17 - Immigrants held in Camp Bonegilla

Italians in Australia not allowed to drink in pubs or speak their language in public

Bonegilla means many things: a prison camp during World War II, then an arrival centre for foreign workers and their families when the Australian government launched, in 1947, an organic immigration policy. The times and names have changed, but the substance is more or less the same because Bonegilla, 400 kilometres from Melbourne, remained for thousands of Italians the place of their first traumatic encounter with this country.
Debarking after 40 days on the open seas, those who had neither friends nor relatives that could offer them accommodation were loaded onto trains. Those trains advanced slowly through a countryside where the dominant hues were red and yellow. Every once in a while, a little green was seen in the distance. In the end, the barbed wire fences of Bonegilla appeared, and in the wooden cabins our emigrants waited to be called up for work. Some of them waited for months.
"When they arrived," says Maria Tence, co-ordinator in charge of community relations for Melbourne's Museum of Immigration, "the men were separated from the women; the boys over 16 went with their fathers because they were considered adults and could be employed. Sometimes they were sent quite far away from the place where the rest of their family had settled. Then they were given pillows, blankets, bed-sheets, dishes, and bowls. Everybody had to help keep the camp tidy, so shovels, brooms, rakes and pails were also distributed. If they got lost or damaged, they had to be replaced by the person they had been given to: their value was deducted from the one pound per week that the government gave to immigrants. Often, due to a lost shovel or a dented pail, all that was left of that pound were a few shillings, just enough for a packet of cigarettes or a postage stamp."
A soldier's life, little money, poor food and much boredom waiting for a job; all the ingredients for a riot were there. The first one happened in 1952, when the demand for foreign labour plunged due to the great recession, and the few requests coming in systematically excluded Italians and Greeks. The anger exploded because the awful food. The mess hall was destroyed and the army had to be called in. Another riot took place in 1961, for the same reasons both evident and hidden, again with Italians and, this time, the Germans. There were brawls and mass arrests.
Despite Bonegilla and other camps like it all over Australia, Italian immigration to this country had begun in earnest. It would only stop in the early Eighties, when the Australian economy revealed the symptoms of a structural problem caused by the great oil crisis of 1973, by the instability of the world market of food and minerals, and by the competition of Asian manufacturing industries.
Those decades were enough for Italians to succeed in a country that, despite its immigration policy, was terrified of losing its British identity. This is the great Australian contradiction of those years. It harmed the foreign workers, who found open doors that were immediately shut again. Australian immigration offices, opened all over Europe, presented the country in bright colours (guaranteed jobs, excellent climate, tolerance towards foreigners, welfare, prepaid tickets for the professionals who decided to go). When workers arrived, after passing through the many Bonegilla camps, they found a different reality with barriers in the workplace and in everyday life, that made them feel unwelcome.
"Immigrants were even forbidden to use their language in public," remembers Gaetano Rando, historian of Italian immigration to Australia. "There were no interpreters in public offices, nor English classes for the kids." Carlo Coen, long-time director of Melbourne's Istituto Italiano di Cultura, adds, "Our people could not patronize the pub, that typically British institution. They were only allowed to go in, buy a beer and go out. If they stayed and drank it inside, they were literally thrown out."
That could not last. Despite the stubbornly emphatic declaration by the minister of Immigration of the late Sixties, Snedden, that "we must have one culture, we do not want pluralism," the times were ripe for multiculturalism, the inevitable way to ensure a civilized coexistence of newcomers and old residents. The first steps were uneasy. The idea was to assimilate, but the project went down because it was considered unacceptable not just by the Italians, who had already become the most authoritative community, but also by many members of the Parliament.
"Things really changed in the early Seventies, when the Labour government led by Gough Whitlam considered the immigrants as the central object of a new policy of radical social reforms," explains Gaetano Rando. "That was the starting point of Australia's multiculturalism, modelled after the Canadian one. That produced the recognition of foreign communities as sources of cultural and economic enrichment for our country."
The rest came as a consequence: recognition and acceptance of the different cultural identities, parity of rights and duties, and a job market open to everyone, regardless of ethnic group. These are the bulwarks of Australian multiculturalism.
The slow and occasionally traumatic passage from "white Australia," closed and intolerant, to multicultural Australia, received a significant contribution from the Italians. They kept working without accepting provocations, then raised their voices when enough was enough, and finally contributed to the formation of a modern political conscience.
"Our first immigrants, I mean those arriving in the Fifties, were mostly unskilled labourers and peasants," says publisher Ubaldo Larobina. "Their political orientation leaned towards a form of Christian Socialism. Had they stayed in Italy, they would have voted for the Christian-Democrats and for the Left. Here, they did not abandon their ideas, also because those values could apply. That's why Italians were, and still are, for the most part for Labour and the Republic."
When Italy's President Scalfaro went to Australia in 1998 on a state visit, the Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, made a toast during the official dinner: "Dear Mr. President, I don't even want to think about what Australia would be today without Italians."
Marco Lucchi, journalist, left Rome a decade ago and works for SBS, the multicultural public radio and TV station, broadcasting over Australia in 68 different languages (Italian is the language with the longest daily broadcasting time). "Bob Carr's words," he says, "reflect the perception of us shared by today's Australians. We are far from invisible, we can be found everywhere. And Italophiles are more than one would imagine. The Consulate General in Sydney told me that Italian is taught in 75 schools in New South Wales alone, with over 250,000 students learning it, from primary school to college. Be careful, though; these are not just children of Italians, many young Australians study it because Italian is considered the language of a successful community, whose country of origin exports culture all over the world. And then there's Ferrari, of course."

Publication Date: 2002-11-17
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2021