16 - Italians were replacements for slaves

Turn-of-century immigrants to Australia were subject to racist attacks by residents

Once upon a time, in Australia's Queensland, the sugar cane was harvested by Kakanas, Melanesian half-slaves. When forced to replace them, the colonial government recruited 335 peasants from the Veneto. That was in 1891. Thus began Italian emigration to Australia.
The job was awful. The cane could only be cut after burning the bush and driving away mice, scorpions and snakes; then the real machete work began. It went on from the early morning light for as long as the worker could stand, because the wages were based on piecework. Those who survived that hell were uncommon men. The Venetian peasants survived.
However, Australia was not unknown to Italians. A decade earlier, in fact, some fishermen from Molfetta, the Eolian Islands and Capo d'Orlando had already come looking for fortune. A few dozen people, but by the turn of the century they had vigorously contributed to modernizing and boosting the fishing industry in Fremantle, where they had settled down. Before them, only missionaries, political exiles and artists had reached the end of the world. People like father Salvado (who sported a musical name, Rudesindo), for instance, who wrote his Memorie storiche dell'Australia, particolarmente della Missione Benedettina di Nuova Norcia e dei costumi degli Australiani ("Historical memories of Australia, particularly of the Benedictine Mission of New Norcia and of the customs of Australians") upon his return to Italy in 1851. The title may be long, as was fashionable at the time, but the book has historic value. It was the first book on Australia ever published in Italy.
Raffaello Carboni, a follower of Garibaldi and Mazzini, who had to leave Italy after the fall of the Roman Republic (1849), arrived Down Under in 1854. He was less than fascinated by the political situation he found. "In fact, the British colonial rule was all but enlightened. It was fundamentally racist, and no less repressive than the Italian governments of the time," explains Gaetano Rando, historian of Italian emigration to Australia. "What particularly struck Carboni was the absence of the ideals of democracy, equality and liberty that were present in the European progressive movements."
Those ideals were brought to Australia mainly by Italian political exiles. Francesco Sceusa, forced to leave Trapani because of his ideas, arrived in Sydney in 1877, and for the next 30 years was a Socialist activist inside and outside the small Italian community. And a textile worker from Schio, Pietro Munari, who arrived in 1890, became one of the founders of the Australian Labour Party. A heroic endeavour in a country that had began as a penal colony and still had not lost some characteristic traits of that period.
The life of political exiles was not a bed of roses; the same applied to the workers who were beginning to come from Italy. When those 335 Venetians were called to replace the Kakanas, the powerful Workers' Union denounced the fact that the Italians, willing to work harder than the slaves and to accept low wages, would in the long run take jobs away from Australians. Over 8,000 Queensland farmers signed a petition asking the government to kill the project replacing the Kakanas with Italians. The petition was ignored, and for decades Italians kept cutting sugar cane, eventually becoming owners of some farms themselves. The hostility from White Australia would accompany them for a long time.
"The constant inflow of Italians," remarks Gaetano Rando, "was seen with apprehension by that part of the population that worried about safeguarding racial purity and social harmony. The Labour Party and the trade unions were afraid of the repercussions on unemployment of those arrivals. The press fuelled worries and fears."
In 1883 the Bulletin of Sydney wrote that Italians were grossly ignorant and brought with them jack knives and contagious diseases. For years other newspapers would follow suit, competing in evidencing negative traits of Italians. In the course of this "meritorious" campaign, they promoted Italians from dirty dagos (a definition shared with Portuguese and Spaniards) to mafiosi tout court. When, in 1924, a steamship with 1,090 Calabrians, Apulians and Friulians docked, those newspapers wrote that Italy was invading Australia. The sense of measure (and of the ridiculous) was in short supply among those journalists.
Considering this climate, one cannot be amazed that in 1930 the farmers of the Murrumbridgee Irrigation Area, supported by the town dwellers, proposed that the authorities forbid Italians from purchasing lands and farms. In the same period the British Preference League was formed, with an exemplary program: excluding foreign workers, Italians first and foremost, from any employment; an alternative was mass deportation. Once again nothing came of it, but the episode exemplifies the climate surrounding Italians.
The war did nothing to improve the situation: Italy and Australia fought on opposing sides, and like in the United States and Canada, our fellow nationals were interned in concentration camps. Almost 5,000 of them.
But the war itself brought a change. During the war 18,000 Italian POWs were deported to Australia. They were given the choice of concentration camp or farm work. Almost 15,000 chose the farms. Evidently, the war had shown where racism and intolerance could lead, as those 15,000 were accepted with a different spirit, and their work made the fortune of many agricultural areas. After the fighting was over, Italian prisoners returned home, but many of them immediately went back to Australia, receiving a warm welcome. Stimulated by this experience, the government launched a solid policy of immigration, the only way for building and populating such an immense country and exploit its resources.
From then on, Australia, with Canada and Venezuela, became one of the objectives of Italian emigrants, especially because the traditional destinations (mostly the U.S.A. and Argentina) were increasingly difficult to get to. Washington and Buenos Aires, in fact, had enacted harsh measures discouraging immigration; Argentina in the Fifties was shaken by a grave recession of the economy coupled with heavy inflation. Australia was far, very far away, but it had jobs and a solid economy, and the climate was similar to that of Italy. So, many Italians left, bound for the other side of the world.
"Many among them did so with the intention of never going back, or at least of staying for a long time," says Carlo Coen, who knows Australia quite well because, before Toronto, he directed Melbourne's Istituto Italiano di Cultura. "The distance played a key roll. You cannot go back and forth easily when the place is over a month away. But there was also an immense, almost unexplored country, where one could really start a new life. And this is what many Italians wanted, after the war. These premises have two main consequences. The first is that Italians have a close link with Australia, maybe closer than other immigrants have with other countries. The second concerns remittances, the money they saved."
Coen explains, "Little money was sent to Italy by Italian-Australians. They preferred keeping their savings to themselves, using them to bring over their families or to open a business in Australia. In short, returning was a rather remote idea for them. A different situation applied to those who emigrated within Europe or even in the Americas, relatively closer places, that fuelled the dream of returning. Their remittances brought wealth to their families and robustly helped Italian economy."
For years Rocco Cudazzo (the name has been changed, but the story is true), a miner in Marcinelle, Belgium, sent his savings home, in a whitewashed village in the province of Lecce. "I want to buy a house, a shop and a grave, because I want to go home," he told his friends.
He used only the grave: a sudden firedamp explosion in the big mine cut his dreams short. The year was 1958.

Publication Date: 2002-11-10
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1992