 22 The example of the initiative to lease land reflects what Ricatti describes as ‘the intensity of migrants’ lives’, demonstrated by the complexity of social and cultural dealings: the experience of nostalgia for what they had known mixed with the challenges of settlement and prospects for the future. Ricatti, Italians in Australia, 3, 10.

23. 23 Department of Immigration Central Office, A435, Class 4 correspondence files relating to naturalisation, 01 Jan 1944 – 31 Dec 1950, 1946/4/510, Berno Vittorio Pietro born 18 July 1909—Italian, 1939–1946; Department of Immigration Central Office, A435, Class 4 correspondence files relating to naturalisation, 01 Jan 1944 – 31 Dec 1950, 1946/4/527, Berno Alberto—born 16 February 1905—Italian 1939–1946, NAA.

24. 24 Maria Rosa Tormena, Personal communication, 11 February 2021.

25. 25 Investigation Branch, Central Office, Melbourne and Canberra, A12217, Alien Land Transfer files, single number with L [Land] prefix, 01 Jan 1940 – 31 Dec 1946, L5555, Gino Felice Berno—purchase of property in Lockleys, SA, 1942–1943, NAA.

26. 26 Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 157–58.

27. 27 A12217, L5555, ‘Gino Felice Berno’, NAA; Advertiser, [Adelaide], 1 August 1942.

28. 28 A12217, L5555, ‘Gino Felice Berno’, NAA, 33–34.

29. 29 ibid., 13–14.

30. 30 Investigation Branch, Central Office, Melbourne and Canberra, A12217, Alien Land Transfer files, single number with L [Land] prefix, 01 Jan 1940 – 31 Dec 1946, L7183, Giovanni Santin—purchase of property Lockleys, SA, 1943–1944, NAA.

31. 31 Investigation Branch, Central Office, Melbourne and Canberra, A12217, Alien Land Transfer files, single number with L [Land] prefix, 01 Jan 1940 – 31 Dec 1946, L6307, Gelindo Rossetto—purchase of property Findon, SA, 1942–1942, NAA, 10–11.

32. 32 ibid., 24–25.

33. 33 ibid., 3.

34. 34 ibid., 10–15.

35. 35 Maria Mantello, ‘Their Words … My Words … Our Words: A Reflection on Oral History with Reference to Italian Immigrant Identity in the Werribee Community during World War 2’ (BA Hons thesis, University of Melbourne, 1981), 34–36; Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, 214–15.

36. 36 This judgement had been promulgated since at least the 1920s when public servant Lyng described Italians as ‘Mediterranean types’ who ‘are backward and the living standard of the people low.’ Lyng cited in Catherine Dewhirst, ‘The “Southern Question” in Australia: The 1925 Royal Commission’s Racialisation of Southern Italians’, Queensland History Journal 22, no. 4 (2014): 316–32, at 326.

37. 37 See Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 64–65; O’Connor, No Need to be Afraid, 125–27; Hugo, ‘Mica Mining at Harts Range’, 156–229.

38. 38 Dino Piovesan, OH 872/17, 23 September 2011: 7.

39. 39 Hugo, ‘Mica Mining at Harts Range’, 92–102.

40. 40 Two women interviewed for the project spoke about their experience of living at the mines with their families. See Armida Mattiazzo nee Biasetto interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/12; and Bruna Rossetto nee Battaglia interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/33.

41. 41 Lena Moscheni nee Rossetto interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/32, 28 August 2014: 18.

42. 42 Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 65; Davine, Vegnimo da Conco Ma Simo Veneti, 49.

43. 43 The first two families, the Rebulis and the Marchioros, were able to purchase land before 1950. See South Australian Certificate of Title, Vol. 1095, Folio 118, 27 February 1947; South Australian Certificate of Title, Volume 1986, Folio 84, 2 July 1948, Property Title Registry, Land Services SA, Adelaide.

44. 44 Bruno Piovesan interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/5, 3 December 2008: 8 [emphasis in original].

45. 45 Huber, From Pasta to Pavlova, 20, 25, 29.

46. 46 Albert Tonellato, OH 872/4, 3 October 2008: 6.

47. 47 South Australian Certificate of Title, Vol. 2100, Folio 188, 1950.

48. 48 South Australian Certificate of Title, Vol. 1991, Folio 123, 1951.

49. 49 Johnny Marchioro, OH 872/1, 28 July 2008: 25.

50. 50 South Australian Certificate of Title, Vol. 1986, Folio 84.

51. 51 Connie Legovich nee Marchioro interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/11, 10 January 2011: 4.

52. 52 Ricatti, Italians in Australia, 132.

53. 53 See Mariastella Pulvirenti, ‘The Morality of Immigrant Home Ownership: Gender, Work and Italian Australian Sistemazione’, Australian Geographer 31, no. 2 (2000): 237–49, doi.org/10.1080/713612245, at 238. Pulvirenti analyses sistemazione in the context of postwar migrants and home ownership.

54. 54 Milva Rebuli nee Zampin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/36, 27 March 2016: 19.

55. 55 Christine Zampin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/42, 26 February 2017: 8.

56. 56 Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 159–60.