8

Transforming the paese

They were all very close to each other. They [the Santin and Tonellato families] came from Caselle which is close to Riese so they probably felt that they were almost like, how we say paesani, which means from the same country [town] and they probably helped each other and that was fairly common, like I can remember the other Italians coming to our place—if a certain job had to be done or when they were doing refurbishing or whatever was needed maybe, in the shed. I can remember many people coming. And probably Dad and Uncle did the same for them. And that’s why they helped each other. Surely being able to live close to each other was one way of keeping contact, of whenever needed. I would have said there was probably, you know, mutual support, lending or whatever, borrowing money or whatever it was … a stage when they were very well settled families, okay. There were young people arriving, I can remember them because we used to have young people coming to our place.

—Remo Berno, 2017¹

Remo Berno was born in Adelaide in 1953 to a Veneto market-gardener family that returned to live in Italy when he was 18 years old. Although more than 40 decades had passed since he left his life in Australia, Remo remembered and identified geographic and relational spaces of the market gardens at Lockleys. In his interview, he recalled a settled community that operated through the proximity of families able to assist with physical tasks associated with the market gardens. He referred to the close interactions and networks that included other forms of reciprocity such as financial and social support within the community that were part of the culture of the paese in his parents’ generation.

In another study of the settlement of Veneto migrants between the wars, such initiatives of care, protection and support were identified as ‘invisible networks’.² Remo remembered that large numbers of migrants who arrived after the war were supported by networks in the paese at Lockleys. He provided insight into his family’s contribution to supporting paesani in the day-to-day interactions of market gardeners in the Lockleys community. His memories illustrate the value of oral history in enabling narrators to remember the past and find subjective meaning in speaking about it from the present.³

Plate 8.1: Berno siblings: Diana, Remo and Robert, Valetta Road, c. 1964

Source: Photo supplied by the Berno family.

The first generation of men and women adjusted their sense of identity in the paese over time. They modified contadino values and practices associated with the cultivation of land and conceded to changes within the community in response to external influences that led most of the second generation to withdraw from their family market gardens. The boundaries became more permeable as they incorporated the postwar Veneto migrants into their close community. Other transitions occurred after they sold their market gardens. For example, some in the first and 1.5 generations became members of a pan-Italian association in the mid-1960s that provided a range of social events in Adelaide.⁴ When the Veneto Club was established in the western suburbs in 1972, some in the market-gardener group extended their social lives beyond the paese at Lockleys into a wider social framework of Veneto people living in Adelaide. Despite the dislocation from the soil and work of the market gardens, the social network developed by the first generation lived on through the 1.5 generation into the second generation, and now even extends to the third generation in some families.

Denise Doyban nee Santin, a second-generation narrator, acknowledged links back to the ‘old people’, who, in her case, were her Santin and Tonellato grandparents and her own parents. They continued to live on Frogmore Road after their market gardens were sold. Denise also reflected on the continuing community connections in the area that was the paese:

Well, the old people have certainly gone, but the young ones this time around, we still keep in touch with a lot of the ones that are around. Again, most of my relatives still live close to me. Some friends have moved interstate or whatever, but as I said, the older ones have gone, passed on, but we’re still there, and I think there’s still a few, even though they might have moved a few streets away. You know, their children are still there and we still see each other [but] not as often. But I think the community’s still there.⁵

The connections between the paesani in the 1.5 and second generations have been maintained over many years through formal and informal gatherings involving extended families that echo the experience of the first-generation market gardeners when they attended celebrations within the community. People like Remo who were brought up in Adelaide and now live in the Veneto region have maintained transnational connections with relatives and paesani. New strands in the network have emerged through the Veneto market gardeners’ oral history project, which has created opportunities for descendants to document their family history and the life of the community—a narrative that now spans nearly 100 years in Australia. The 1.5 and the second generations participate in a relational or virtual paese in the form of a dedicated website that archives the memories and history of the Veneto market-gardener families and friends at Lockleys. The collective memories of this community illuminate the role of family in the history of migrant groups and provide context and new approaches to historical study and themes to include in national narratives.⁶

The narratives of the first generation of Veneto market gardeners contain the unfolding experience of migration that has evolved beyond the act of emigration from the Veneto to Adelaide made by the first generation in the late 1920s. When members of the first and 1.5 generations made return visits to their places of origin, they gained a broader perspective of their identity as veneti and Veneto Australians.⁷ Many in the second generation have also realised their origins through visits to Italy and satisfied some of the longing to understand their heritage. Most narrators have nurtured their transnational links and claim both Australian and Italian, if not Veneto, identities. The high incidence of narrators citing their Veneto identity reflects an attachment to the place of family origin and the significant role of forebears. For example, Romano Marchioro declared:

I’d class myself as an Italian. Yeah, well, what can you say? They say: ‘Where are you from?’ I say: ‘I was born here but my parents are Italian, that’s what I am, Italian’ … We were brought up speaking Italian and you never lose that, you never forget that, and you never forget if you’ve been there, you never forget your cousins, your aunties, and your uncles. Surely, why not? You’re Italian, you’re Italian.⁸

Romano repeats the word ‘Italian’ and reflects on his connection to his parents and relatives whom he had visited twice in the province of Vicenza as an adult. His repetition of ‘you never forget’ is compelling in emphasising his attachment to his ancestry and the memory preserved in migrant families despite the separation of generations and distance. His links to relatives illustrate his position as a second-generation Italian Australian who wants to maintain living bonds with his parents’ history and relatives in Malo, Italy, although his father had left the family nearly a century ago. Although Romano was second generation, his visits embodied a ‘transformation of identity’, consciousness of his Italian-ness and his wish to actively maintain intergenerational relationships in the Veneto.⁹ Romano’s Aunty Angelina made three visits to her brother and sister-in-law, nephews and their families in Adelaide in the 1970s and 1980s. While she was in Adelaide, she helped her nephew Johnny and his wife, Eleonora, with their market garden at Bolivar—an indication of the continuity of the family identity as contadini.

Interpreting the paese

The distinctive feature of the settlement of the Veneto market gardeners at Lockleys, discussed in previous chapters, was the development of a paese as an intraregional community of veneti in the interwar years rather than a group formed through chain migration. The image of the paese is an element in the foundation story of the Veneto market-gardener community and the first, 1.5- and second-generation accounts offer individual and shared collective memories. The two representatives of the first generation interviewed in 1984 referred to the enduring support of the early community, which Angelina Marchioro expressed simply as: ‘All the time, stick together.’¹⁰ The companionship of paesani—close neighbours with the same cultural origins—and everyday interactions on their market gardens ameliorated the challenges of settlement, which were also a feature in the Veneto settlement in Gippsland in Victoria.¹¹

The physical location of settlement and the formation of community are often elements of analysis in migration studies. At times, the concepts overlap and can be examined simultaneously to understand the processes of migration and settlement. The discussion of location may include references to the development of defined communities separated from the rest of the population as a place of first residence for families who arrive through chain migration.¹² Although the two concepts are similar, it is possible to separate and identify various components of culture that the veneti maintained and the adaptations they made to inhabit and shape their network of relationships and physical place of settlement. The families at Lockleys were attached to their paese in two ways: physically and relationally, through their community interconnections. Both attachments were emotional but also practical and created opportunities for sistemazione and the formation of the Veneto market-gardener identity at Lockleys.

The Italian language has a word that incorporates the two elements of attachment to place, encompassing both meanings: campanilismo. It is used to describe a physical locality and a sense of belonging to a community manifested in the emotional attachment a man or woman has to his or her home village through the tall church belltower, or campanile, that dominates the sightline in a paese.¹³ Adjoining the church, the tower is usually in a central location on the piazza (village square). The campanile is also a feature because the sound of its bell can be heard throughout the village, calling people to religious ceremonies or to mark significant events such as a funeral. It is a personal and communal reference point for migrants, especially in the first generation and some in the 1.5 generation who retain memories of life in their home village. At Lockleys, the sight lines were dominated by the endless rows of glasshouses, which could be considered a unifying landmark in the landscape—a proxy for the bell tower. Instead of the village piazza, at Lockleys, some packing sheds became community spaces for celebrations. The Veneto group created a distinctive sense of campanilismo and paese at Lockleys as they did not share the single focus of having originated from the same village or comune.

The attachment to Lockleys runs deep into the second generation. For example, Diana Panazzolo nee Santin, from the second generation, explained her memory of the land her family farmed on Frogmore Road for more than 40 years. While the market gardens had been sold more than 30 years before her interview, she reflected on her attachment to the family property and visualised physical features drawn from her memory. She began by explaining the route she took to travel away from her home at the time of the interview and the need to change direction because Frogmore Road was being upgraded:

Frogmore Road’s been closed for quite a few months and like yesterday … I had to go the back streets and I was saying, ‘Oh, this is where the house was. Oh, this is where the tank was. Oh, I’m running over, going over where the well was.’ [Laughs] … I was going down Santin Avenue and I was picturing the glasshouses and the tanks because the road was right on the edge of the property, and now there’s houses and, along here [indicating on a map], I can still see it.¹⁴

After the land was subdivided, the local council allocated names to streets in the area of the market-gardener families. Streets were named after the Santin, Piovesan, Tonellato and Ballestrin families and indicate the location of those families’ market gardens before subdivision.

When the 1.5- and second-generation narrators reminisce about the market gardens that no longer exist, they convey memories of an idealised place associated with security, productive working lives and the companionship of paesani. The narrators’ affection for both place and community at Lockleys is a memory of the paese, bounded and separated from the Anglo-Australian world. The paese was both a place and a community that existed in a particular time with a coherence that allowed the inclusion of some non-veneti. For example, when the Recchi family moved onto their market gardens at Lockleys in the late 1930s, the parents and two children were integrated into the Veneto community as neighbours and friends although they were from another region in Italy.¹⁵ The close relationships were evident when their daughter married in 1956 and chose the daughter of a neighbouring Veneto family as one of her bridesmaids

Map 8.1: Detail of street directory marked with names of some Veneto market gardeners

Note: From left: Piovesan, Santin, Rosalia (Piovesan), Tonellato and Ballestrin.

Source: City of Charles Sturt, 2009, reproduced with permission.

Community: Family and friends

At Lockleys, the Veneto group developed a distinctive coupled identity as veneti and as commercial market gardeners. Daily interactions through shared language, heritage and occupation created familiarity within a secluded community, evolving on the margins of Anglo-Australian society for three successive generations. The proximity of the market gardens facilitated social interactions and created new opportunities in the Lockleys community.

In 1947, Mary Zoanetti, a 1.5-generation woman whose parents came from another northern region of Italy, was 23 years old and living with her widowed mother, both of them working as market gardeners, with Veneto families as neighbours. Mary married Albert Tonellato, a 1.5-generation man whose parents were Veneto market gardeners. In her interview, Mary referred to the physical and social connections between families at Lockleys:

It was a community that we were all close together. His [Albert’s] father used to live next-door to Bruno’s father [Angelo Piovesan] … [I]t was all connected … We were bordering where they had their land and then there was … Ballestrin, Zalunardo, Piovesan, Laio and Tonellato. We were all not far from one another … [P]eople were very helpful then with one another.¹⁶

Mary’s description of the first-generation community—physically close, available to collaborate in everyday social interactions—paints an image of intimacy and a context for understanding the Veneto community, particularly in the first years at Lockleys. Mary was interviewed at the age of 84 and her reference to the community ‘then’ suggests her nostalgia for the connections forged in the past. Another narrator, a postwar migrant from the Veneto and relative of a market gardener, spoke of the challenges of settlement processes for the first generation and explained the necessity to form strong relationships as paesani because their own families were not in Australia.¹⁷

The concept of ‘family’ takes on significance and gains symbolic status in narratives of migration and emphasises the complexities of intergenerational responsibilities to pass on and preserve culture and identity.¹⁸ Many narrators used the word ‘family’ in recalling their parents’ participation in the community of Veneto market gardeners. For example, Milva Rebuli nee Zampin said: ‘You know, it was just … a great big family.’¹⁹ Aida Valentini nee Recchi, whose parents were market gardeners from another Italian region, recalled that her family was considered members of the Veneto community at Lockleys: ‘We got on as one family with all the neighbours that we had around.’²⁰ The attribution of ‘family’ was even more emphatic when Christine Zampin reflected on the way her Irish-Australian mother was respected as a member of the paese at Lockleys: ‘It was really important to her to feel … wanted and belonging to this family of veneti.’²¹

The narrators elevate the idea of family within the paese at Lockleys and their nostalgia supports an interpretation of it as a model of a utopian community. The Veneto community at Lockleys experienced a transformation of the concept of belonging to a family. The first generation had imparted the designation of ‘community as family’ to the 1.5 and second generations in the absence of their own extended family relationships. However, the first generation also expanded the image by being open to new ways of interpreting the construction and meaning of family. They formed nuclear families, integrated godparents as proxy family members, accepted men who married outside the community and incorporated the presence of single men and women within the wider Veneto community.

Changes in the composition of the community that occurred with the arrival of postwar migrants from the Veneto were unforeseen. Some, like the Ballestrins and Bernos in the first generation, sponsored ‘new Australians’ who were paesani—mostly young single men escaping the poverty and hardship brought about by the war. Some families guaranteed accommodation and employment for the arrivals on the market gardens for two years under conditions set by the government. In some cases, the first generation responded to the new arrivals in a manner that echoed the padrone relationship of the Veneto region, where bosses organised the conditions of accommodation and labour. For example, some families erected basic accommodation on their properties and rented out rooms to young men (and some couples) who either worked on the market gardens or were employed in factories in nearby suburbs. The transformation occurred in the paese at Lockleys through the initiatives undertaken by the first generation and some in the 1.5 group to support the sistemazione of the new Veneto migrants.

A new sistemazione

After enduring the challenges of World War II, a new stage in sistemazione occurred in the paese at Lockleys at the same time as postwar social and economic forces and local circumstances impacted on the Veneto market-gardener community. The families incorporated the new migrants as they began to reap the benefits of their hard work, frugality and the security of the community. Market gardeners met the demand for fresh vegetables generated by the increase in the state’s population in the years after the war.²² While they may have had the support and solidarity of the Lockleys paese, those postwar Italian migrants gained employment in factories and interacted with the public domain in Adelaide beyond the safety of the Veneto community. The young migrants benefited from the network of older paesani who had lived in Australia for more than 20 years, although there were gaps in the perspectives of the two cohorts of first-generation Italians. The initiatives of the first generation to support the new arrivals also brought some assessments of the relative ease postwar migrants enjoyed in adapting to life in Australia. The older Veneto market gardeners provided support for the new arrivals—a resource that had not been available to them in the 1920s. Vittorio Marchioro compared the simpler and accelerated path to economic success for the postwar migrants with the situation that he and his generation had faced in the interwar years:

Before the war, the gardens, work and work and no money too. Start after the war, start better, price got better and go up … All different now than before. Now, everybody got a car, before nobody got a car, nothing, take a horse and trolley to market … The people … coming after the war, come here, started work, making money quick.²³

While Vittorio acknowledged the postwar economic growth that created conditions for increased prosperity, his observations suggested some reservations about the differences in the opportunities for the two generations of Veneto migrants. He observed that postwar Italians obtained employment, purchased houses and cars and established themselves within a few years of arrival. The younger generation achieved sistemazione much more quickly than those who had arrived in the late 1920s in a difficult economic and political period in Australian history.

As the market gardeners extended the social boundaries of their paese to the Veneto migrants who arrived after the war, the older veneti confronted what it meant to ‘belong’ to the community at Lockleys. There were some limits to the inclusion of others, at least for one first-generation man, Isidoro Ballestrin, who held Sunday afternoon gatherings for Veneto men in his packing shed. Isidoro had hosted the events for some time and his guests had contributed to the cost of a keg of beer. Because of the limited opportunities for the new migrants to socialise, numbers escalated and changed the nature of the gatherings. His son Francesco explained the situation:

When Dad was doing it, it was just basic, old friends who were here in those early years. And of course, he dropped it after a while, when it got too big and they started getting people, strangers—although they were Italians—but they weren’t of the group that was here years ago. When it got too big, they decided to drop that, otherwise it would have been a circus then, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t have been a friendly gathering anymore.²⁴

Francesco emphasised that his father’s original aim was for the older generation to share precious leisure time in the company of other men they knew. Others also offered social occasions such as bocce games on courts built on their market gardens and a range of Veneto men, from the first generation to the newly arrived, socialised at the weekly events.

The boundaries of the paese also changed after second-generation daughters married young men who had emigrated from the Veneto in the 1950s and 1960s. New transnational connections developed within families at Lockleys. The sense of identity was intensified as the newly formed Australian families made visits to the Veneto region. The women born in Australia met their in-laws and gained a new perspective as members of a transnational Veneto family.

Plate 8.2: Sunday afternoon bocce group, Santin market garden, Frogmore Road, 1962

Source: Oscar Mattiazzo.

Interactions with Anglo-Australians and Chinese

The first generation of Veneto market gardeners did not mix much with the Anglo-Australian market gardeners—a situation confirmed by Rae Ballantyne, the son of a returned serviceman who had been allocated a soldier-settler block after World War I. The Ballantyne property was close to some of the Veneto families. He recalled that his father sold or gave to an Italian man a number of olive trees that grew on his property.²⁵ While Rae was able to name some of the Italian and Veneto families, he acknowledged that his family did not interact much with the Italians especially because of the situation during the war years when Italians were regarded with suspicion: ‘Those days, you knew there was Italians there but you didn’t mix with them much. No, we were not allowed.’²⁶ However, as a child, Rae mixed with the son of Gino and Jean Berno, who lived on Valetta Road.

There were at least three Chinese men, two with families, who had market gardens close to some of the Veneto families. Lina Campagnaro nee Ballestrin, from the second generation, spoke about visiting almost daily Yick Kee, a Chinese man who lived on a small neighbouring property where he had ducks and vegetables that he sold at the market. Lina recalled where he lived:

It was like a shed converted to his kitchen … And he would invite us [in]. My brother would eat everything but I just ate the fried rice … a wonderful sauce and still to this day, I do not know what it was, but it was beautiful.²⁷

Lina said she did not know what vegetables Yick Kee grew: ‘And I don’t think Mum or Dad ever mentioned it.’ It appears that children were more comfortable than their parents interacting with the Chinese market gardeners. This is confirmed by Mel Recchi, from the second generation, who recalled some contact and knew enough about their food traditions to say: ‘Chinese food didn’t suit the Italian food … They were always very friendly and always very, very polite.’²⁸

A different perspective of relationships with Chinese who lived in the area is evident in the example of a first-generation man, Angelo Innocente, who arrived in 1950 from the Veneto. Angelo lived on the southern side of the river where there was a half-case factory owned by a Chinese-Australian man, Harold Dare, who employed Angelo for seven years during which time he was made foreman.²⁹ In a sign of trust and goodwill, Harold lent Angelo money to buy a truck for his new business when Angelo decided to start his own half-case factory. Angelo had his half-case factory for 22 years and served the needs of the Veneto market gardeners at Lockleys.³⁰

Identity and place

Between the wars, the Veneto market-gardener community maintained two geographical reference points that preserved their identity and gave a sense of belonging. The connection to their place of origin in the Veneto region was emotional and nostalgic for many in the first and 1.5 generations, while the market gardens at Lockleys were a site with social and economic significance that marked their sistemazione. In interviews, narrators from the 1.5 generation remembered both places whereas the second-generation women and men identified the second, the market gardens, as the site of the foundation of the family in Australia. The connection between the two ideas of place and community is evident in the narrators’ accounts of the history of their family as migrants from the Veneto or the village from which the family originated. Second-generation narrators who had visited relatives in the Veneto indicated that they felt a deeper sense of belonging to the ancestral paese and had increased their knowledge of family history—a new consciousness of their identity attached to the village of their parents and forebears and a new sense of pride in their Italian ancestry.³¹

Attachment to the ancestral paese

Those who left their paese in the Veneto as children associated the attachment to place with relatives and the family household and expressed a strong emotional relationship. For example, Lino Tonellato, born in 1926, recalled the poignant wrench of leaving the village of Caselle di Altivole, where he had spent the first nine years of his life. With his mother and four siblings, Lino left the village and his relatives in 1935 to join his father in Adelaide:

LT: We were all happy about it but at the same time you don’t like to leave your great-grandfather … I still remember him … my mother’s father. He had to be home by himself.

OH: It must have been hard for your mother to leave him?

LT: Oh, it was very hard.³²

The prospect of being reunited with his father, who had migrated eight years earlier, and reframing family life in Adelaide contrasted with the sense of loss that Lino communicated nearly 80 years after he left Italy. He used the term ‘great-grandfather’ for his grandfather and his memories are part of the family history he embodies in his own role as a great-grandfather. Lino conveyed the experience of migration from a child’s perspective, balanced between the hurt of losing the relationship with his grandfather and the embrace of a new life with both his parents in a new place. He communicated three images of disrupted family relations in his narrative of migration: his sense of loss, the loneliness of his grandfather, who was left behind, and his mother’s sadness about abandoning her elderly father. Lino’s is an intergenerational perspective of male emotions relating to the separation from the intimacy of close relatives in the context of the migration experience.

The second generation imagined the paese and relatives in the Veneto region through the lens of their parents, who maintained links to their place of origin. They acknowledge the language and the contadino customs their parents preserved that created a distinctive identity. For example, Virginia Rodato nee Zampin, born in 1945, reflected on the rhythm of working life in the family household in the Veneto region and compared it with the experience of the market gardeners at Lockleys. She was familiar with both places because she spent extensive periods in the village where her relatives lived and in her husband’s village in the Veneto:

[S]ix days a week was hard work and seven days … most of them would have had a few hours off. That was more or less in them when they were young. And they would go to church or something when they were back in Italy and come back, have their little sleep in the afternoon and probably go and play bowls in the afternoon if they were in Italy or just catch up with their mates, and that was always the atmosphere here, as well. I suppose some didn’t, but those that I knew done that.³³

Virginia linked the working life of the market gardeners at Lockleys to the contadino work ethic in the Veneto region. She identified the tenacity of the men, the domination of work, the allocation of time to religious observance and some leisure activity, which included a siesta on non-working days. She outlined the weekly routine for men in the first generation like her father, who kept some land and continued to work a glasshouse after selling their market garden.

Plate 8.3: Silvano Zampin tending tomatoes, Findon, late 1970s

Source: Photo supplied by the Zampin family.

Links to origins: Visits to the Veneto

Intermediaries facilitated connections between the first generation at Lockleys and their families in the Veneto when travel was infrequent and took several weeks by ship. The people who returned to Italy visited their own families and met with the relatives of other market gardeners and members of the wider Veneto community in Adelaide, reporting back after they returned to Lockleys. Virginia Rodato nee Zampin, a second-generation woman who married a postwar Veneto man, explained how her father preserved his connections with his relatives:

Well, in those days there was a lot of immigrants out here as well and a lot of times, they would bring him a letter and he would have the latest news, of course. And then, other than that, he would himself write letters and that would take, those days, about a month to arrive there. But, in the meantime, perhaps someone had went to Italy and they came back and they said, ‘I’ve been to see your family. They look good. And your mother, this, or your father, that.’ Or, ‘They had a good harvest this year.’³⁴

Virginia’s reference to ‘out here’ indicates the close association between ‘here’ as Adelaide and ‘there’ as the village of Riese Pio X, her father’s hometown. The use of the two reference points is similar to the way British people who migrated to Australia considered England as the orientation for the colonial country. Virginia captures the intimate connections in families separated by distance and time although they were able to maintain membership of both households, in their ancestral paese and in the home they created with their family in Adelaide. As Virginia indicates, when members of the paese at Lockleys visited the Veneto, they assumed roles as conduits between paesani in both locations.

Transnational voices and images

Another second-generation narrator outlined her father’s active role in strengthening links between veneti in Adelaide and their families in the Veneto. Romildo Santin was a member of the 1.5 generation and returned briefly to his village of Caselle di Altivole to get married in 1950. Twelve years later, Romildo and his wife, Clara, and their two eldest children made their first visit together to Italy, where they stayed with Clara’s parents for several months. About two years before the family went to Italy, Romildo made a tape recording of Veneto people who lived at Lockleys or nearby and who had originated from the locality of Caselle di Altivole. Romildo had invited people to record messages that could be played to their relatives in Italy.

In 2023 Romildo’s daughter Diana unexpectedly discovered the old cassette tape, labelled ‘Australia per Italia 1958–59’.³⁵ Romildo must have devoted weeks to collecting the messages because there were more than 90 voices on the cassette, which was converted from his reel-to-reel tape recorder. The messages are poignant and convey the sense of families fragmented by migration. One man emphasised the transnational context and addressed family members as ‘your relatives far away’. Another spoke with a faltering intonation: ‘After 22 years, you hear my voice.’ One woman who was known as a good singer sang Ave Maria accompanied by a friend on an organ. Speakers addressed categories of relatives—brothers, sisters, in-laws, cousins, aunts and uncles—and some ended by sending wishes to the local priest, who had been in the parish for many years. Other veneti outside the paese in Lockleys were invited to record their messages.³⁶

Once in Italy, Romildo repeated his role as go-between, as Diana recalled:

I remember Dad going over on the ship, [he] bought a movie camera, and … he went around to every family who had children here [in Australia], you know, all their parents and took photos of every family. And when he came back here, he showed them … Oh, and we travelled [in the Veneto] and found all these people. Going over, we, you remember the old tape? The old—before the cassette—a tape recorder, we took. And he’d called people over to come and send their regards and their love to their mother, so they could hear their voice … then Dad would take the film, and brought it back here … Because you know, it was 1962, and you think 50 years, they didn’t have all these things and the phone, it was very rare.³⁷

Diana uses the word ‘photos’ to refer to the films her father shot on his Super 8 camera. In 1962, Romildo recorded more than two and a half hours of various families and gatherings, including a wedding, in the Veneto region. Countless scenes of relatives, groups sharing meals, wedding banquets and contadino farms convey interactions within families and with paesani, which at times are self-conscious because of the camera’s presence. In her telling, Diana communicates pride in her father’s capacity to connect transnational families through the intimacy of voice recordings and moving images—an initiative made possible by the technology of the time and Romildo’s skills and ingenuity.

Visits to Italy by the second generation

The experience of travelling to Italy, meeting close relatives and being present in family households enabled second-generation narrators to understand their origins and the context of their heritage. The visits became an initiation into the process of connecting with relatives and forming a new appreciation of their ancestry and identity. Baldassar provides case studies of young second-generation Italians for whom a visit to their parents’ origin village takes on the status of a ‘rite of passage’.³⁸ Such visits enable the second generation to begin to develop connections with their grandparents and other relatives. This process has three elements—opportunities to: gain knowledge of the family context, engage and spend time with the relatives, and maintain links with family members who previously were only distant figures in the transnational family story.³⁹ Some of the second generation who grew up in nuclear families at Lockleys and visited Italy with their parents stayed in intergenerational family households with grandparents or aunts and uncles. Through encounters with their transnational family and the experience of being in, and learning about, Italy, they gained a new recognition of their Italian identity.⁴⁰

Diana Panazzolo nee Santin, whose father was the conduit between the two communities of veneti, remembered precise details of her first visit to her parents’ village when she was 11 years old in 1962. She spent a lot of time with her grandparents and aunts and these connections continued as she grew older.⁴¹ Ten years later, her parents invited Diana to accompany them with her siblings to celebrate the sixtieth wedding anniversary of her maternal grandparents. When her parents offered to pay for her airfare, Diana did not hesitate to go for three months even though she was engaged to be married at the time. The attachment to her nonni (grandparents) and other relatives in her father’s village outweighed her need to be with her fiancé at a time when young women would typically have focused on planning their wedding. Diana made two further visits to spend time with her relatives. In 2019, Diana and her husband spent time in Caselle di Altivole with her relatives with whom she maintains regular contact. Also included in that trip were her children, their spouses and her grandchildren.⁴²

Lockleys: A second place of origin

Narrators ascribe a second meaning of place to the location of the market gardens and the paese. Lockleys became a place that signified Veneto-Australian identity. At Lockleys on the market gardens, the community developed a ‘place consciousness’ over three generations.⁴³ One 1.5-generation narrator, Maria Mazzarolo nee Compostella, a relative of market gardeners, who married and lived on Frogmore Road for more than 60 years in two different houses, spoke about the benefits of living there. Maria summed up her feelings, beginning by referring to the sense of community among the retired market gardeners:

It was still there especially when people knew each other … [E]verybody was retired down this area … Well, to me this is like a home, a second home. That’s all. I would not shift from here to go anywhere else. No way. No.⁴⁴

Maria’s first home was the house in which she lived with her parents and brothers on the south side of the River Torrens. It was a significant home, found by her father, who arrived in Adelaide in 1938 and reunited with his wife and three children nine years later. Before migration, the family had shared accommodation in a large multigenerational household in Caselle di Altivole. Maria lived with her parents until she was married, when she and her husband built a house on Frogmore Road near relatives and paesani. After some years, Maria and her husband and children moved to another house on Frogmore Road that had been built by first-generation market gardeners. Maria’s affection for Frogmore Road communicates her deep feeling for the place where she married, raised her family and continued to live as a neighbour to other veneti, although the composition of the locality changed over the six decades that she lived there.

Plate 8.4: The Mazzarolo family: Lina, Sonia, Maria and Arsenio, Frogmore Road, c. 1972

Source: Photo supplied by Maria Mazzarolo nee Compostella.

Narrators who were born on family market gardens acknowledged their attachment to the paese, where they felt the strength of belonging to a community of other families with the same heritage. Second-generation woman Denise Doyban nee Santin spoke about her attachment to Frogmore Road, where two sets of grandparents, her parents, uncles and aunts had worked their large market gardens:

[I was b]orn at [number] 40, lived at 36 and then got married and moved to 38 … I’m not going anywhere. No … I think it’s just part of me … I’ve never really wanted to live anywhere else … My oldest daughter, Nicole, she lives at number 36 now … In my Mum’s home, yeah, Mum and Dad’s home. And we’ve still got the gate between the two houses.⁴⁵

Denise had earlier referred to the closeness of the community of Veneto market-gardener families who continued to live on Frogmore Road: ‘I told you, we’re all related here.’⁴⁶

Narrators in both the 1.5 and the second generations attribute meaning to the market gardens, the place of settlement, in a way that implies that Lockleys is the ‘second place of origin’.⁴⁷ They understand it as the place of settlement for the first generation and the location where families established themselves and achieved sistemazione. That place has assumed significance for second-generation narrators because they were born and grew up there. It remains a site of belonging even for those who no longer live there. For example, Sandra Conci nee Santin spoke about the changes that had occurred on Frogmore Road in her lifetime. Sandra was born in 1947 and lived for the first two years of her life on Valetta Road before her parents, uncles and aunts moved to a market garden on Frogmore Road. Sandra spoke about her sense of home although, at the time of the interview, she had not lived there for more than five decades. Her memories linked back to her grandparents to whom she was very close:

It’s changed a lot. I go down there and it still feels as if it’s Frogmore Road, the place I knew back all those years ago … And you picture as you go down that my grandfather’s house is still there and I can imagine that was their land and I can still visualise that. No, it’s still nice down there. It feels [like] home even though I haven’t lived there for fifty years, it always feels [like] home there.⁴⁸

Movements away from the paese

While the first and 1.5 generations continued to live on house blocks on the properties that had been their market gardens, the community experienced disruptions in the 1960s. Circumstances changed as families sold market gardens and the first and 1.5 generations retired. Changes also came with the deaths and re-migration of some of the first generation. By the end of the 1960s, 13 members of that group had either died or returned to live in the Veneto region, which was enjoying an economic boom. After years of arduous physical labour on the market gardens, the two older generations improved their financial status, gained more leisure time and took opportunities to visit their families in the Veneto or travel more widely. Second-generation sons and daughters finished school, moved away from the market gardens to employment and came of age, undertaking the processes of sistemazione: marriage and raising their own families. Some moved outside the family and community boundaries and, consequently, the composition of the paese transformed.

For its first three decades, the community of Veneto market gardeners had enjoyed a social life built mostly around the relationships in the paese. From the early 1960s, some families had become members of the Casa d’Italia, a pan-Italian social organisation in Adelaide that brought together Italians from different regions and reflected the postwar increase of the Italian population in South Australia. Two first-generation Veneto market gardeners, Giuseppe Ballestrin and Eugenio Zalunardo, were foundation members of the South Australian Italian Association (SAIA).⁴⁹ This body was formalised in 1967 ‘to promote and facilitate activity as an umbrella organisation to connect all Italians in South Australia, and to promote outreach to the wider community’.⁵⁰ At the time, Ballestrin and Zalunardo, who had been in Australia for 32 years, undertook a significant commitment to belong to this organisation.

Six men in the 1.5 generation became foundation members of the SAIA in 1967: the three Santin brothers, Lui, Vito and Romildo, and Luigi, Albert and Orlando Tonellato. Lui Santin was also a member of the Building Fund Committee, which suggests he took an even greater responsibility for the establishment of the association. Although the men had received education to compulsory age in Australia and some of them mixed with Anglo-Australians through sporting activities, they were drawn to join an association formed as a ‘second home’ for the social life and wellbeing of Italians in South Australia. Lui Santin and Luigi Tonellato were identified as volunteers who doorknocked Italian men to ask them to become members and provide funds to establish the centre. The active participation in the establishment of the Casa d’Italia suggests that some in the 1.5-generation families developed a strong affiliation with the wider Italian community in Adelaide.

The men supported the vision of developing a place of connection for migrants who could feel ‘at home’ in the company of other Italians even in the period when the Australian Government promoted assimilation.⁵¹ Oscar Mattiazzo, another narrator and brother-in-law of the Santin brothers who had a wider range of friends and business contacts outside the Veneto community, was a member of the first SAIA committee in 1967–68. Oscar explained the reasons for his involvement in the association:

Yes, I was on the committee of the Italian Association, in Carrington Street, [the] Italian Club, and that’s the only club that I joined … because that was, to me, that was Italian, because I feel greatly this way, that when you’re in another country like now we’re in Australia, when you’re in Australia, you’re Italian, and when you’re in Italy, you’re regional, you’re Veneto, Calabrese, Molfetta or whatever the case may be, but I feel very strongly that when I’m here that I don’t say that I’m a Veneto, I’m an Italian, because I feel that we should all be together as we came out here.⁵²

The association opened its new premises in 1972 at a time when multicultural policies created possibilities for ethnic groups to establish their own centres in a more inclusive environment. The centre in Adelaide quickly became a venue for intergenerational groups of Italian Australians to gather in large numbers and participate in social events and regional associations like the Veneto Club began building their own facilities. The Casa d’Italia became a popular venue for all age groups, hosting functions, wedding receptions and providing Italian meals. Young people attended Sunday evening dances with live music that could attract more than 200 people in the 1970s.⁵³

By the 1970s, the idea of preserving the paese at Lockleys was not the shared priority it had been for the community in the previous 35 or so years. The Australian population had become more diverse through postwar migration initiatives and government policies reflected the need to respond to the increasingly multicultural context. There was bipartisan agreement that multiculturalism must replace earlier policies of assimilation and integration. In July 1976 the Liberal government established the federal Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs and the services and programs available to migrants were reviewed in a report published two years later. It recommended new approaches to increasing the rights of and opportunities for migrants and improving access to services and programs. It also proposed providing financial support to ethnic groups and associations for special projects.⁵⁴ The report prepared the way for ethnic communities with large cohorts of postwar migrants to develop their own organisations and associations. By 1977, nearly 2,000 ethnic organisations and media platforms had been formed, reflecting the multicultural composition of the Australian population.⁵⁵ The identity of separate groups in the Italian population was strengthened as different regions established their own clubs and associations across the country.

The Veneto Club in South Australia was officially registered in 1972 and some market gardeners were foundation members. It was established to cater for all people from the Veneto, although, at first, the membership comprised only men and included more postwar migrants than those who had migrated between the wars. A substantial membership fee was required to join the club—something one narrator described as an excessive amount, which he recalled was twice his weekly wage at the time.⁵⁶ However, 300 men became members before the foundation stone was laid in 1973.⁵⁷ Initially, many in the older generation of market gardeners were not attracted to the idea of the club, relying on familiar ways of socialising and gathering in homes to share hospitality and companionship. Some of those in the first and the 1.5 generations who had joined the SAIA also became foundation members of the Veneto Club. When members of the older generation saw the success of the large social gatherings at the Veneto Club and the opportunities to mix with a larger group of veneti, they participated in events such as the large Sunday night dinner dances.⁵⁸

Plate 8.5: Amelia and Silvano Zampin celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary at the Veneto Club, Beverley, 1981

Note: With their daughters Milva, Bruna, Roma, Angela, Christine, Virginia, Sandra and Cynthia (seated).

Source: Photo supplied by the Zampin family.

Members of the community gave their time, skills and equipment to the construction of the club’s facilities over 84 Sundays.⁵⁹ Veneto tradesmen contributed their labour; some second-generation Veneto market gardeners used their equipment to level the ground, assisted with erecting steel works and contributed in other practical ways. In 1974, the Veneto Club opened its facilities about 4 kilometres from the market garden area and hosted social events, cultural activities and an extensive sporting program that included first-, second- and third-generation Veneto Australians. Events that market gardeners had held previously in packing sheds such as baptism parties, birthdays, wedding receptions and anniversaries began to be celebrated at the Veneto Club.

Although clubs were not part of cultural practices in Italy, the new generation who had arrived after the war was interested in retaining Veneto culture and mixing with other veneti through the social events and other programs of the Veneto Club.⁶⁰ The veneti wanted to speak dialect within an environment where they felt at home. Families attended social events, and sporting activities like netball, basketball and bocce enabled women to represent the club. In the wider Veneto community, the existence of the club facilitated a sense of ownership and belonging among veneti and the growing membership in the 1970s was evidence of the need for a venue where they could speak dialect and identify as a regional group of Italians in South Australia. Although membership of the club diminished as the postwar generation aged and died, it continued to exist, albeit in a different form from the vision of its founders, especially when the venue had to be sold in 2014 because of financial challenges. However, the club realigned itself with new accommodation arrangements and, in November 2024, there were more than 400 members, a small number of whom are descendants of the Veneto market gardeners.

Identity and multiculturalism

Multicultural policies provided scope for migrant communities to form their distinctive clubs and associations in Australia in the 1970s and rejected assimilationist protocols and practices. The multicultural approach created an idealised concept of Australia as a place where people from many cultures could participate equally. However, the Anglo-Australian ideal remained pivotal and multiculturalism became a vehicle for ‘inducing pride in people’s “ethnic heritage” and in Australia’s cultural diversity’.⁶¹ The impact of multiculturalism allowed groups like the veneti in South Australia to develop their own cultural centre and place of belonging. Transnational associations such as the Trevisani nel Mondo for people who had roots in the Veneto province of Treviso were significant for supporting provincial identity in Australia. In 1999, 80 Italian Australian associations were active in South Australia, including in regional areas;⁶² most had been established in the 1970s after Australia officially became ‘multicultural’.

Some narrators spoke about their sense of identity and growing pride in being Italian as they became older. One notable example is Norma Camozzato nee Ballestrin, who articulated the development of her identity through her life:

Once upon a time, I’d say, ‘I’m Australian, definitely Australian.’ If somebody asks me, I say, ‘I’m Australian but I have Italian parents.’ I’ve changed a bit … Maybe I’m older, maybe the world is different. I like being part of the Trevisani, [I’m] proud of it, I suppose … [O]nce upon a time, I’d say, ‘I’m Australian’ and then I’d come out and say, ‘My parents were Italian.’ But now yeah, I’m Italian, yeah, I’m Australian, yeah, I’m half and half, yeah I’m part of this, I’m part of the Italian group. Maybe I’m not ashamed.⁶³

Norma clarified her status in relation to her age and with a reference to the times in which she now lives. She can declare proudly that both her parents were born in Italy and she has Italian heritage without feeling the shame she experienced as a young girl when she was one of a very few who had her ears pierced—a feature that made her feel self-conscious and part of a group with a foreign culture in Anglo-Australia. As a woman in her mid-seventies, she had thrown off the stigma of being a ‘wog’ and perhaps this was an advantage of multicultural Australia for her generation.

Redefining the paese

Belonging to the paese at Lockleys was always the first choice for the Veneto market gardeners and their families because of the reciprocity within the community and the security of proxy family relationships that contrasted with the lack of interest and early hostility of the Anglo-Australian world. Consequently, there was little incentive for the first generation to move outside the boundaries of the Lockleys market garden area. With the deaths of the first generation and many in the 1.5 generation, the network of families changed, although relationships continued through informal connections. However, a redefinition of the paese created new prospects for the 1.5 and second generations, especially through the intervention of two forms of media.

First, narrators recorded their memories of the community from its origins in the 1930s to the loss of the market gardens in the 1970s through the community oral history project. Second, the Veneto market gardeners’ website created possibilities for descendants to listen to interviews with members of other families, view photos and documents, write blogs and interact with writers. The sons and daughters who grew up on the gardens have participated in the collection of historical evidence about the family market-gardening enterprises that were part of the social and economic history of the area now known as Kidman Park and Flinders Park. The website, launched in 2014, created a virtual paese and a site of belonging for the 1.5- and second-generation narrators and descendants of the first generation of market gardeners.⁶⁴ The website also embodies the circular connection between the two places of origin for the Veneto market-gardener families.

Plate 8.6: Example of a family biography page on the Veneto Market Gardeners 1927 website

Source: venetimarketgardeners1927.net, accessed 2 March 2023.

A regular blog on the website reconstructs the paese through the histories of individual families and work on the market gardens, customs related to food, rituals at Christmas and Easter, and the meaning of Australian-Veneto identity. The participation of guest bloggers from Adelaide, Melbourne, the Veneto and Canada reflects local and transnational interest in the history of the market-gardener community and family histories and accounts of migration. In 2022, one-third of the blogs were written by guests.⁶⁵ Eulogies were added at the suggestion of families and provide a permanent record of the story of individuals and their experience as migrants in Australia. Several eulogies were added during the Covid-19 pandemic when restrictions prevented attendance at funerals and their online publication enabled wider access to the stories of people’s lives.

In 2015, the National Library of Australia added the website to its PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia) archive of web publications and websites that have cultural and research significance. The items are selected in partnership with state libraries. A copy of the website is archived annually, in a national database to ensure its preservation.⁶⁶ The website is now formally acknowledged by the wider Veneto community. In 2021, after seven years of the website’s existence, the Veneto Club Incorporated Adelaide guaranteed the future of the website by contributing funds to its maintenance costs. Angelo Piovesan, the second-generation relative of an original market-gardener family, advocated for the annual funds and affirmed the role of the website in the context of the community of the previous generation:

[The] work over the life of this project has been a source of enormous pleasure for the Veneti families and their friends, and will continue to give pleasure to our children, grandchildren—and I hope the many generations that follow us. It has become a source of great pride to not only see our migrant heritage preserved, but it has also become a means for us all to share our stories and to unite us again into a community which closely resembled the spirit shared by our parents and relatives in those early times of migration. I also grew up amongst nearly all of the Pioneering Families and thought I knew a lot about their families … I became addicted to reading about their family backgrounds!! It allowed me to group together their family members into a structure—much the same [as] I had done many years earlier in drawing up our Family Tree.⁶⁷

As both a source of knowledge and a resource, the website develops an understanding of the ongoing transformation of a migrant community in Australia and the widening circles of interactions with each successive generation. Memories of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents accessed on the website are passed down as intimate migration stories and oral testimony that communicate ideas about families in the context of identity, belonging and change.

Opening memories

When they recall the experience of the paese and the lives of the market-gardener families, narrators project an image of community as ‘common ground … a ground that is material, but also virtual, real and imaginary’.⁶⁸ The shared experiences of growing up on a market garden surrounded by other Veneto and Italian families are real for the narrators; they also represent the memories and the mostly idealised stories of the paese at Lockleys. The website created a space where memories of the market gardens and belonging to an early migrant community are shared through the voices and images of three generations and it continues to attract new visitors more than a decade after it was first established.

The paese has been redefined by recent generations and the emotional attachment to the community has transformed over nine decades. Although the market-gardener families gradually became part of the Veneto community in South Australia and the South Australian community more broadly, descendants have maintained the identity and history that connect them to their parents’ paese at Lockleys. Attachment to the place of origin in the Veneto region is a continuous thread in the interviews and in the archive of communal memories on the website. However, the market gardens where the veneti settled and created their life in Australia have always been the heart of the story now preserved in the memories of the first, 1.5, second and third generations of the community.

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1. 1 Remo Berno, OH 872/46, 27 June 2017: 12.

2. 2 Davine, Vegnimo da Conco Ma Simo Veneti, 88–89.

3. 3 Alessandro Portelli, ‘Living Voices: The Oral History Interview as Dialogue and Experience’, The Oral History Review 45, no. 2 (2018): 239–48, doi.org/10.1093/ohr/ohy030, at 245–47.

4. 4 Cosmini and Glenn, La Seconda Casa, 51–61.

5. 5 Denise Doyban nee Santin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/62, 8 December 2021: 48.

6. 6 Katie Barclay and Nina Javette Koefoed, ‘Family, Memory, and Identity: An Introduction’, Journal of Family History 46, no. 1 (January 2021): 3–12, doi.org/10.1177/0363199020967297.

7. 7 Baldassar, Visits Home, 332–38; Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 184–85.

8. 8 Romano Marchioro, OH 872/20, 11 June 2012: 19.

9. 9 Baldassar, Visits Home, 287.

10. 10 Angelina Marchioro, OH 12, 13 March 1984: 15.

11. 11 Davine, Vegnimo da Conco Ma Simo Veneti, 51–53.

12. 12 John S. MacDonald and Leatrice D. MacDonald, ‘Chain Migration Ethnic Neighbourhood Formation and Social Networks’, The Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1964): 82–97, doi.org/10.2307/3348581, at 90–91; Donna Gabaccia, ‘Global Geography of “Little Italy”: Italian Neighbourhoods in Comparative Perspective’, Modern Italy 11, no. 1 (2006): 9–24, doi.org/10.1080/13532940500489510.

13. 13 Baldassar, Visits Home, 185–208; Rudolph M. Bell, Fate, Honor, Family and Village: Demographic and Cultural Change in Rural Italy since 1800 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 151–53.

14. 14 Diana Panazzolo nee Santin, OH 872/27, 13 December 2013: 52.

15. 15 See Mel Recchi interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/31; and Aida Valentini nee Recchi interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/39.

16. 16 Mary Tonellato nee Zoanetti, OH 872/3, 3 October 2008: 7.

17. 17 Armida Mattiazzo nee Biasetto, Personal communication, 30 May 2020.

18. 18 Fortier, Migrant Belongings, 97–98.

19. 19 Milva Rebuli nee Zampin, OH 872/36, 27 March 2016: 8.

20. 20 Aida Valentini nee Recchi, OH 872/39, 28 September 2016: 16.

21. 21 Christine Zampin, OH 872/42, 26 September 2017: 26.

22. 22 Sendziuk and Foster (A History of South Australia, 153) make the point that between 1947 and 1954 South Australia had ‘the nation’s highest proportional increase in population due to migration’.

23. 23 Vittorio Marchioro, OH 12, 13 March 1984: 14, 15, 18.

24. 24 Francesco Ballestrin, OH 872/7, 5 January 2009: 39.

25. 25 Rae Ballatyne, OH 872/21, 25 August 2012: 13.

26. 26 ibid., 25.

27. 27 Lina Campagnaro nee Ballestrin, OH 872/28, 13 March 2014: 6.

28. 28 Mel Recchi, OH 872/31, 18 June 2014: 18.

29. 29 The half-case was the object that generated the group biography of the Veneto market gardeners.

30. 30 Angelo Innocente, OH 872/8, 5 January 2009: 10–11.

31. 31 Baldassar, Visits Home, 286–91.

32. 32 Lino Tonellato, OH 872/10, 16 July 2010: 15.

33. 33 Virginia Rodato nee Zampin interviewed by Madeleine Regan, Transcript, J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, OH 872/43, 15 March 2017: 33.

34. 34 ibid., 17.

35. 35 Diana thinks her father made the recordings as a response to a priest who had visited from Caselle di Altivole. She gleaned from listening to the tape that the priest had brought recorded messages from relatives to their kin in Adelaide.

36. 36 The use of the tape recorder and Super 8 camera to record the messages of the veneti in Adelaide was an example of the strong regional identity of the migrant group.

37. 37 Diana Panazzolo nee Santin, OH 872/27, 18 October 2013: 21.

38. 38 Baldassar, Visits Home, 286–91.

39. 39 ibid., 257.

40. 40 ibid., 287–91.

41. 41 See Maria Chiara Marchetti-Mercer and Anita Virga, The Italian Diaspora in South Africa: Nostalgia, Identity, and Belonging in the Second and Third Generations (London: Routledge, 2023), doi.org/10.4324/9781003266884, 75.

42. 42 Diana Panazzolo nee Santin foreshadowed the visit when she was interviewed some years earlier. OH 872/27, 13 September 2013: 20–21.

43. 43 Shopes, ‘Oral History and the Study of Communities’, 593–94.

44. 44 Maria Mazzarolo nee Compostella, OH 872/30, 23 April 2014: 18.

45. 45 Denise Doyban nee Santin, OH 872/62, 8 December 2021: 50.

46. 46 ibid., 22.

47. 47 Fortier, ‘Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)’, 46–47.

48. 48 Sandra Conci nee Santin, OH 872/47, 25 August 2018: 36.

49. 49 Cosmini and Glenn, La Seconda Casa, 148–49.

50. 50 ibid., 63–64, 149. The authors outline the genesis of the SAIA in two previous organisations that had supported the wellbeing of Italians in the state: the Catholic Italian Welfare Association (1949–65) and the Italian Australian Centre (1965–67).

51. 51 The vision of establishing the Casa d’Italia was finally realised in 1967 by the SAIA Incorporated. Cosmini and Glenn, La Seconda Casa, 55.

52. 52 Oscar Mattiazzo, OH 872/13, 13 April 2011: 187.

53. 53 Christine Rebellato nee Mattiazzo, Personal communication, 20 October 2020.

54. 54 Frank Galbally, ‘Migrant Services and Programs—Summary’, in Review of Post Arrival Programs and Services for Migrants Migrant Services and Programs, Parliamentary Paper No. 164 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1978), 3–13, 15–28, www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/galbally_1.pdf.

55. 55 James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 27–29, doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139195034.

56. 56 Johnny Tormena, OH 872/18, 7 July 2012: 62.

57. 57 Veneto Club Adelaide Inc., In 84 Domeniche Nasce il Veneto Club.

58. 58 Gino Innocente and Rinaldo Secca, Personal communication, 11 August 2021.

59. 59 See ‘About the Veneto Club Adelaide’ for a summary of the history of the Veneto Club of Adelaide: www.venetoclubadelaide.com.au/veneti-in-adelaide.

60. 60 Baldassar and Pesman, From Paesani to Global Italians, 121–22.

61. 61 Hsu-Ming Teo, cited in Arapakis, ‘Ethnic Compartmentalisation’, 145.

62. 62 Antonio Cocchiaro, ‘The History and Future of Italo-Australian Associations in South Australia’, in Proceedings: The First Conference on the Impact of Italians in South Australia, 16–17 July 1993, eds Desmond O’Connor and Antonio Comin (Adelaide: Italian Congress, The Italian Discipline, Flinders University of South Australia, 1993), 67–77.

63. 63 Norma Camozzato nee Ballestrin, OH 872/37, 21 September 2016: 32.

64. 64 In 2013, the local council, the City of Charles Sturt, provided a cultural heritage grant to develop the website.

65. 65 See examples of guest blogs on the Veneto Market Gardeners 1927 website: Irene Zampin, ‘The Three Simeoni Sisters’, 8 March 2020, venetimarketgardeners1927.net/the-three-simeoni-sisters/; Aida Innocente, ‘A Child Discovering Italy’, 22 May 2022, venetimarketgardeners1927.net/a-child-discovering-italy/; Rosa Parletta, ‘Giovanni Balestrin’s Story’, 8 May 2022, venetimarketgardeners1927.net/giovanni-balestrins-story/; Remo Berno and Madeleine Regan, ‘The Mezzadria System’, 15 September 2019, venetimarketgardeners1927.net/?s=mezzadria+system.

66. 66 See: webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20240411140025/https://venetimarketgardeners1927.net/.

67. 67 Angelo Piovesan, email communication to the Veneto Club Adelaide Inc., 19 January 2021. I was copied into the email correspondence and it is reproduced with permission.

68. 68 Sara Ahmed and Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Re-Imagining Communities’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (2003): 251–59, doi.org/10.1177/13678779030063001, at 257.