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Apr 9,2006 - Apr 16,2006 |
15 - Love and Rancour from Down Under
Italian immigrants in Australia have mixed feelings in vote for emigrants abroad
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-11-03
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Italian immigrant couple in 1904 photo
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Two things strike the traveller after landing at Melbourne: the smell of the sea, as intense as it can be at sunrise along the coast between Otranto and Leuca, and the cars driving on the left side of the road. A sort of Mediterranean Britain. But such parallels between Australia and what is still today the 'motherland' must be drawn with great care: one's interlocutor may be of republican feelings, and still smarting from the marginal monarchist win in the 1999 referendum, so such an observation could elicit some rather harsh replies. In short, a person can very easily be told where to go if some bare nerves are even grazed.
The referendum split the Australians. Republic or monarchy? Monarchy won 55-45 percent. This means that, like in Canada, Her British Majesty, wrapped in London fog, far away, keeps being Australia's Head of State.
"What does she understand of us?" wondered, without reverential fear, a reader of the prestigious newspaper The Australian. With typically Italian subtlety, Il Globo, Melbourne's Italian newspaper, in the months preceding the referendum, printed an item about "Britain to disappear under the sea." This, according to the paper, was the diagnosis of an international team of scientists that is studying the melting of the polar caps.
The first split came in 1966, when Australia adopted the decimal system and changed the name of its currency, not pound anymore, but dollar. Traditionalists were scandalized. "This means destroying our world," "If Britain does not change, why should we?" This was the tone of the letters flooding the newspapers in the months before the change. In order to avoid widening the rift, then Prime Minister Menzies even proposed the name of "Royal" instead of dollar. Nothing came of it, but the initiative actually increased the tension. Finally, complaints, controversies and flaming letters suddenly ceased on February 14, 1966, the day when the new system entered into force.
Australians haven't succeeded yet in scoring the second goal: right-side driving and republican government. It is only a matter of time, though. "When Prime Minister John Howard leaves his post," a talkative cab driver tells me, "we'll win the referendum and become a republic." He added that Howard is one of the few monarchists left in his own party, the Tories, and that Labour, the smaller parties and even Howard's own right-hand man, Peter Costello, are all republicans.
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