The Italian Girl 6b4gt

Dr Rebecca Huntley is a researcher and author with a background in publishing, academia and politics. She holds degrees in law and film studies and a PhD in gender studies. Rebecca is the executive director of The Ipsos Mackay Report and the author of two books, The World According to Y: Inside the new adult generation and Eating Between the Lines: Food and equality in Australia. Rebecca is a regular contributor to essay collections, magazines, newspapers and online publications and is a feature writer for Vogue Australia. She is also a sought-after commentator on social trends on radio, in print and on television, is married with a young daughter and lives in Sydney.

Contents

‘Australia’ by Mariano Coreno Family tree Map of Innisfail

Prologue

Part One 1 The Train North 2 A Migrant Town 3 Rite of age 4 A Different Light

Part Two 5 Uncovering 6 Time Out 7 Returning North 8 A Family Affair

9 Preserving the Truth

Part Three 10 Dividing Lines 11 Recording History 12 Camps Divided 13 Luigi’s Release 14 A Bribe for a Groom

Part Four 15 Dreams and Ghosts 16 The Left-hand Curve

Epilogue

Acknowledgements Further Reading

To my nonna, my mother, my sister, my daughter . . .

Australia

Australia young smiling land circled by the oceans are you listening to me? I have broken my heart to understand you, to know the blood in your veins, to draw new things from the gardens of your poetry. You know, this voluntary exile now is a sweet fusion between past and present between reality and a dream between grass and dirt. With the ing of time something in me has been extinguished and then it has risen to enlighten me

in the dusk of the evening. Integration is discovered little by little like the words of a great love Australia of my heart

Mariano Coreno

‘When this war is finished, if the story [of internment] is ever published, it will astound decent honest Australian people.’

The Hon. Cecil ‘Nugget’ Jesson Labor Party Queensland parliamentary representative for Kennedy (1935– 50) and Hinchinbrook (1950–60)

Prologue

February 2011

I am sitting at my kitchen table with my mother on a humid summer’s day. I am talking to Mum about the past – asking her questions about her childhood, everything she re about her relationship with her mother and grandmother. But she is not listening to me. Her attention is on my three-year-old daughter Sofia, who is busy twirling around on the polished wooden floorboards in new cotton socks. Sofia stops her ballerina dance abruptly and disappears into her room, emerging half a minute later with some soft toys that she piles onto her grandmother’s lap. ‘Grazie carina! Bella bambina!’ my mother says in a high-pitched, affectionate voice. ‘Voi un biscotto? Si? Ecco-la!’ Mum takes a sweet biscuit from the plate on the table and gives it to Sofia, who immediately shoves it into her cherubic mouth. ‘Di “grazie Nonna, grazie Nonna”.’ ‘Grazie Nonna’, Sofia says in singsong Italian, spitting crumbs on the floor. I watch this interaction and try to stifle a small surge of resentment. In just a few seconds Mum has spoken more Italian with Sofia than she has with me in forty years. I think back to the time when I was taking lessons to improve my Italian language skills, how my mother rebuffed all my requests to get her to talk to me in her first language. Yet she speaks happily without prompting to my daughter. The little surge subsides when I realise that talking to Sofia must be easier than talking to me. The love between grandparent and grandchild is a joyful thing, clean and uncomplicated. Mum can speak Italian to Sofia and it can be fun, a game between them. She can be a nonna and all nonnas speak Italian to their grandchildren. There is no sadness or regret, just love and biscotti.

My mother’s mother – my nonna – spoke Italian to us from time to time when we were children. I recall she was a different person when she spoke Italian – more confident, opinionated, and vivacious – than when she spoke English. I wonder whether, if I had been able to really talk with her in her first language, I might have got to know her better. I wonder whether I could have asked more questions about her life and understood the answers. Growing up, I always saw Nonna as a relatively uncomplicated person, content in her role as housewife, with no greater aspirations than to her husband, raise a happy daughter and help that daughter raise even happier daughters. When my nonna died I found out she was a different person than I assumed, with a history full of moments of heartache and bravery. In my attempts to find out about her life, I found out more than I could have anticipated about love, loss, identity, family and the unbelievable things people do in times of war.

1

The Train North

August 2000

The Canberra train station looks almost deserted when my taxi pulls in to the rank. As I emerge from the back seat, the cold morning air has the effect of the first coffee of the day. Suddenly I am awake and ready for the challenge of getting from Canberra to Innisfail in north Queensland in time to see my grandmother. Inside the enger waiting room there are a number of travellers already assembled, despite the fact the train to Sydney won’t be leaving for another forty-five minutes. A few people are lined up in front of the Country Link office and so I them in the queue, shifting my weight from foot to foot with nervous impatience. When it is my turn to sit down at the booking desk I am in a confessional mood. I tell the Country Link lady opposite me that my grandmother – my nonna – is unwell; in fact, we believe she is dying and I need to see her as soon as possible. I want a ticket home to Sydney as well as a return ticket from Sydney to Innisfail. The Country Link lady doesn’t comment on my revelation. Perhaps she thinks I am looking for a discounted fare, like the airlines give for emergencies and bereavements. She repeats the name of my destination to confirm she has it right – Innisfail – and then starts tapping away on the keyboard, her face turned intently towards the static and glow of the computer screen. In the minute or so she spends typing I offer up another confession, namely that while the situation with my nonna is urgent, I’m not one for plane travel. I tell her about my fear of flying, a phobia I developed in my mid

twenties despite a childhood and adolescence spent in planes travelling around the country and the world. I am pouring my heart out but she says nothing. She just keeps typing, her only response the sound of the clicks of her varnished nails on the plastic keys. Who can blame her? There is a crazy person sitting in front of her who is desperate to get to her dying grandmother three thousand kilometres away and she is taking a train. After a minute or two, the Country Link lady turns away from her screen to give me the computer’s diagnosis. I can get an overnight train from Sydney to Brisbane this evening. There is a sleeper available but I will have to share with another female. ‘That’s fine’, I tell her. I will have a few hours’ wait in Brisbane and then I can catch The Sunlander, which travels from Brisbane to Cairns, stopping off at Innisfail. There are no sleepers but there are lots of first-class seats left. The good news is that on the trip back there is a single sleeper free from Innisfail to Brisbane. After another short stay in Brisbane and a bus ride over the border, I will be able to have a sleeper to myself again and I will arrive in Sydney the next morning. I will be on trains almost as long as I will be in Innisfail. I pay for my ticket on my only, almost exhausted, credit card. I tense my shoulders and hold my breath during that five-second pause before the machine confirms you have enough money to proceed with the sale. The train ticket costs nearly twice as much as a return flight to Cairns – further evidence of my insanity. Mum has kindly offered to pay for the ticket and I make a mental note to get the cash from her as soon as I return from the north. I had rung Mum from Canberra the night before to say hello and to report on how my thesis research in the National Archives was going. She told me Nonna had been itted to hospital and a feeling of panic rose and spread its heat through my chest. The tone of Mum’s voice was even. She was almost matter-of-fact, like an experienced nurse talking to a doctor: ‘Teresa Ballini, widow, aged ninety, weight thirty-nine kilograms.’ Nonna is dying is what she was really saying. I needed to get to Nonna right away. When my tickets are confirmed, I take the blue-and-white paper envelope from the Country Link lady and sit down on one of the few uncomfortable

seats left in the waiting room. Then the panic of the previous night returns. I can’t the last time I saw my nonna. It has been so long since we were in the same room together – three years, maybe four. If Nonna had kept a diary – or if I had – I might have been able to pinpoint that final, ordinary moment of . While I can’t the timing of our last moment together, I can confidently imagine what would have happened at the end of that final visit. Nonna would have packed her twenty-year-old navy blue suitcase early in the morning, perhaps even the night before, as her daughter and granddaughters slept and our cats patrolled the kitchen floor. She would have had a breakfast of milky coffee and plain toast topped with butter, the same thing she had served her husband almost every morning during their fifty-plus years of marriage. She would have been sitting, fully made-up and dressed in her travelling clothes, at the table in our kitchen when I woke. She would have wished me a good morning and offered to fix me something to eat, despite knowing I would want a simple bowl of muesli. She would have been eager to get to the airport as the morning wore on, but reluctant to leave us at the same time. I would not have gone with my mother and sister to the airport to say goodbye, giving the usual weak excuse that I was too busy. Nonna would not have insisted that I come with them or sulked because I wasn’t. Instead we would have kissed and hugged on the threshold of our house and waved to each other as she sat in the back seat of our secondhand Saab. And she would have seen me turn away, too quickly, from the departing car.

*

The Canberra to Sydney train trip is outrageously slow, and when you are in a hurry it sometimes feels as if more progress could be made if you got out and jogged. I decide not to go over and see my mother and sister Emily at their place; instead I’ll spend my few hours in Sydney at home unpacking my Canberra bag full of jumpers and jeans and packing my Innisfail bag full of short-sleeved cotton shirts and lightweight pants. I’ll also need to

gather together enough reading material to justify to my thesis supervisor that I’m not taking a break from my studies. The train from Canberra pulls into Central Station late and I splurge on a taxi to get home as quickly as possible. The one-bedroom apartment I share with my partner is close to the seaside suburb of Coogee. I spend the day packing and unpacking, sending emails, making phone calls and doing laundry – all the comforting little tasks that keep you from thinking too much about anything important. Then I look through the photos I have of Nonna, wondering whether to take some with me. There is one particularly important photo I consider for quite some time. It was taken in the mid 1970s with my parents’ treasured single-lens Pentax camera and now sits in a wooden frame on my bookshelf near my desk. The photo is from the time we all lived in Adelaide. Four of us – Mum, Nonna, Emily and me – are on the front lawn of my grandparents’ house on the Esplanade at Glenelg. The photo must have been taken in winter, judging by the blue and chocolate brown skivvies we are wearing. It is a square photo, matt and faded, as if covered with a layer of dust that can’t be wiped away. It’s the kind of photo that wouldn’t exist today, that would have been deleted almost as soon as it was taken because you can’t see my face and Nonna isn’t looking towards the camera. And yet it is perfect. In the foreground to the left, my sister Emily smiles broadly. She is advancing with toddler steps towards the person behind the camera. My father? My grandfather? No one can who it was. She is planning, I expect, to grab the camera out of the hands of the forgotten photographer. Sitting a few metres behind her, in the centre of the frame, is my mother. Over her brown skivvy she is wearing a chambray dress and a widebrimmed blue hat. Her black hair is long and straight. She looks happy to be in the photo, which is surprising given she hates being photographed. I am sitting next to her in a light blue skivvy that is covering my chubby, four-year-old chest. I am looking towards the ground, my arms outstretched as if I am pretending to be a plane, but I am clearly about to launch myself up and towards my sister, racing her to get to the camera first. Then there is Nonna, kneeling behind me, her face lit up by her smile, not for the camera’s sake but for ours. She is looking at Emily, perhaps anticipating the humour of the contest between her granddaughters for centre stage and possession of the camera. This is the truest photo I have of my family, four

sides of a square, all loving each other equally in their own way. In the end I don’t pack this or any other photos. It occurs to me that being forced to think about the past may be upsetting or tiring for Nonna. It may not be the best way for us to spend our last moments together. Instead, I take the time to walk up to the local shops to buy rosewater hand lotion from the pharmacy. I seeing some in Nonna’s vanity drawer once when I was a child, a tube that was almost full but didn’t look new. I guess it was a gift she thought was too fancy to use regularly. Now I want her to have something luxurious that we can share, and we can use the tube up completely in a few days if we want to. With my chores complete, I ring my partner at his work to tell him about my train trip north. After a moment’s pause he suggests I take a plane because Nonna may die before I get there. I tell him he is wrong; the train, however slow, will get me there in time. Also, Nonna knows I am coming and she will hold on until I arrive. He thinks I should reconsider my plans given what’s at stake. I end the conversation abruptly, slamming the phone down in anger, overreacting because he may well be right.

*

The woman sharing my Sydney to Brisbane sleeper happens to be an Italian woman. She is a few years older than me, attractive, with long dark hair. In Australia on a working holiday, she has been living in Bondi, only a few suburbs away from me. She is on one of her regular mini-trips to discover different parts of the country. She tells me she loves Australia, especially the climate and the beaches. The men, though, are another matter. ‘Why do Australian men have such trouble talking to women?’ she asks me. ‘They can only talk when they are drunk.’ I laugh in agreement. She is eager to keep me engaged in an in-depth discussion about the mysteries of the Australian male but I’m not much help. I am still working them out myself, with little success. I eat my takeaway dinner of cold salad and sushi while she chats away. Then we retire early, her to the upper berth and me to the lower one.

I find it hard to sleep. As I lie on my back under stiff white sheets and rough blankets I recall childhood trips on The Overland from Melbourne to Adelaide, in which I relished the rhythm and rock of the train. It was as if the sleeper was one giant mechanised hammock. Tonight, though, I don’t sleep well at all. The train lurches and bumps at the precise moment I am nodding off, like a hand jerking me awake to deal with some emergency. Electric lights keep penetrating the cabin through gaps in the blue curtains as we speed past country towns and crossings. I start off the night feeling too cold and then end up feeling too warm, then return to feeling cold again. I don’t think much about Nonna. Instead I mourn the death of my romantic view of overnight train travel. We arrive in Brisbane very early in the morning, that time reserved for joggers and garbos and long-distance commuters. My companion says only a few words to me over breakfast – tart orange juice in a plastic container, a tub of full-fat yoghurt and one soft hot croissant – which is delivered with abrupt cheerfulness half an hour before our arrival. She leaves the cabin before I do, saying a polite but quick goodbye, as if our chat about men the night before hadn’t happened. I put it down to the thought that perhaps she isn’t a morning person or perhaps she feels she said too much the night before. I am left alone with a few hours to kill in Brisbane. I check my baggage and reading material into a locker and set off without a map to wander around the CBD. I don’t know the city very well as I haven’t visited it since I was a teenager. I don’t have the cash to shop or the energy to visit an art gallery. So I walk aimlessly through streets that seem similar to but emptier than the ones I know in Sydney. Before long I head back to the station to board The Sunlander bound for Cairns. The carriage is cleaner and newer than the shabbier ones I am used to travelling in from Sydney to Canberra and Melbourne. I am lucky though, as I have a seat by the window and the conductor tells me as he checks my ticket that the places next to me are unoccupied for the whole trip – I can stretch out and sleep if I want to. Looking around, I see the car is half full of holidaying pensioners and a few families. I am one of only a few single people and the only woman travelling on her own. I let my reading material rest in my backpack while I stare out the window. Almost the entire length of Queensland will me by over the next twenty-nine hours.

Without a travelling companion and little energy for Foucault’s theory of discourse, I am left with time to think about Nonna. Somewhere on the outskirts of Brisbane it dawns on me that I must have disappointed her. I haven’t seen her in years. I missed her ninetieth birthday celebrations the month before, reluctant to fly north and back. My mother and my sister went, ing our extended family at a party at her nursing home. My sister took photos of Nonna blowing out the candles on a hideously expensive birthday cake that I had bought for her, my way of compensating for my absence. More than the shame of missing this milestone, I feel a greater sadness that at twenty-seven I am unmarried and childless. Nonna will die before she sees her eldest granddaughter in a wedding dress or nurses her first great-grandchild. The train trip is mostly lonely and uneventful. I talk to no one other than the man at the canteen car who keeps me supplied with a steady stream of bad sandwiches, tea and gossip magazines. I glance at my PhD reading material every now and then but drift through entire paragraphs and have to retrace my steps. I find it impossible to concentrate and spend hours at a time staring out the window. It is enough to be absorbed in the landscape steadily changing in front of my eyes. You feel so close to it on a train journey. Four or five hours out of Brisbane I notice the first signs that we are approaching the tropics. David Malouf wrote about a similar train journey he took north when he was younger. He said that one of the advantages of train travel is that you have time to ‘get used to travelling’:

You could watch the country change, feel the temperature rise, the air dampen, and tell yourself as you counted off the houses that the journey you were making was the equivalent of Paris to Moscow . . . There were no borders to cross, no . . . uniformed officials, no changes of coinage or tongue . . .

At the end of a trip like this, it feels as if you should arrive somewhere truly foreign, rather than merely different. It feels as if you deserve to indulge in some duty-free shopping.

I want to fall asleep long before the sun outside the window dims. I am exhausted from the interrupted night before. I slip off my shoes, pull on sport socks and try to wrap the Queensland Rail blanket around me in a way that will stop it slipping onto the linoleum floor. I lie down, curled up with my head towards the window and my feet slotted under the armrest. My toes protrude slightly into the centre aisle. I know they are courting midnight encounters with travellers heading towards the toilet but I don’t care. I face outwards so I won’t have to inhale the stale smell of the seat fabric, the ingrained dirt and sweat of countless engers who have gone before me. I sleep in this foetal position without waking until dawn.

*

In the morning I unfurl myself with some difficulty. I sit up and look out the window and instantly recognise the tropical landscape behind the glass. In his book on north Queensland, Alan Frost describes how halfway between Townsville and Ingham, ‘grazing paddocks and swamplands give way to scrub and sugar cultivations, the coastal ranges begin to glisten with rainforest’. The flora and fauna is nothing like what you might find in other parts of the country. In a time prior to the arrival of Europeans, dense foliage covered these floodplains like an almost uninterrupted blanket. The first piece of land Nonna’s father, Luigi Ballini, bought when he arrived in Australia had been like the land I could see outside my window. Luigi’s property was located in South Johnstone, thirteen kilometres south of Innisfail. When he bought it, it was choked with thick tropical vegetation. Luigi cleared his ninety-six acres with a couple of other Italian men using just saws, axes and shovels. He did this work on a Sunday, after having worked for six days on another man’s farm cutting cane. Once the clearing had been done, the roots of the trees they felled were excavated with dynamite. All the green matter was burnt, the first of many fires to be lit on that ground. Cane was planted. And then a bad storm destroyed his crops and damaged the farmhouse, but Luigi rebuilt, working seven days a week. The steaming landscape Luigi battled with was nothing like the tidy little parcels of land on the island of

Elba, his birthplace, off the Tuscan coast. The thought of all this toil makes me overwhelmingly tired. It also feels as if the train is moving slower, as if its pace has been slackened by the heat and humidity. I am moving in slow motion as well. I eat my breakfast – yet another tub of yoghurt and a hot croissant – with a rare lack of enthusiasm. I take my toiletry bag into the bathroom and try to freshen up, washing my face with my hands and swabbing under my arms and around my neck with dampened toilet paper. It is almost noon before I think about calling my mother back in Sydney. I make my way to the canteen to pick up some lunch and to use the public phone. Mum answers after only three ring tones. Once she knows it is me she says almost immediately, ‘I am sorry Rebecca. Nonna died this morning’.

*

After talking briefly with Mum before she and my sister leave for the airport to fly north to meet me, I make my way back to my seat. I dodge fellow engers heading towards the sandwiches and soft drink. I find my place and sit as still as possible, as if behaving like nothing has happened would make it so. I stare out of the window for some time, watching the horizon as we slide in and out of train-track towns. Only a few clouds hang in the bright blue sky. I reach into my backpack and take out the rosewater hand cream. Breaking its thin metal seal, I squeeze a large glossy bead of it into my left palm and work the cream into my hands, wrists and all the way up to my elbows. I focus on the feeling of skin across skin, trying not to cry in front of this carriage-load of strangers.

2

A Migrant Town

Innisfail is not my hometown but when I go there it feels like I am returning somewhere personal, a place that has a claim on me. Most Australians only know about Innisfail because of its sugar, its bananas and its extreme weather. It is a place of fierce cyclones and floods. Some say it’s one of the country’s wettest towns. The humidity claims almost everything that isn’t surrounded by state-of-the-art air conditioning. David Malouf describes the dampness in the far north as so intrusive that it ‘gets in and covers boots and leather belts in a wardrobe with mould’. The town sits inland, five kilometres from the Cassowary Coast, an hour’s drive or so south of Cairns, at the juncture where the North and South Johnstone rivers meet. Surrounded by old-growth rainforests and the newer growth of cane fields and fruit farms, Innisfail’s population is small, a little over eight thousand people. It is not a tourist destination like nearby Mission Beach, but it is a pretty town. Trouble has been taken by the local council to preserve many of its old buildings with their art-deco style. Even the new buildings in the city centre are built to conform to the look of that time. I am one of a few people to disembark at the train station. Mum had told me on the phone that my Uncle Frank, her cousin, has offered to pick me up. As promised, he is waiting for me, standing to greet me at the end of the unsheltered platform. Frank is wearing his farming clothes but no hat. He looks to me like an antipodean version of a John Steinbeck hero, exuding roughness and decency in equal measure. I am surprised at the extent of my happiness and relief when I see him – finally, company and someone to talk to about Nonna. He reaches out his hand to grasp mine, to pull me into a hug. His palm feels like a block of un-sanded wood. The texture takes me by

surprise because I am so used to the hands of men whose only tools are laptops and mobile phones. I haven’t seen Frank in years and he has hardly aged at all. Of course Italians weather well, even in the northern Australian sun. Frank is the second of four children born to my nonna’s sister Dina, the eldest of the five Ballini girls. I Dina as a physically frail but fierce old woman who seemed to be permanently glued to an easy chair in the granny flat behind her daughter Elsie’s house. She had a way of fixing you with eyes that looked as hard as glass. Frank, on the other hand, has soft eyes. In his sixties, he is a cane farmer who also owns tin mines. He is a bachelor, charming and handsome, so handsome in fact that my mother jokes he should have been born with a label on his backside: ‘Warning: this man can cause heart problems.’ Frank takes me to a coffee shop in the centre of town and we drink hot things despite the heat. We sit at a small round table covered with a lace cloth and decorated with a plastic geranium in a slender glass vase. When my latte arrives it is strong enough but not hot enough as it has been cooled too easily by the shop’s turbo-charged air conditioning. On the face of it, Frank and I have almost nothing in common but blood yet I can talk to him, especially after two days of hardly speaking to anyone. I confide in him about how I feel I let Nonna down by not getting married before she died. ‘She never got to see me in a wedding dress’, I tell him. Frank laughs in his gentle way and shakes his head ever so slightly. ‘You didn’t really know your nonna, did you? She was a feminist before we knew what feminism was. When the men were interned during the war, it was your nonna who ran the farms. She kept everything going until they came back. She wasn’t waiting for you to get married. The proudest day of her life was when you graduated university.’ I listen respectfully to Frank but wonder whether he is saying these things to make me feel better – his version of ‘she died peacefully’ or ‘she’s gone to a better place’. I listen to him but I can’t quite believe him. While I vaguely recall that the men in the family were interned, no one has ever spoken to me about what Nonna did during the war. My nonna, a feminist trailblazer? It didn’t fit with my image of her as a woman who had no greater ambition

in life than to cook, clean and care for others. We stay at the coffee shop for a long time and I ask Frank more about the family, the full spectrum of uncles, aunties and cousins, the Ballinis, the Corsis and the Aglis. He tells me about the troubles he’s having making a decent profit from sugar; he is trying to get out of it, to make a better living from mining if he can. We talk some more about Nonna, and I ask whether she was in pain at the end. Thankfully, the geriatric leukemia she had wasn’t aggressive and her most obvious symptoms had been loss of appetite and energy. ‘What did she say to you when you visited her at the hospital?’ ‘Oh, the usual things we talked about when we saw each other, family things and that’, he answers. Frank had always been diligent about visiting Nonna regularly, especially after her husband died. Sometimes he would take her to Vigil Mass on a Sunday if she was willing – Nonna’s belief in the church had waned as she got older. Frank tells me he is going to Mass the following night and I ask if I can go with him. I haven’t been to church in years but right now I want to visit the places where Nonna spent time, among people that knew her. I think Mass at her church might give me some solace, perhaps even help me to still feel close to her. Frank and I string out two coffees as long as is respectable until we notice the waitress hovering nearby, waiting to clear our table. We head back out into the heat and drive around the corner to The Riverside Hotel, my home for the next three days. I am surprised to see Mum and Emily there already, leaning on the balcony outside our rooms. They tell me they have just arrived from Cairns in their hire car. Mum is smiling and looks relaxed. She must have been working herself towards her mother’s death for years, talking it though with Frank during their long Sunday afternoon phone calls. The motel is basic but clean, family run and un-renovated since its construction in the late 1980s. True to its name, it looks towards the river, with a sideways glance at the drive-in bottle shop across the road. Mum, Emily and Frank sit in one room to talk and I go into the other to call my partner. I tell him Nonna died that morning and that I had missed her by half a day. He tells me he is sorry and is thoughtful enough not to say, I told

you so. I cry a little while we talk, but not with any intensity. I feel punch drunk with the heat and the movement of the train still trapped in my body. I don’t ask him to come up for the funeral and he doesn’t offer. I decide to take a shower, my first since leaving Sydney. As I stand underneath the lukewarm gush of water I think about what Frank has told me, about how Nonna didn’t care whether I got married or not. I try to what she had said to me over the years about marriage. She never asked me after meeting the various boyfriends I have had since I was eighteen whether marriage was on the cards. She never spoke about her own wedding or the weddings of other people’s daughters and granddaughters. I only one comment she made to me, when I was a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old. I was sitting with her hand in mine, twiddling with the rings on her fingers, turning them clockwise and counterclockwise, asking her about the names of the various gemstones. She pointed to her plain gold wedding ring, burnished and scratched, and told me solemnly, as if it was a warning, ‘Everything changes between a man and woman once you put this on’.

*

I finish my shower and get dressed in slightly wrinkled clothes for dinner. The steam from the shower and the humidity in the air makes it almost impossible to get completely dry. I apply extra deodorant and spray myself liberally with perfume. Some of our closest relatives have descended on our hotel room after finding out we have arrived in town: my beloved Auntie Elsie and her husband Bruno, and Frank’s eldest brother Dino and his wife Alice. Dino had been Nonna’s favourite nephew and the last person in the family to see her alive. As we sit together in Mum and Emily’s hotel room, Dino tells us that Nonna had been quiet but clear-headed when he went to see her in hospital that morning. They talked in Italian, him sitting by her bedside, her slightly elevated in her bed. She answered every question he asked her, although she kept her eyes closed most of the time as they spoke. The novelist Louis de Bernières once wrote that ‘a resigned composure’ overtakes those on the edge of death, and I imagine Nonna this way, calm

and accepting. After visiting her for an hour or so Dino told her he had a doctor’s appointment and needed to go, but he promised he would return later. ‘Don’t worry about hurrying back, Dino. You come and visit me when you are ready’, she had said to him. He left and she died twenty minutes later. Dino couldn’t believe Nonna could slip into death so quickly, after such a banal exchange about him being on time for the doctor. In contrast to Dino, his sister Elsie is ignoring all the death talk and is joking around, keen to share stories about her recent trip to Kalgoorlie to visit her eldest son. She tells us about the bars with topless waitresses and the flash brothels in the town, one of which allows non-client of the public to tour the rooms. Frank says very little, sitting on a chair at the edge of the group, as always the family’s fringe dweller. ‘I want Nonna to be cremated’, Mum announces during a lull in the conversation. The men are silent in response, as is Alice, but Elsie can’t hold her tongue. ‘Zia would have never have wanted to be burnt up. You know that, Marisa.’ Mum simply looks at her straight-shooting cousin, her face sad and thoughtful. I know what Mum’s thinking. She wants Nonna near us, not in Innisfail. If her mother is cremated she can have her ashes housed in a ceramic urn and placed on the mantelpiece in our Sydney home, not unlike the Wedgwood statues my grandparents used to display in their living room. But Elsie is right about her auntie, and it doesn’t take much to convince Mum that Nonna should be buried. No one in our family has ever been cremated. They are all lying in the cemetery in Innisfail. Nonna will be no different. My uncles and aunties leave us as the sun is setting but Frank stays on and has dinner with us at a bistro in one of the town’s numerous pubs. Surprisingly, our mood isn’t sombre. We are together and Frank keeps us talking and laughing. The fact that we are in Innisfail and Nonna is gone doesn’t feel real. We have only ever come here in the past to see her and at this moment it is as if she is still in her room at the nursing home and we have simply delayed visiting her until the morning.

*

Later that evening, lying under starched sheets, I think about the last time I was in Innisfail. We had flown up as a family for my grandfather’s, my nonno’s, funeral eight years earlier. After decades of working on building sites and making statues of animals and dancing girls for carnivals, Oreste’s lungs had deteriorated, eaten away by concrete and plaster dust and the fumes from the gelatine moulds. After his death, the doctor told my mother his lungs were full of so many holes they looked like a piece of lacework. I was with Mum and Nonna when the undertaker visited us at my grandparents’ home to discuss the details of his funeral service. The undertaker was an older man with a thin frame and features. I thinking he looked like the undertaker in the film The Right Stuff, imive and ominous. I guess I had never met an undertaker before; the movies were my only frame of reference. At one point in the conversation the undertaker asked my nonna details about her husband’s full name: Oreste Ballini. Then he asked my nonna for her full name: Teresa Ballini. ‘And your maiden name?’ ‘Ballini.’ ‘No your maiden name?’ ‘It’s Ballini. I was a Ballini when I got married to a Ballini’, my nonna said without hesitation. He looked at her and then realised it was his mistake, not hers. ‘His parents were Ballinis; my parents were Ballinis as well. Tutti sono Ballini.’ Everyone is a Ballini, she had said with no shame. He gave us an uncomfortable smile and moved on to discuss the flower arrangements. After he left, I quizzed my mother. ‘So Nonno and Nonna were related?’ I asked. ‘Yes’.

‘Distant cousins?’ ‘No, first cousins. Nonno’s father was the brother of Nonna’s mother.’ ‘What about Nonna’s parents?’ ‘Yes, Ballini was Marietta’s, Nonna’s mother’s, surname before she married Luigi Ballini.’ ‘So they were related too?’ ‘They used to say they weren’t, but who knows?’ Jokes about banjo picking and mutant babies ran through my head. I looked at my mother. Was this something we should be itting in public? I had never heard her say to someone, I am the child of first cousins, but at the same time no one was hiding anything either. It wasn’t so much a secret as a fact that lies somewhere between denial and approval. Unable to sleep I start thinking about the name Ballini. It is nowhere near as evocative as ‘Bellini’, the name of famous Renaissance painters and of the sparkling peach cocktail we love to drink at Christmas time. But it still feels like a glamorous name and at one point in my life I wanted it to be my own. A few months before I started university I decided I would get rid of my surname, Crawford, mainly because I wanted to study law and my father was the dean of the faculty at The University of Sydney. I wanted anonymity. I was also happy to drop the name. I never felt close to the Scottish–Australian side of my heritage nor had I seen much of my father’s family since my parents separated in my mid teens. So I told my mum I was thinking of taking Ballini as my surname. She was strongly against the idea; in fact she made me promise not to do it. She was so adamant that I let Ballini go without a second thought just to avoid a confrontation. In the end Huntley was a name chosen randomly from the A–K phone book. Years later, I asked Mum why she was so against me taking her maiden name. Her answer completely surprised me. She said she worried that I wouldn’t succeed in life – in law or journalism or business – if I had an Italian surname. She thought I would face too much racism and discrimination. I tried to tell her that Italians were fully accepted, even cool, now but she insisted that that wasn’t the case.

‘Name one prominent Italian public figure in Australia’, she asked me. I named a few but she was unconvinced. While I believed things had changed for Italians in Australia, my mother didn’t feel the same way. To her, Italians were still looked down on by the WASPs that ran the country. She didn’t want her daughters to face discrimination and so such an obvious Anglo–Saxon name like Huntley was a better choice than a genuine family name like Ballini. Thinking now about my name change, the whole episode strikes me as absurd. I should have pressed my mother further for the reasons she was opposed to my first choice. I should have defied her and started my adult life as Rebecca Ballini. Now Ballini is gone, ceded too easily in favour of a name arbitrarily picked because it sounded neutral, but really because it sounded ‘Australian’.

*

Apart from rain, sugar and cyclones, Innisfail is famous for being an Italian enclave; the largest in the area after the town of Ingham located about one hundred and sixty kilometres to the south. My relatives are just one of hundreds of Italian families in the Innisfail phone book. The place was founded in the early 1880s as an Irish town and its name is derived from the word used by Shakespeare and Yeats for Ireland – Innisfree. Its founder, Thomas Henry Fitzgerald, has been described as a ‘strikingly handsome, virile and talented’ Irish-born engineer, architect and surveyor who dreamed of transforming a tract of dark scrubland on a river junction into orderly cane farms and sugar mills. Fitzgerald’s town was originally called Geraldton but the name had to be changed to prevent confusion with Geraldton in Western Australia. The story goes that in 1910 a large Russian timber ship out of Vladivostok arrived at Hecate Point near Cardwell. No one on board could speak English so a couple of the Chinese crew was taken ashore to converse with a few of their countrymen who were working as market gardeners at nearby Meunga Creek. The crewmen couldn’t have been pleased to discover they were not in Western Australia but on the other side of a vast continent. The

wrong charts had apparently been given to the captain before he left Russia. Innisfail was transformed from a predominantly Irish settlement into a prime destination for Italian migrants following the establishment of the ‘White Australia’ policy. The government’s position meant that the Kanakas – the Melanesian men who had for forty years provided the bulk of the labour for the sugar industry – were forced to return to their original homes in the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides and New Britain. These indentured servants were evicted from the country regardless of the fact that many were well established in the north with homes, wives and children. The irony of this was cruel given that many of the Kanakas had originally been kidnapped from their homes to work in the cane fields. Both the repatriation of the Kanakas and the White Australia policy posed an enormous problem for the sugar industry. They needed cutters but the State demanded that they had to be white and it was hard to attract enough white men to do cane cutting work. It seemed that men from Italy were considered white enough – and hungry enough – to do the backbreaking work of cutting cane. But it wasn’t just any Italians who could fill the labour gap left by the Kanakas; they had to be from Italy’s north. In fact the Queensland Government stipulated that any Italian coming to the cane fields had to come from regions north of Livorno. And so, in 1891, 335 men from Piedmont and Lombardy arrived in Townsville, imported by two Italian businessmen called Armati and Fraire. By 1907, the first of many significant waves of Italian nationals looking for cutting contracts arrived in the region. My great-grandfather, Luigi, was in one of these early waves, arriving in Brisbane in May 1914, only a few months before the start of the First World War. It wasn’t just the Italians who were attracted to the far north, something I discover on my first morning in Innisfail when I take my pre-breakfast walk around the town. ing all the shops on Edith Street, I turn left into Owen Street and spot a building painted deep red with a green roof. I assume it is the obligatory country town Chinese restaurant but a plaque in front of its entrance tells me it is a Joss House, a Chinese Temple. This version was built in 1940, and it is said to be far more ornate than the original Joss House built on the site in 1890. The Chinese have been living in the Innisfail area even before the Italians arrived in serious numbers. They had come via the goldfields, at first to cut cane but later to run shops and grow bananas.

At one time Innisfail hosted a vibrant and extensive Chinatown where Mr See Poy ran his famous and successful store. In her book Hurricane Lamps and Blue Umbrellas, Dorothy Jones describes Innisfail’s Chinatown at its nadir:

Chinatown was noisome, exotic, pungent and entered by a roofed bridge leading to serpentine lands lined with alcoves and shops. Hurricane lamps were hung at night to give some light . . . Chinatown provided everything from blue umbrellas, wonderful food, gold buyers, samshu [rice wine], girls who were apparently never of the Chinese race, opium dens, colourful pageantry and gambling . . . Opium was smoked quite openly without repercussions . . . [There were] Chinese herbalists and even a Chinese barber who would cut hair, clean ears and scrape the tongue for one and six.

This cacophony of sight, sound and smell has by now shrunk to a single structure, a tourist attraction in a town that attracts few tourists. And yet the Joss House reminds me that north Queensland has always been a mixed community of Italians, Slavs, Germans, Greeks, Maltese, Finns, Chinese, Japanese, Malay and Spanish. Local historian Delia Birchley says that ‘there never was, and never could be, a White Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn’. Even during the White Australia years, Innisfail was a multiracial community and today the descendants of migrants from Europe, Asia and the Pacific outnumber the town’s original Irish founders.

*

After my morning walk, I return to the hotel for a shower and breakfast. Over cereal, Mum tells my sister and me what we have to do that day, namely all the istrative tasks death throws up to be dealt with by the living. We need to go to the funeral parlour to discuss the details of the burial and we have to organise the food for the wake. Because Nonna was an excellent cook, the food must be good and, because she was Italian, there

has to be lots of it. Frank promised us the night before that he would talk to the priest about the service, which is a blessing given how my mother is when it comes to priests. They have to have an open mind and a sense of humour; if she encounters a die-hard fan of John Paul II, there might be trouble. There is enough already for us to attempt in one day so we decide that sorting through Nonna’s possessions at the nursing home will have to wait. We head off to the funeral parlour and the woman who greets us at the door has perfected that particular manner those in her profession use when they interact with their clients: the dulcet tones, attentive looks and respectfully slow movements. Despite her gentle demeanour, she manages to efficiently usher us through a list of decisions that need to be made. ‘Do you want to view the body before the funeral?’ ‘No’, my mother says. ‘Mum was a very private person. I know she’d hate the idea of people looking at her dead body.’ ‘What kind of casket would you like?’ We decide Nonna will be laid to rest in something nice but not extravagant. No dark timber or red velvet. ‘What would you like the deceased to wear?’ Her nightgown from the hospital will be fine. ‘My mother would hate the idea of strangers dressing and undressing her’, Mum says. A few soft toys will be placed in the coffin with Nonna, providing a fluffy barrier between her body and the casket walls. Mum also asks that they include among the teddy bears a porcelain-faced doll Nonna cherished, one with blonde ringlets and a Victorian-style dress. We tell the funeral parlour lady that Nonna is to be buried in the plot where her husband is already interred. They had buried him deep enough so that his wife could be placed above him when she died. ‘That makes sense. She was always above him’, Mum says. The expression on the funeral lady’s face tells me she doesn’t know whether it is appropriate to laugh or not.

*

Early in the evening, I leave Mum and Emily in their hotel room and go with Frank to Mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel. While he is a regular, I am an interloper and so I ask him if we can sit towards the back of the church. It seems impolite to take a seat at the front. Looking around me, the congregation is larger than I expected. It includes lots of older people of course, but there are also families, young parents with their children. The little ones are awed enough by their surroundings to remain relatively quiet and well behaved during the ceremony. As the service commences, I reflect on my presence in the church where my grandparents had married and where my mother had been baptised. This place has hosted so many notable moments in my family’s history. Built in 1921, Our Lady of Good Counsel sits on the highest point of Innisfail in the centre of town. If you feel lost while driving or walking in the area, you can always look up and find the turrets and towers of the church and instantly you know where you are. The structure owes its existence to the determination and grit of Father Michael Clancy. After his original church was destroyed by the 1918 cyclone, the energetic priest organised for a larger and more resilient structure, which is neo-Gothic and art deco in style, to be built on the same location. Frank turns to me at certain moments in the service and smiles and squeezes my hand. The soft night air blows in from the front door and the flow and rituals of the evening service comfort me. I The Lord’s Prayer in full, reciting the words with ease as if they are the lyrics of a 1980s pop song. The priest then acknowledges Nonna’s death and asks us all to pray for her. I sing the hymns enthusiastically in tune with the strains of the electric organ; at times it feels like I am back at high school during our weekly assemblies, trying to belt out a harmonious version of Advance Australia Fair. My mind, though, is not fully on the service. I am thinking about the next morning, when all the family will be sitting in the pews in the sunlight and the heat, gathered around Nonna for the last time.

3

Rite of age

The day we bury Nonna is warm and not too humid. The skies over Innisfail are almost free of clouds. I decide on my mourning wear – flat-heeled shoes, a skirt and matching top in a deep maroon colour with black lace trim, and a black cardigan. My long hair is out. Mum is wearing a black dress but with a coloured shawl because Nonna was never a fan of black, even on days like this. In fact, it was her father who started this disapproval when he banned his children from wearing all black to funerals. He considered it to be too Sicilian. As we get ready to leave the hotel for the church, I marvel at my mother, her apparent calmness and good humour. My sister, always less demonstrative than me, looks relaxed, as if this was any other Monday. I feel like the only one who is anxious and emotional. Brushing my teeth that morning I was close to tears, the strain in the back of my throat fighting with the peppermint taste of the toothpaste. Mum, Emily and I arrive at Our Lady of Good Counsel. We mill around the entrance of the church, greeting familiar as well as unfamiliar guests. We are the next of kin yet we are unsure of what we are meant to do. As the chief mourners, we know we will sit at the front of the church closest to the priest. We will have our parts to play in the service – I will read from the Bible, Mum will give the eulogy. We will also be the first to rise with the priest when they carry the coffin out to the hearse. Other than that we are at a loss. As Mum greets yet another distant relative, I turn and see an attendant enter from the church’s side door, wheeling in Nonna’s coffin on a steel gurney. He places it in the middle of the centre aisle of the church, as you might line up a shopping trolley at a supermarket checkout. This is Nonna,

dead and lying in a box. I feel a moment of panic and then anger. I know the lid on her casket will remain shut and I feel the weight of my last chance to see her in the flesh denied. I haven’t been allowed enough time to prepare for this moment and it suddenly seems unfair that things are happening so quickly. I try to control my angst at the sight of the coffin and turn to hug my sister, hoping some of her calm will rub off on me. She returns the gesture with a light squeeze. She feels hot and is sweating despite the cool of the church. A welcome breeze blows through the church and the sun shines in the windows, shedding light on the white walls and dark wooden pews. We sit in front of a respectable number of close and distant relatives and some of Nonna’s more mobile acquaintances from the nursing home. Mum had wanted a simple ceremony. No ostentatious sprays of lilies or gladioli were ordered. Instead she asked for arrangements full of unfashionable carnations in white and pink. Carnations had been Nonna’s favourite flower and are supposed to be symbolic of a mother’s undying love. Christian legend has it that pink carnations sprang from the ground where the Virgin Mary’s tears fell as she wept for her son on the cross. The carnations don’t stand alone, though, as relatives and friends have sent more flowers to be placed at the altar. I think the town’s only florist must be quietly thankful for days like this. The nuns at the Sydney school where Mum teaches have hurriedly prepared a service for her, modified by the local priest to suit his own flock; more familiar hymns and so on. The church’s best organist, the one I had heard the night before, has consented to come in on a weekday to play for us. The service starts with Here I Am Lord as the entrance hymn, followed by the introductory rite: ‘We welcome the body of our sister, Teresa, into our midst for the last time and surround her with the prayer of the Church.’ Sprinkling the casket with holy water, the priest tells us that in being baptised Nonna died with Christ and is reborn, and will now share with him eternal glory. After the opening prayer, in which we humbly entrust Nonna into the Lord’s hands, it is my turn to do a reading, from the letter of Saint Paul to the Romans. When I start, my voice is steady even if the pace of my reading is slow.

‘With God on our side who can be against us?’ I read, but then stumble over ‘Nothing therefore can come between us’. The mistake unnerves me and I start to cry, tears falling on the tissue paper folios of the Bible. My mouth forms the solemn words but the sense of them is lost in my gulping and wet inhalations. ‘For I am certain of this: neither death nor life . . . can ever come between us and the love of God.’ I finish and take my seat at the front, whispering an apology to Mum for mes the reading. There are more readings spoken by the priest. His homily feels long and impersonal, but then homilies often do. At one point Mum scrounges for a pen in her bag and writes on Emily’s order of service, ‘Nonna would have said, “Get to the point you stupid windbag”’. We try not to break into inappropriate laughter as the priest speaks about how we can triumph through life’s trials by the power of God’s love. We can’t, and so we huddle together, trying to muffle our giggles on forearms and shoulders. Later on, Frank tells us he thought we were embracing each other and crying. When Mum gets up to give the eulogy she doesn’t talk about God but that other great institution in Italian life: family. She acknowledges the relatives in the room – Frank, Alice, Elsie, Rosie, Pauline and others – who looked out for Nonna each week in the years since her husband’s death. She singles out Dino for a special mention: ‘Dino, my mother was there when you started your life and you were there at the end of hers.’ Mum then tells us that she can’t really believe Nonna will no longer be around. ‘I keep thinking I will walk into a room and she will be sitting there, in a comfortable chair, with her hands folded in her lap, impeccably dressed, waiting to go out somewhere for coffee. But she is gone.’ The time for communion arrives and, having never taken my first communion, it feels a little insincere to receive the sacrament. I have done so only a few times in my life and on each occasion I felt nervous, as if the priest had the power to see through me, to sniff me out as an impostor. But at this moment I get it into my head that Nonna would want me to take communion and so I get up from my seat and step into the altar space. It takes a few seconds for me to figure out that I am the only one standing up there with the priest, that no one has followed me. I am not supposed to be

there. I stand rooted to the ground in embarrassment. I look towards my mother and sister who stare at me in confusion: What are you doing? To the priest’s credit, he goes with it. He is surprised to see me in front of him but after a moment of contemplation his face relaxes and he smiles at me. Like a lost child or patient with dementia, I have wandered into his front yard and he is obliged to take me by the hand and look after me. He gives me directions about holding the cup filled with the wine and the plate with the wafers. I have no idea what I am doing and have forgotten what little I knew about the ritual, its progression and protocols. At one stage the priest tries to take from my hands the plate on which the broken wafers lie but I keep holding onto it. He almost yanks it from my grip and the crackers slide across the plate, threatening to fall to the floor. Once the host has been prepared, the of the congregation rise to receive it and I them in the line-up. The sip of wine and bite of wafer fill my mouth with an unpleasant taste. I think about the catering we have ordered for the wake and suddenly feel hungry for real food. I expect the faithful mourners lined up next to me to look in my direction with disapproval, but I am ignored. Like our family laughing fit, my behaviour has been absorbed by those around us as a normal part of the ceremony. When the communion rites are over I try not to rush too quickly back to my seat next to Mum. More hymns and prayers follow and then the final commendation. Holy water and incense signal that the Mass is over and we are all assured we will meet Nonna again in Christ’s company in heaven. Mum and I link arms and my sister follows behind us as we walk down the aisle, smiling left and right at relatives and friends, towards the light at the church’s front door.

*

We drive, just the three of us, in the escalating heat away from the church and the centre of town towards the cemetery. Mum tells us she is pleased with the way the funeral was done and surprised by how many people turned up. We arrive at the cemetery grounds and drive up the pathway

that cuts through the orderly ranks of the dead. We park the car a few metres from the growing crowd of relatives gathering where folding chairs have been set up at the gravesite. There is a worn red carpet next to the hole in the earth. Auntie Elsie wanders around, looking at the gravestones surrounding Nonna’s plot, telling us who she knows and who she doesn’t. She points to a plot close to where Nonna will be buried. ‘I her, she was Sicilian’, Elsie reports. Mum doesn’t like the idea of her mother lying next to a southerner for all eternity and she tells me she will enquire about how much it might cost to move her elsewhere, maybe next to some nice Chinese people closer to the trees. For Mum the only thing worse than her mother sharing the ground with Sicilians, though, is sharing the same grave as her father. Mum disliked her father almost as much as she loved her mother. Eight years have ed since his death but her antipathy has remained constant. If it had been up to Mum, Nonna would have been buried on the other side of the cemetery, as far away from her husband as possible. Instead, man and wife will stay together. It will be in death as it was in life; if Mum wants to visit her mother she will have to visit her father as well. The burial happens quickly. As Nonna is lowered into the earth, some of our relatives say their silent prayers and make the sign of the cross, lightly touching their wrinkled foreheads and thick arms. I try not to look down into the open grave but watch these rituals performed with nonchalance by the men and women who knew my nonna long before I did. We leave, fleeing the heat and smell of the earth for the air-conditioned car. We return to the church hall for the wake. In the usual Italian fashion it is over-catered. The collapsible tables are covered in big platters of different panini and miniature pies, tropical fruits and cannoli, as well as elaborate cakes. I notice there is nothing alcoholic to drink; Italian wakes are all about the food. I don’t need any grog but I am desperate for a glass of water to wash away the taste of the altar wine. I quickly down lukewarm water from a plastic cup and then another before I put a small plate of food together for myself. But the hunger I felt at the church’s altar has been diminished by the heat at the gravesite. The wake’s caterer is an Italian man who runs a continental deli in town.

‘He is my Uncle Joe’s illegitimate son’, Mum whispers to me over our sweets and sandwiches. ‘But we aren’t supposed to know that.’ I wonder how anything can be kept secret in a small town in which everyone is related. Even at the wake, Elsie is her usual playful, provocative self. She elbows Auntie Pauline’s husband Alberto in the ribs, chuckling, ‘Well get ready, you’re next, Alberto’. The old man doesn’t find it funny. He picks at his fruit with a stony look on his face. His wife purses her lips in annoyance. Looking around the room, I can see how the older generation will soon start to disappear into sickness and lost memory. The thought makes me want to rush out to the hire car and drive to some place where the young outnumber the old. Towards the end of the wake Nonna’s nephew Paul arrives. Paul’s father was Joe, Teresa’s brother and Luigi’s only son. Mum hasn’t seen Paul since she was a child and she can’t stop staring at him. Her cousin looks almost exactly like their grandfather, Luigi. It is the same face and smile existing in a slightly shorter body. ‘I can’t believe how much you look like Gigi’, she keeps saying to him. He smiles, taking it as a compliment. He walks around the hall, shaking hands and kissing the women, eating what is left of the panini and cannoli. I watch him, intrigued, as if I am watching a documentary about my greatgrandfather. All my life my mother and Nonna have talked about Luigi in almost heroic . He was such a gentleman. Charming, dignified, generous. He played first trumpet in his village band, he could read and write, he was a great shot, and a wonderful dancer. He was over six feet tall with red hair and blue eyes, a handlebar moustache and a perfect smile. Luigi is the reason all these men and women from Elba in Italy are gathered in a church hall in north Queensland. When the wake is over the women of the family clear and sort the leftover food in a businesslike manner as the men stand around and speak to each other in Italian. My mother spends time thanking people, one by one. The restrained mood of the church and the cemetery has lifted and people are chatting as if this is any other family gathering, asking my sister and me about our lives back in Sydney, telling us all the news about their children and grandchildren.

*

On our last day together in Innisfail, Mum, Emily and I spend it sorting through Nonna’s room at the nursing home. She moved to the home from her small flat at the local retirement village eighteen months previously, when she was diagnosed with leukemia. Although she hated the idea of a nursing home, she was pragmatic enough to understand she could no longer look after herself without assistance. Luckily, the reality of the home was nowhere near as bad as the theory. I walk into her room and think to myself, this is a nice place. There is no acrid smell of chemicals or urine. The room is large with a small lounge area. It has a large bathroom, like you might find in a private hospital. There is a generous window and glass door that opens out onto a small private garden. She had her own bed, bedside tables, lamps, wardrobe, chest of drawers and lounge suite. Nonna had the space and the furniture to receive visitors in privacy, which was important given Frank and Dino visited her daily. The only other residents at the home who spoke Italian, though, either had dementia or were moving steadily towards it, and so mostly Nonna chatted with the nurses, who responded well to her gentle humour and elegance. The only downside was the food; Nonna told us the home served unsophisticated ‘Aussie’ fare that was a poor substitute for what she was used to cooking and eating. Sometimes Joe’s unacknowledged son, the funeral’s caterer, would bring her food from his deli, and then she would eat more of this than she would of the steak and three veg and jelly and custard on the nursing home menu. Mum has bought a large pack of garbage bags for us to fill with Nonna’s things. We start the sorting by creating piles of what will be kept and what will be given away to St Vincent de Paul or to the matron of the home so that items can be used by other residents. Frank drops by to say hello, as does Dino, who just sits on the lounge and watches us, still not quite believing Nonna has died and that we are carving up her possessions in front of him. I start looking through her wardrobe, running my fingers through the neatly hung dresses of silk and lace on padded coathangers. I go

through the colourful petticoats in her drawers, some with letters, cards or photos from her grandchildren hidden in the folds. Mum is sorting through the chest of drawers in which all of Nonna’s collection of handmade embroidery is stored. There are pillowcases, sheets, tablecloths, doilies, tea towels, aprons, hankies as well as pieces of clothing, slips and camisoles. Nonna was taught how to embroider as well as how to make lace by her grandmother on her father’s side. As a young woman, she would sit and embroider on her own by the light of a kerosene lamp. Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon the See Poy sisters, the daughters of the well-known local Chinese businessman, would her. Her cousin Pauline would also on occasion be part of their sewing circle. Nonna had tried to teach Mum how to embroider, to no avail. I never learned much beyond sewing a button on a shirt and so, as Mum lays the pieces on the bed one by one, we inspect each creation with astonishment. Nonna didn’t kept a journal or leave behind a sheaf of letters, so these bits of beautiful cloth feel like diary entries, marking the different moments in her life from childhood to old age. Mum shows me the first piece Nonna ever made, an apron made of white linen created when she was only thirteen years old. It has a blue edge around it and a pocket embroidered with pink flowers on the left-hand side. On the right side, there is a blonde woman in a Scarlett O’Hara-type gown and a large, swooping sun hat. She is holding a bouquet of flowers in pinks, purples and greens and strolling through a garden, looking into the distance with her blue eyes fringed with long lashes. There are no stains on the apron and I wonder whether it has ever been worn by anyone to protect them from cooking splashes and smears, or if it was merely created to be folded and kept in a glory box. Nonna had kept her bridal veil, made from a square of white mosquito netting and embroidered with bows and lilies. It was a fitting match for her wedding dress made from parachute silk. Like most wartime brides, Nonna had to scrape together a wedding outfit at a time of shortages and rationing. Mum tells me the veil used to be draped over my crib when I was a baby to protect me from insects. She holds it up for me to look at and says I can keep it if I want to. ‘You can drape it over food at a picnic’, she says. I can’t for a moment

imagine using it that way. Mum pulls out a white silk bed jacket with handmade white lace, shot through with accents of pink, blue, purple and green. Nonna had made it for her only daughter to take to the hospital when she gave birth. Mum gives me the bed jacket as well and I fold it carefully and place it with the veil next to my handbag. Mum shows me the various practice pieces Nonna produced before attempting a new creation. They were a way to work out which pattern might suit best. These scraps of fabric tell me that, for Nonna, embroidery wasn’t just a way to the time in an era before television; it was something she took seriously. Each design for every tablecloth or napkin was her own creation, as she didn’t have patterns to copy. My favourite piece among all the ones Mum shows me is Nonna’s first attempt at lace, which she incorporated into a rectangular doily of fine cream linen. It was used to line a tray of biscotti served with coffee when visitors came. Running my hand over the square of white lace work, I marvel at its precision. I think about the satisfaction she must have felt trying something new and succeeding. I think of her sitting on the farm’s verandah in the dim light and evening quiet, working on these delicate items after a long day of cooking and cleaning in the heat and humidity. Nonna created beautiful things, even in a setting that was harsh on objects and on people, and even when those beautiful things might not get used. I imagine that in making these pieces she was doing something just for herself. I wonder if the repetition of extravagant dresses in many of the pieces was her way of indulging in a fantasy about going to a dance in a ball gown. Perhaps she hoped that one day she would have the chance to her embroidery on to a daughter or a granddaughter, someone who would ire her skill, who would hold a piece up the light and think to herself, ‘My Nonna made this’. As Mum and I work our way through the folded linens and silks we have on the bed, Emily sorts through the bedside tables. In recent years Nonna had gradually given all her best jewellery to my mother, and so what’s left – paste brooches and plastic cameos and semi-precious stone rings – is mostly destined for the secondhand stores. All Nonna’s clothes will be given away, expect for one special piece, a caramel lace gown imported from Florence. As she inspects the gown for moth holes and loose threads, Mum tells us

that one of her earliest memories is of a party – a wedding, perhaps – when Nonna had worn the dress with obvious pride. We remove it from the hanger and set it aside, away from the unwanted frocks in garbage bags and the blouses and skirts that smell of lavender and dust.

4

A Different Light

On the morning of my last day in Innisfail, I make a farewell tour of the town, a final walk to imprint the place on my memory. I leave the hotel and make my way along the river towards the start of Edith Street. Halfway there I see a group of indigenous women and young girls walking towards the Jubilee Bridge. The girls are talking and laughing but the women are quiet. I wonder whether they live in town or somewhere else. I know I can’t ask anyone about it, not even Frank. When I was sixteen I thought it might be clever to wear my ‘Stop Black Deaths In Custody’ badge on a trip to visit my grandparents. Mum took one look at it and told me to take it off. ‘It isn’t worth it’, she had said. She knew my family’s views about indigenous people and believed no useful conversation could be had on the topic. Family peace trumps personal opinion. And so I would sit in silence when some of my relatives complained about the blacks and the grog, their welfare payments and the trouble they caused with their claims about the land that they said they owned. I arrive at the point where Edith Street meets the river, where The Canecutter monument stands. The statue was erected in 1959 as a memorial to the pioneering work of Italian cutters. It is made of white marble from Carrera, fashioned by an artist named Renato Beretta. The cutter is life size. Instead of ornate fountainheads around its base there are replicas of the water bags men used in the cane fields. The fence rails are sticks of cane and attached to this fence are cane knives and sharpening files as well as more water bags. The cutter looks grave but too white and lifeless to remind me of any of the relatives I know who shared his profession. Almost all of the men in my family cut cane at one point or another. I have heard the stories about how savage the job was, how the first week of the

season would almost break them. Their skin would be sliced and swollen; a terrible stiffness would invade their backs, shoulders and arms. It would take time but their bodies would adjust to what the work demanded. They would get up in the dark and cut, using a wood-handled machete-like knife with a right-angled hook at the end. They were almost constantly bent over to cut and strip the stalks of the cane – what they call ‘the trash’ – and then they would have to heft them onto their shoulder to load them into the trolleys that took the cane to the mill. There was always the danger of the knife blow missing the cane and inflicting a wound on the cutter instead. After a few hours’ rest for lunch they would be back again to cut until dark, and would work in the rain or the relentless humidity. Either way, as one cutter observed, it was like working ‘under water’. There was a strong rivalry between cutters about who could cut well and quickly, and load even quicker. Each gang comprised six men and there was intense pressure put on each of them to cut at the same fast pace. If you were the one picking the gang, you always chose strong men you could trust and who pushed themselves to keep up with the others. In order to maintain the energy to cut, the men had to be able to ingest enormous amounts of food throughout the day. My mother told me that her grandfather Luigi, who was a good cutter in his time, would start work at 4.30 am after a meal of porridge and toast then work till 8 am, when the cook would take them a breakfast of meat, eggs and cake, and big tin pots of coffee and tea. They’d return home for a lunch of risotto or spaghetti, meat and vegetables, pudding and fruit, and head back to work at 1 pm and cut more until their 3.30 pm smoko. The working day finished at 6 pm with a dinner much the same as lunch. These men did this work year after year because it paid up to four or five times the national average. If you knew how to cut you could clear in the six-month cutting season what other manual workers might earn in a year. But it was a young man’s job. Even a good cutter struggled to work in the cane after thirty. It was a job that could wreck your body and break your spirit. As one former cane cutter said, ‘no slave should ever have been asked to do that work . . . you could only do it for the slavery of self-interest – the accumulation of wealth’. And that’s what most of the Ballini men were, slaves to self-interest. They cut, saved, and lived on hardly anything so they could buy the cheapest land they could find, which was often a discounted

farm that came on the market after floods and cyclones. They would clear the land with their hands, plant the cane, harvest it, and keep saving until more land could be bought. While Italian cutters had a good reputation, jobs weren’t always easily available. In 1930, British Preference was introduced in the northern cane fields, which was an agreement between the Australian Workers Union and the Employer Association that stipulated seventy-four per cent of all cane cutter jobs be reserved for ‘British’ workers. In contrast to many of their Aussie co-workers, Italians tended to remain in north Queensland during the off-season, picking up whatever work they could around the area until they could get their cutting jobs back again. The Aussie cutters generally went south to live it up, like Roo and Barney from Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Lawler’s play is set in the fifties, the beginning of the end of cane cutting by hand. For seventeen years Roo and Barney have flogged themselves in the cane fields for quick money after which they return to the same place and the same women in Melbourne to relax and enjoy life until the start of the next season. But their bodies are giving out and they know it. I reading the play at university, not making the connection between these roustabout blokes and the determined Ballini men I knew. Like Roo and Barney, my nonno, Oreste, was still cutting cane in his thirties, having started when he was just eighteen years old. If you hadn’t seen him work you wouldn’t have picked him for your gang. He was short and taciturn. But he cut faster than most and lasted longer than many and stayed fit and strong almost until his last days. It wasn’t always the biggest men who made the best cutters. It was more important to have energy, stamina and economy of movement. Oreste was born with the natural athletic skills that made for a good cane cutter.

*

I leave the marble cutter, looking into the distance across the river, and then circle through town, past the slowly opening stores, the shire hall and the

church. I then head back towards the hotel to pack. Mum and Emily are staying on for another day or two to clear out the dregs of Nonna’s room but before they head back to the nursing house they come with me to the train station to say goodbye. Frank arrives to drive us there and we manage to share a quick coffee together before I have to leave. Frank keeps telling us how much he will miss us and, on the station platform, he crushes me in a hug and tells me I need to get over my fear of flying as soon as possible. I assure him I’m fine and that I love train travel. ‘I know you do but you want to travel by train because you want to, not because you feel you have to’, he says. Mum and Emily come on board to take a look at my first-class sleeper. It is small but perfect compared to my last sleeping spot on The Sunlander. Now I have my own shower and toilet, there is carpet, not linoleum, on the floor and a bed where I can completely stretch out. I say my goodbyes quickly to Mum and Emily in the car’s ageway as I know I will see them within the week back in Sydney. As the train pulls out from the station I catch a glimpse of the three of them heading towards the car park. I’m the one leaving and yet it feels as if I am being left behind. On the journey I once more ignore my books and PhD research in favour of staring out the window at the scenes that slip past me. I pull out my Discman and the first song it plays is Moby’s melancholic ‘Porcelain’. ‘This is goodbye, this is goodbye’, he sings. I can picture in my mind Nonna walking the length of the cane rows or sitting with her father Luigi on the verandah of their house on the South Johnstone farm. The environment outside seems ageless, as if I can reach out through the scrub and touch the time in which Nonna was young and alive, a place where her whole life was ahead of her.

*

The last train I catch on my trek home arrives at Central Station days later, in the early hours of the morning. I have managed to sleep well in my little compartments and so I arrive home feeling refreshed and relieved to be

back in Sydney. I am in my beachside home before 8 am and find the place empty, my partner having gone to work early as usual. While I’m disappointed he hasn’t left a note on the kitchen bench for me, at least he has wiped it clean. After the light and heat of the north, our apartment seems cold and full of gloomy corners. Relief at being home turns into sadness as I step back into my old life. I unload the unread books and journal articles and turn on my computer, more out of habit than a desire to do any work. I look around the apartment and it is only slightly altered, messier of course with dead flowers drooping in their vases in the lounge and dining rooms. Over the two years we have lived in the place I have tried hard to make it look as lovely as possible, despite the fact it is rented. I bought new furniture and resurrected old furniture, framed pictures for the walls and invested in window coverings and lampshades. But it is clear to me now that all the money and energy has been a waste. It isn’t a real home. I am unhappy and I am unhappy living here. Sitting in my apartment on the morning of my return from Innisfail, I wonder whether Frank is right. Maybe Nonna had never worried that I wasn’t married. Maybe she had worried that I would marry the wrong person. After a few months more of living in that lonely apartment, I leave for good. Nonna’s death has changed things. I start to view my life in reference to hers. The comparison – in of choice and freedom – is stark. To stay in a relationship in which I feel unhappy seems ridiculous, obscene. I extricate my belongings from his, which is an easy task as we have bought very little together. I put the salvaged items into storage and move back into the family home, back with my sister and mother. My old room has long since been taken over by my Uncle Graham but I am more than happy with the guest room. It is a small space with a window looking out onto a wooden fence. It is where Nonna used to sleep on her visits after her husband died. I have a single bed, a desk, an unfinished thesis and long stretches of time to think about the past, present and future.

5

Uncovering

Now that I am back living with my mother again, I think more and more about my Italian heritage. With Nonna gone, the link to my past suddenly feels tenuous and superficial. We don’t speak Italian at home nor do we observe any Italian rituals or customs. Only occasionally do we cook the kinds of dishes Nonna used to make regularly for us – Zuppa Inglese, Melanzane alla Parmigiana, Schiaccia Briaca, polpette and gnocchi. When people ask me about my family, I always say ‘I’m Italian’, but it doesn’t feel true. I’m an impostor, taking communion when I haven’t been confirmed, calling myself Italian when I can barely speak the language. So I decide to try to become more Italian. And the first step in that direction, I reason, is to learn to speak Italian properly. I can speak a kind of ‘kitchen-table’ Italian, a scramble of words and phrases I have picked up over the years listening to my mother and her parents talk about what was happening with the family or what’s for dinner. I know words associated with food and with gossip. But that’s about it. Part of me blames my mother for my lack of language skills. When I was a child she never spoke to us in Italian. But I blame myself as well because I chose other languages – German and French – to study at high school. Soon after I move back into the family home, I enrol in an introductory Italian course at the Dante Alighieri Society in the city. After our first lesson, our teacher encourages us to speak Italian as much as possible outside class time and so I ask Mum if she and I can talk to each other in Italian one day a week. Although she agrees at the time, it becomes clear she is unenthusiastic. She resists picking a day for us to do this, and after one or two attempts to get her to speak Italian with me I let it go. I do understand her reluctance. Since her father died, the only time my mother spoke Italian

was with Nonna. During the latter years of Nonna’s life their conversations became more difficult. Nonna wanted Mum to move to Innisfail even though she knew it wasn’t going to happen. Mum’s home was in Sydney and Nonna knew it was unreasonable to expect her daughter to uproot her entire life and the lives of her children for her sake. But then again, Nonna had looked after her parents in their old age, had cared for others since she had been a girl, and now, when she was the one who needed care, strangers would be paid to do it. Both Nonna and Mum felt guilty about this and at the same time angry about that guilt. Mum probably feels that speaking Italian with me will remind her of those fraught exchanges, the irreconcilable desires of an ageing mother and a grown-up daughter. I have more luck in enlisting Mum’s help in the next step I take to become more Italian: to learn and perfect the dishes that made up Nonna’s repertoire. I decide to start with the all-important Schiaccia Briaca, a traditional cake made and eaten on Elba. With the kind of ingenuity scarcity encourages, the women of the island concocted a cake that is so moreish that the absence of luxuries like eggs, butter or chocolate is hardly noticed. Roughly translated as ‘drunken bread’, the cake is made from a handful of ingredients: flour, sugar, dried fruits and nuts, olive oil and some kind of alcohol. Traditional schiaccias use a reddish sweet wine called Aleatico, whereas Nonna had used Muscat. It’s difficult to describe the texture of schiaccia but it’s somewhere between a cake and a biscuit. The fruit, oil and alcohol combine perfectly to produce a flavour that is distinctive. During my childhood it was the taste of family celebrations as my Nonna would make it every Easter and Christmas. She also used to bring at least two of the cakes down to Sydney whenever she visited. These were carefully encased in foil and plastic, and then further protected from harm in her suitcase by a wrapping of clean clothes. I search the internet for some information about the cake and find out that it was often given to Elbans to provide energy to endure long and uncertain sea voyages. It turns out that schiaccia was originally a Muslim sweet, incorporating honey, pine nuts and raisins, standard ingredients in Middle Eastern cuisine. Discovering this amuses me. North Italians love to draw a thick, dark line between their culture and the culture of southern Italians, ‘tainted’ as they are by the blood and history of Africans and Arabs.

When I was a child I watched my Nonna make this cake countless times. I especially the days around Christmas and Easter when I would sneak into the kitchen cupboard a few times a day to scrounge for crumbs left in the wake of my father’s hastily cut slices. I look for recipes on the internet but they include ingredients I know Nonna didn’t use. I ask my mother to teach me how to make it, just as Nonna had taught her but, like my requests to get her to speak Italian with me, nothing much eventuates. Finally, over two years after Nonna’s death, Mum relents to my repeated requests for a schiaccia lesson. It is one of those still, summer days in that languid stretch of time between Boxing Day and New Year when Mum brings out all the necessary ingredients from the cupboard – nuts, fruit, sugar and flour – and opens a fresh bottle of Muscat. As Mum bends over to light our gas oven, it occurs to me that the ing on of this recipe from mother to daughter must have happened many times, as far back as our name can be traced. In a bowl Mum puts half a cup of sugar, a pinch of salt and two cups of selfraising flour, and then adds a cup of raw, chopped walnuts, a cup of raw, chopped almonds and a cup of sultanas. She mixes these dry ingredients together with her hands and tastes it before adding more sugar. ‘You keep tasting it and adding more sugar until you are happy with the flavour. The mixture needs to be lumpy with the nuts and fruit but not too lumpy or the cake will fall apart’, she tells me. Once she is satisfied with the taste and texture, she combines a cup of Muscat with a cup of olive oil. ‘Use the good stuff, the extra virgin oil and a Muscat that you would happily drink’, she says. ‘You have to work fast to mix the wet with the dry. The alcohol and oil makes the dough go stiff very quickly.’ She then presses the mixture into a medium-sized cake tin lined with baking paper and makes indentations with her fingers on the top of the dough. After that she sprinkles sugar and a little of the leftover oil–Muscat combination over the top. The cake is then placed on the middle shelf of the oven and cooked on a medium heat. ‘We need to wait until it is brown on top and a skewer comes out clean’, she explains. It is touching watching my mother cook and talk to me enthusiastically

throughout the baking process, especially since I know she doesn’t like cooking. After my parents divorced, she did so under sufferance. With her children now grown up, she never cooks unless she absolutely has to. Nonna had been a fantastic cook. She had started cooking for her family as a young girl and when she arrived in Innisfail prepared enormous amounts of food every day for the always-hungry cane cutters on her father’s farm. Mum believes that cooking was a chore and a burden for Nonna, but I disagree. I know Nonna loved to cook. She was always interested in new recipes and, even in her empty nest years, kept making time-consuming dishes despite the fact that her husband would have been more than happy with eggs on toast. I feel I inherited my love of cooking from her, even though she never taught me to make anything except gnocchi. After less than an hour the schiaccia is cooked and is light brown on the top with a flat sugary crust. The alcohol in the Muscat has been largely burnt off, but the flavour lingers to enhance the taste of the sultanas. We can hardly wait for it to cool down before trying it. It tastes good and holds together well but it is not Nonna’s. It is unrealistic, perhaps, to think our cake could live up to hers; ours is missing the crucial ingredient of nostalgia. As Mum and I eat the warm cake, standing together at the kitchen bench, I promise myself I will make schiaccia often, perfect the recipe, and one day teach my own children how to make it.

*

On quiet weekends, looking to escape from my thesis, I watch The Godfather. After a few months of language classes I am able to follow most of the Italian without needing the subtitles. When Solazzo, the upstart gangster, tells Michael Corleone, ‘Io ho un grosso respeto por tu padre. Ma tu padre pensa antica’, I know he is saying that, while he respects Michael’s father Vito, he thinks he has an old-fashioned way of thinking. Michael responds soon after by shooting Solazzo dead. Mum insists the Corleones’ dialect is nothing like the Italian spoken on Elba. She tells me, not for the first time, that our family has little in common

with Sicilians. And yet a few parallels are obvious to me: the hunger for money and status, and the belief these will protect you from the unfair and the unknown; the fervent hope that circumstances will be different for the next generation, that your son or grandson can be a judge or a senator and get to pull the strings; and the conviction that, in the end, you can only trust family. As long as I can that’s what Mum has said to me: ‘You can only trust family.’ I ask Mum if there were ever any Mafia in Innisfail. ‘Once the Black Hand was active but it was before I was born’, she replies. ‘All the big farmers and shopkeepers were approached and intimidated, asked to pay protection money. They came to my grandfather and asked him for money and he told them to get off his land or he’d shoot them. My grandmother was scared that something would happen but my grandfather was determined he could deal with them. And then the Black Hand tried to do the same to other people in the district and they all decided, no, they weren’t going to give in to these people.’ In the 1930s in north Queensland there were a small number of extortion rackets that practised intimidation like this as well as bombings and sometimes murder. The historian Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien writes that during this period eleven murders and other violent activity were attributed to these groups:

The most spectacular incident in Innisfail involved a dispute in which a cane-cutter was physically restrained by two men while a third cut off his ear. The victim, Giuseppe Iacona, a cane-cutter from Sicily, refused to tell police who was responsible. On his release from hospital, he went to the main street of Innisfail in daylight and shot dead his mutilator, the Calabrian Nicola Mamone.

The media of the day sensationalised these events, depicting the north as rife with criminal types and the Black Hand as a highly organised operation ‘with tentacles stretching to every Italian community’ in Australia. But the historian Lyn Henderson argues that in fact ‘syndicated crime in Ingham and Innisfail was a myth’:

In reality, a few men, unable to advance themselves and jealous of their more successful compatriots, used a well-known symbol synonymous with terror and crime in order to extort money. When the alleged ringleader in Ingham, Vincenzo D’Agostino, was murdered in 1939, Black Hand activities seemed to die with him. In March 1940 the Queensland police denied that blackmailing or intimidation still occurred in the Ingham and Innisfail districts. On balance, it would appear that Ingham’s Black Hand paralleled its counterparts in America: each was a localised group, usually of Calabrisi, intent on extortion or blackmail of rich and poor alike, demanding what it thought the victim could afford.

In some respects, my great-grandfather Luigi had made a brave decision to rebuff the Black Hand. The consequences of ignoring their demands could be serious. They might burn your cane or your house to the ground, and assault, maim, kidnap or kill a family member, even a child. But perhaps he knew the thugs attempting to bribe him were not as powerful as they sought to appear. He dealt with them like he would deal with any ordinary pack of bullies. Perhaps he was compelled by his pride as a northerner not to yield to southerners. Whatever the reality, my family seemed to view the Black Hand’s activities as a nasty example of what southern Italians were capable of, something which had nothing much to do with law-abiding Tuscans like themselves.

*

When I was younger, on what must have been one of her last trips to Sydney, I had the bright idea to tape an interview with Nonna about her childhood and her family. I wanted to know about her father Luigi as well. Why he had picked Australia as his new home. What his life had been like in north Queensland in the years he worked there before sending for his family. I listen to the interview again – originally recorded on a cassette tape but now transformed into a digital file for my computer – and make notes

as part of my effort to reconnect with my Italian past. Nonna’s soft voice is so familiar. It wavers from time to time as she tries to recall facts or struggles to pronounce certain words in English. I asked a hundred questions but looking back on it now most of them were the wrong ones. I asked Nonna about everyone in her family but I didn’t ask her about herself. We didn’t even touch on what happened during the war because I didn’t know about it at the time. I didn’t ask how she felt about her life and how it had turned out. Along with the interview I also have some family histories pulled together by my Auntie Mimi, who was organised enough to write down what Luigi had told the family about his early life in Australia. The interview and the histories help me build a picture of Luigi’s journey to Australia. Nonna told me that originally her father had wanted to settle in Argentina. He had an uncle who lived there, working his own land and raising his children. Luigi wrote letters to him with deferential requests that his uncle sponsor his application to emigrate. After months of waiting for a reply, a disappointing one arrived. His auntie, a poor cook and housekeeper, wanted instead to sponsor Luigi’s cousin, Antonietta, to go to Argentina as a domestic help. Luigi was despondent after hearing this news. Then one day he was walking home from the post office and he encountered his parish priest, Don Andrea. The priest suggested that Australia might be a good alternative destination. Luigi had never heard of the place but the priest explained it was a new country, a long way away, but that one day it would be as wealthy and important as America. Andrea’s brother was already living in Australia and enjoying it. Luigi wanted to know if there was land available in Australia. Lots, Don Andrea assured him. So with little more than the recommendation of a priest’s brother it was decided Luigi would make the trip to Australia, accompanied by his friends Oreste, Abelardo and Livio Signorini, three brothers from the Elban town of Capoliveri. In February 1914, at thirty-one years of age, Luigi Ballini left Elba for Naples to board the Omrah bound for Brisbane. The entire trip took three months and would have cost him around forty pounds. The fact that the journey was so long worried my great-grandfather. What kind of place could there be at the ends of the earth? Some of his companions on the boat feared they would never arrive in Australia and that the boat would sail the

seas forever. Some thought they would be dumped in an unknown land full of savages. Luigi brought with him just a small suitcase full of clothes and family photos. The food on the boat was awful, consisting mostly of bread with only a little meat each month. He shared a dirty room with twenty or so people from both the north and south of Italy, and slept on a wooden bed with no sheets. The boat encountered bad weather and rough seas throughout the trip. The conditions were probably similar to those on earlier boats that had ferried migrants to Australia, described by an Italian politician to that country’s parliament in 1899 as:

. . . steamers, laden with human flesh, the route of which across the ocean was marked by a long trail of corpses of the weakest and sick migrants, of women and children, debilitated, destroyed by contaminated or insufficient food, by lack of medical care, and sad to say, by lack of fresh air.

Luigi’s boat docked in Brisbane one day in May 1914. It was late in the evening and he spent the night at the boarding house run by Don Andrea’s brother. He woke up very early the next morning to survey the land he had travelled so far to reach and Brisbane failed to excite him. Certainly there weren’t many job prospects for a newly arrived immigrant who couldn’t speak English, and there was no possibility of buying up large tracts of land in such a well-developed area. He stayed in Brisbane for only two days and then, like so many Italian migrants, headed north to Mackay to get a job as a cane cutter. By this time, Italians had established a reputation as reliable and easy-to-manage cutters. A recruiting campaign by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company ensured a steady supply of Italian men into north Queensland to supply the industry with labour. Cane cutting was guaranteed work for an Italian who couldn’t speak English. In his years in Australia before he sent for his family, Luigi lived in different parts of the north, cutting cane but also working on the construction of a Catholic church and convent, as well as on the railroads, laying miles of wood and iron tracks for sleeper carriages. He lived in tents on the outskirts

of towns like Mackay and Serina with other working men, most of them migrants. He especially liked working with the Chinese because he considered them polite and industrious. Over time he picked up enough English and Chinese to understand what was going on around him. Luigi sent money back to his family regularly, but it became difficult to do this during the First World War. His wife and family had to survive on the rental income from a property they owned in Piombino. It was a tense time for them all. There was very little money and hardly any communication during the war years. My nonna wrote letters to her father while he was away, not knowing who he was or ing what he looked like as he had left when she was less than three years old. When Luigi’s letters did get through to them they were full of descriptions about his work and promises that he would send for them soon. Luigi wanted to buy land before his family ed him in Australia. Before he could buy land he needed to become a naturalised British subject. At that time, it was relatively easy to do this, compared with becoming an Australian citizen today. The prerequisites included five years’ residency in the country and two English witnesses to vouch for you. A former employer, a Mr McDonald, and the manager of a local branch of the National Bank, a Mr Carter, offered to act as witnesses. On 23 September 1922 Luigi was naturalised. Was he troubled with thoughts of Elba when he signed the papers remaking himself as a British subject? I don’t think so. The ambitious Luigi had come to Australia to own land, and naturalisation was a step towards wealth. It was more about property than patriotism. When Luigi was naturalised and felt established enough to send for his family, Nonna along with her mother Marietta and siblings – Dina, Elide, Inez, Maria and Joe – travelled in a small boat through bad seas to Townsville, after which they took an even smaller boat to Mourilyan Harbour. They arrived on the morning of 19 October 1922. Luigi had come down from Innisfail to meet them. Nonna re seeing her father and crying, perhaps more from nervousness than happiness. She didn’t know him. Luigi had been separated from his family for nine years. They climbed into a sugar wagon pulled by a train and headed to the South Johnstone farm, their new home. The family was shocked when they saw the four-bedroom house built of

galvanised iron and timber. The interior walls were lined with cardboard and plastered with bitumen. They had furniture made from kerosene boxes. Nonna hated the place at first sight and never grew to love it. She loathed the humidity and the long summers, the way the outside invaded every corner of the house with flies, dust and dirt. She wasn’t a country girl; she wanted to be in the city. The closest city, though, was Brisbane, one thousand seven hundred kilometres away. Over the coming years Luigi would build a new, nicer, two-storey house on the South Johnstone farm, create a co-operative mill with other growers in the area, buy more land and build more farms in Babinda and Mourilyan. He would see his two daughters, Dina and Elide, marry. He would sponsor numerous of the extended family and friends from Elba, including my nonno, to come to north Queensland to work. It was as if he was trying to create his own private Elba in the tropical north. From the time his family arrived in Brisbane until war was declared in 1939, it seemed as if little could stop Luigi in his pursuit of land, money and a secure life in his adopted home.

*

In the summer of 2003, I finish my thesis. I move out of home in 2004 and meet the man I am going to marry. I am thirty-three years old on the day of our wedding; the same age my Nonna was when she was a bride. For our honeymoon in October 2006 we plan a trip to Italy, taking in various towns in Tuscany – Siena, Florence, Lucca and Pisa – and ending with a few days in Elba. I have not been to Italy in fifteen years, and can do so now only because I have succeeded in conquering my fear of flying. My husband, Daniel, agrees to start our trip with a week-long language course in Siena. He is put in a beginner’s class with a group of retired English tourists, learning how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and to ask for directions to the train station. I am put in the intermediate class with a bunch of American pre-college teens on their gap year, more interested in picking up Italian girls than Italian grammar. I try to explain to my teacher, Mario, that I was raised in an Italian family but I don’t really speak the language.

‘So you have paid a lot of money and come halfway across the world to learn something your parents should have taught when you were a child?’ Even in his soft-spoken English this sounds like a rebuke and I am embarrassed. Later, walking around the ancient streets of Siena in the autumn sunshine, I pretend to have a conversation with Nonna, imagining what it would be like to talk to her in clean, smooth Italian. Maybe if we could have spoken in her first language she would have told me more about herself and about her life before marriage and motherhood. At the end of the trip we visit the island of Elba, the birthplace of all the Ballinis. Elba’s claim to frame is that for three hundred days Napoleon was exiled there – he’s still ed by islanders for his good works and improvements to Elba’s infrastructure. We are there during the off-season, the island being a popular summer destination for Italians, so the place is quiet and we experience the worst weather of our month-long trip – two days of wind, rain and cloudy skies. As we walk around the streets on our first day I am struck by how familiar the voices and faces of the old ladies on the island are to me. At times, when I catch some conversation between them, I am transported from the narrow cobbled streets of the island back to my grandparents’ melamine table in Innisfail. This is Italian as spoken by Elbans rather than Corleones. In the afternoon I call my mother from the hotel we are staying at right on the coast and I describe the view from our window. The still, clear expanse of water looks more like a lake than the start of the sea. A little rock island sits in the distance to my right and then the rest of the sloping hills of Elba can be seen on my left. ‘Your nonno used to swim out to that rock island every day when he was a young boy’, my mother tells me. It must be at least six or seven kilometres away. After lunch the next day, a few hours before we are due to board the ferry and leave the island, the weather clears enough for us to take a walk along the narrow ribbon of beach close to where we have been staying. Like so many European beaches it comprises mostly pebbles. I pick up two of the larger ones. They are smooth and oval in shape, covered in flecks of inky blue and brown and even a little silver. The metallic dots look like glitter and they wink at me when I hold the stones up to the sunlight. I ask my

husband if I will get into trouble if I carry them through Australian customs. I want to take home a reminder of the island and most of the shops are closed or full of tourist trash. The only Schiaccia Briaca we had been able to find is commercially made, and deemed inedible by the gracious woman who served us dinner at an enoteca the night before. I take the risk and put the pebbles in my pocket. My husband and I spend the ferry trip back to the mainland on the top deck, taking photos of each other in the wind and salt spray. I tell him I feel disappointed. I had hoped the visit to Elba would provide me with some greater insight into Nonna’s life. But I am no closer to understanding her now than I was when I left Innisfail after her funeral. On the prow of the boat, looking back at the island, I decide to write a book about Nonna, her life after she left Elba, her time during the war and what happened when the men were interned. I feel that maybe writing about her life will make up for the missed ninetieth birthday party and all those times I didn’t come to the airport. It might also be a way to keep her alive in my mind because, even after a decade has past, I still want to hold on to her.

6

Time Out

In order to write the history of my nonna I need to know more about the history of the north, of Italians in the sugar industry and about internment during the Second World War. I hire a research assistant, Lucy, to trawl through libraries in Sydney and Canberra and she uncovers books, articles, newspaper clippings and oral histories for me to review. Lucy continues to work for me over the months of my first pregnancy. The mass of papers she diligently collects grows with my stomach. She is still collecting bits and pieces when my daughter Sofia is born in April 2008. But the material is left untouched in a filing cabinet drawer, rarely thought about, as I adjust to life as a new mum. At the beginning of 2009, Sofia is nine months old and ready for a few days in childcare, so now is my chance to tackle the piles of reading. I decide I need a complete escape from my family in order to do this, and so on a hot Friday morning I leave my husband and baby and book myself into a hotel in Kings Cross for three days. It is perfect, as I will be away from domestic distractions but close enough to home if I am needed. After checking in, I unpack a bag of clothes and a similar-sized bag of papers and books. I set up my laptop and survey the hotel room turned writer’s studio, but I feel as if I have forgotten to bring something important. A vital book or my laptop’s power cord, maybe. But this sense I have of something missing has nothing to do with the book or anything I may have forgotten. I am feeling an absence, a void, because for the first time in nine months I am alone with no responsibilities to anyone but myself. It is unnerving and thrilling and I resolve to make every moment count during these precious few days of work. I start sorting the research material into piles: Italians in Australia;

Australia during the Second World War; internment; Italians in north Queensland; Italian women; cane farming. I am overwhelmed by the unread mounds of material on the perfectly made bed. It feels as if I am embarking on another thesis. I start to panic a little. Perhaps this environment is too sterile, too quiet for me to concentrate. I decide to leave the hotel and go out for coffee. I pick up a book and a few articles and head towards Potts Point to one of the cafes I know well, a place I used to visit almost daily when I lived in the area in my early twenties. The streets are busy with that odd mixture of people only Kings Cross can comfortably accommodate – executives and junkies, tourists and hipsters. I walk down Victoria Street to Roy’s Famous, order a coffee and a slice of cake and start to read.

*

Australia has been a destination for Italians since the very first moments of colonisation. James Mario Mantra, a sailor and diplomat from a prominent Corsican family, was among the officers on Captain Cook’s voyage on the Endeavour. After the explorers came the missionaries, with Italian priests arriving in Australia in the 1840s and onwards to establish parishes around the country from Sydney to Perth to Adelaide. The gold rush attracted a large number of Italians to both Victoria and Western Australia. The revolutionary and writer Raffaello Carboni, who wrote the only firsthand description of the Eureka Stockade rebellion, was among this group seeking a quick fortune on the goldfields. After Italy was unified in 1861 Australia was seen more and more as a desirable place for migrants wanting work and commercial success, as well as a new and promising market for Italian foods and other goods like Carrera marble. By the beginning of the new century, there were approximately eight thousand Italians in Australia, the majority living in the countryside and working as artisans and labourers. By the start of the ‘Great War’, Luigi would have been part of the swelling ranks of Italians who had come to Australia to find work and make money.

For the rest of my first day I shift from hotel room to coffee shop and make steady progress through the research. I talk only to my husband to hear about how Sofia is getting on without me. He reports she is unchanged, peaceful and unaware of my absence. That night, after a room service dinner, I read my novel, Sugar, Tears and Eyeties, a story of cane cutting and internment by Peter Dalseno. The story is about a young woman from Venice, Irma Millefori, who leaves Italy and her strict family for a new life in Australia. With her lover Pietro and their infant son, they board a crowded immigrant ship bound for Sydney. All the talk among the engers is about Queensland and the opportunities available there for Italians. A ship’s interpreter reads Pietro a pamphlet circulated by the Queensland Government that urges all Italians to encourage their relatives and friends to move to the state. ‘Their presence would alleviate the labour problem, and it would mean that a considerable number of holdings could be broken up and worked by Italian families’, the pamphlet states. The promise of work and land, spruiked by a government source no less, excites everyone. Yet stories are told about Queensland being ‘a raw country with no roads and no electricity’ and teeming with ‘crocodiles, snakes and venomous spiders’. Arriving at the Gulf of Aden, the last port of the western section of the North Hemisphere, Irma looks out at the migrants assembled on deck:

Poor Italians . . . Scattered to all corners of the earth. Not for greed, but due to the fatherland’s failure to provide incentive and its society’s failure to provide the challenge. Ironically, only the alien lands – the young, vigorous and developing – provide the opportunities.

*

I wake early in the morning and stay in bed to read more about Italians in north Queensland. I already know its cane fields were magnets for Italians since the Kanaka workers were expelled from the area at the turn of the

century. The government and industry program of actively encouraging northern Italians to work in the sugar industry meant that by the late 1930s one-third of all Australia’s Italian migrants were living in the Queensland cane fields. Sugar had created Italian enclaves in places like Tully, Ingham and Innisfail. By 1933 there were more than half as many Italian immigrants in Innisfail as there were in the forty-one Sydney local government areas combined. They made up twelve per cent of the population of Innisfail compared with one per cent of Sydney. The Australian Worker’s Union, the union that represented cane cutters, resented the success of Italian migrants. They were foreign workers prepared to break awards, and they would work from sunrise to sunset and live on the smell of an oily rag. By 1925 these slavish intruders had managed to become owners and bosses themselves. Historian Gianfranco Cresciani reports that of the hundred and fifty sugar plantations in Queensland in the mid twenties, fifty-two were Italian owned. As a result of union pressure, the Queensland Government sent Commissioner Thomas A. Ferry to tour the north and report on the effects of the increasing numbers of aliens in that region. The Ferry Report found that the northern Italian was in general a good citizen and a good unionist, quick to adhere to the laws of their adopted country and ‘the British standard of living’, and had ‘without friction [been] absorbed into the social and economic life of the country’. Other migrants from the Mediterranean were another matter. The Maltese, Sicilians and the Greeks were described by Ferry as undesirable and illiterate, living a degraded and separate existence from the rest of the population. I spend the rest of the day and most of the following morning reading about the Second World War and the regime surrounding the internment of enemy aliens. This is the material that I know the least about but it intrigues me the most. The State defined an enemy alien as anyone over the age of sixteen who ‘possesses the nationality of a State at war with His Majesty’, but the definition included people like Luigi and Oreste, naturalised British subjects who were originally from the Axis power countries. The term ‘enemy alien’ applied to them regardless of how long they had lived in Australia. Not all enemy aliens were equal, though. Military intelligence sorted them into different categories. Category A covered highly suspect individuals, such as Nazi and Fascist Party , criminals (namely those suspected of being involved in the Black Hand) and of the

enemy’s armed forces. Category B was people who had access to vital information and to the ‘harbours’. Category C aliens were leaders and those of influence, including anyone judged to have an ‘anti-British’ history. Category D included all males of military age capable of bearing arms, and category O the ‘ordinary harmless people’. When war broke out, the government created regulations under The National Security Act 1939–40 that set out a regime for the surveillance and control of all enemy aliens. They were extreme powers for extreme times. They required every alien resident to with the nearest aliens’ registration officer (generally a member of the local police force). He was then issued with a copy of his certificate of registration and an officer could demand that it be produced at any time and place. These regulations placed restrictions on an alien’s travel and movement. They were not allowed to change their place of residence unless notice was first given to their registration officer. Unless they received government permission, they weren’t allowed to possess firearms, ammunition or explosives, any camera or surveying apparatus, anything that could be used for signaling or coding or sending secret messages, any carrier or homing pigeon and – the greatest hardship of all for an alien living in a country region – any car, motorcycle or aircraft. The possession of certain chemicals, telephones, broadcasting equipment, maps and military handbooks was also restricted. The regulations gave the government the power to control where aliens lived. They could prohibit them from certain kinds of employment as well as from holding meetings or demonstrations, publishing newspapers or pamphlets and – my favourite – ‘spreading reports in regard to the war’. How can you stop people talking about the war? It was absurd. All this was aimed at ensuring Italians and Germans living in Australia during the war couldn’t create a ‘fifth column’, a force that would invade us from within, aiding and abetting the enemy on the home front. During the parliamentary debate on the National Security Bill, politicians made principled pronouncements about the need to balance the civil rights of individuals, particularly minorities, with the need to protect the general population in times of war. Prime Minister Menzies stated that the new law would be exercised ‘firmly, definitely, and promptly, but without intolerance and with a due respect for the interests of minorities’. And yet some, such as the Labor lawyer and politician Maurice Blackburn, doubted whether the stated intentions of the prime minister would carry the day given what had

happened to enemy aliens during the last world war. There had been widespread internments during the First World War, and the vast majority of them had been unnecessary. It had also cost Australia one and a half million pounds to intern enemy aliens of German, Austrian and Turkish backgrounds, money that could have been better used elsewhere in the war effort. Blackburn believed the lessons from the previous war had not been learned and the wide-ranging powers under the new security laws would be used to detain people whose only real crime was their ethnicity. ‘I know how war changes the opinions of people. I know the nervous tension to which the community and Ministers will be subjected’, Blackburn reflected. He was right. While early waves of internments picked up aliens from categories A and B, later waves were authorised mainly in response to public anxiety about the course of the war and the possibility of a Japanese invasion. At this point in the conflict, internments were more extensive in the far north and west of Australia and included the detention of enemy aliens who could rightly be described as ‘ordinary harmless people’. There was an uneven and, as a result, unfair approach to internment across Australia. Each State acted differently depending on how vulnerable it was to invasion. For example, Victoria had the lowest number of internments, with only 2.7 per cent of ed male enemy aliens arrested and detained. In contrast, Queensland interned just over forty-three per cent of its enemy alien population. The historian Kay Saunders writes that the course of the internment drive ‘reflected the Allies’ defeats on the battle field’. In this way, internment ‘followed the pattern of the war front’ rather than ‘a fair assessment of any individual’s case’. So as the war progressed, many enemy aliens were interned as a precautionary measure, out of inflated or unfounded fears about what they might do. Some aliens were interned as a result of rumour and unfounded suspicion rife in an anxious community. In her book about internment, Margaret Bevege writes that ex-internees from the sugar districts believed the reasons they were held captive had as much to do with local politics as they had to do with national security:

Farmers suspected neighbours hoping to take over abandoned farms. While local returned soldiers and freemasons were most widely suspected by exinternees of making reports against them. A few cane cutters put their inclusion down to attending a meeting protesting against the introduction of labour conscription. Other internees speak of more personal reasons, such as competition with a local policeman over a particular woman, disputes with authorities over other matters and personality clashes.

In a moment of candour in front of the Aliens Tribunal in February 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Sydney Whittington articulated the rationale for interning aliens who were not avowed fascists:

We may not be able to provide what we say in the ordinary sense of evidence, but we can prove it in this way, that we know our people are prepared to give the tribunal sworn evidence that there is reason to believe that such-and-such an alien is dangerous; and in time of war that should be in itself sufficient to show that enemy aliens should not be allowed at large; that we cannot afford to risk it . . . He may be innocent in this way; that he has never done anything to harm the British Empire; the reason for that may be he has never had the opportunity. We have interned him, not because he has done any overt wrong but because he is a potential danger to the community.

*

A few hours before my writing retreat ends, I scribble down a long list of questions thrown up or unanswered by the research. When were Luigi and Oreste arrested? Was Luigi a Category C alien? What about my nonno, Oreste, what category did he fall into? How many other men in the family were interned? What was life like in the camps and how long were they

there? Did the women left behind face discrimination and hostility? How did Nonna feel about being left in charge of the farms? How did the men feel about their internment after it was over? And how did Nonna feel when she had to go back to the kitchen after the men returned? I knew there were only a few remaining relatives who had lived during that time and could help me answer these questions. My uncles and aunties had heard the stories but had not experienced the war as adults. Time was running out to talk to the eyewitnesses. In the back of my mind I know I will have to go back to Innisfail at some stage to do more research but now the need to return feels urgent. On the Sunday afternoon, waiting in the hotel lobby for my husband to take me back to my life, I decide to make the trip back north as soon as I can. But this time I will fly.

7

Returning North

September 2009

I am booked on the last Qantas flight out of Sydney bound for Cairns. I chose an evening flight because I want to feed my eighteen-month-old daughter dinner and put her to bed before I leave. I will be gone for over a week, the longest time she and I have been apart. I plan to spend two days in Innisfail before I have to be in Brisbane as a guest at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival. Since Nonna’s death eight years previously, I have read as much as possible about the north, about Italians in the sugar industry and internment during the Second World War. I am looking forward to seeing Innisfail through different eyes, talking to the older generation about the past, working out how my family’s story fits in with everything I already know. I take a taxi to the airport and it is almost peaceful when I get there. The plane is loosely packed with engers and the seat next to me is empty. I skip the hot meal and simply eat potato chips as I try to follow the Russell Crowe in-flight movie. Three rows in front of me a little boy – no more than a year old I guess – cries and squeals until Russell meets his love interest. Walking past his row on my way to the toilet I spy the little man sprawled across his mother and spilling onto the lap of his father in a slumber of total abandon. I wish I still had the ability to sleep that way, to have that elasticity in my limbs, that casual sense of ownership of another person’s body. But any flicker of guilt I have about not bringing my daughter on this trip is extinguished by the thought of being a human sofa for three hours.

I return from the toilet, switch off the movie and open the novel I am reading, Sugar Heaven. Written by the feminist and communist Jean Devanny, the story concerns a group of cane cutters and their wives living around Innisfail in the mid 1930s. I had learned about the novel in an article on industrial strife in the north between the two wars and had tracked it down on the internet, thinking it might tell me more about what Innisfail was like when my nonna was a girl. The drama centres on the conflicts over the outbreak of Weil’s disease, a fatal malady caused by rat urine. Cutters demanded the cane be burnt to drive the rats from the trash but, at the time, manufacturing sugar from burnt cane was complicated and incurred a penalty, so the farmers were opposed to burning. When the industrial court refused to order burning, it sparked the worst strike in the history of the region. The novel starts with seasoned cane cutter Hefty and his new wife Dulcie taking the same train journey I took from Brisbane to the north. Having met in Sydney only a few months beforehand, the couple knows little about each other. As they get closer to cane farming country, Dulcie’s anxiety increases; she is overwhelmed by the heat, humidity and strangeness of the landscape. She thought she knew about Australia but this place of swamps, feral lantana and cane stretching far to the horizon is foreign to her, as unknown as her new husband. The newlyweds settle in Silkwood, twenty miles south of Innisfail, in a two-roomed shack of weatherboard and corrugated iron. Lying in her marital bed on the first night she is restive: ‘It was too stark, this sugar land; too vast and hidden from her.’ She longs for the known drudgery of her waitressing job back in Sydney. The next day is the first day of the cutting season and Hefty explains to Dulcie that she needs to prepare him five meals and make sure he has a change of flannels for loading the cane. The bundles chafe his shoulders and without clean clothes, sweat and dirt infect the raw skin and can create ‘a mess of festers and sores’. Then there are the fine prickles, the ‘Hairy Mary’, that cover the cane and sink into the skin, causing further irritation. His arms and hands and sometimes his face are cut and scratched. Hefty leaves for the fields to start his first day of cutting and Devanny provides a memorable description of the cutters’ work:

Each man took his place at the head of a row of cane; the left hand grasped the thick stick . . . [the] knife was wielded to sever the stalk on a level with the ground. No time for waste motion. Another stroke with the knife severed the top; two downward motions cleaned the trash from the stalk. The fifth motion heaped the sticks. With automatic precision the knives rose and fell, the hook which was its head raking any undergrowth clear . . . No talk; no rest. The cutters paced each other . . . The pride of the cutter demanded equal work. A ‘lag’ despised himself . . . Before long the cutter’s bodies streamed with filthy sweat that stung as it dribbled into the scratches and cuts. Backs suffered the exaggerated ache of the new season’s time. Cut low! Cut lower! Cut right into the ground! It’s every last vestige of sugar content harvested or the ‘sack’ . . . Dust from the cane filled the mouth, the nostrils, as the cutter drew his fierce breath. It got into the back of the throat and forced constant raucous coughing . . . Smoko came at nine-thirty . . . Thirty minutes and then back to the knife . . . Turgid obscenity expressed as nothing else could the squalor, the stresses, the brutal finality of life on the end of the knife.

I set the book aside and close my eyes, imagining a young Luigi choking back the cane dust, sitting on the ground during smoko, cleaning his cane knives of the trash and sugar sap, counting the days before he could buy a farm and send for his family. I am nearly halfway through the book as we start our descent. The plane makes a smooth landing late in the evening. Looking out of the window as we sink lower, I can see little more than clusters and lines of electric lights in the darkness. As I leave the plane, the humidity hits me at once; it is like walking into a bathroom straight after someone has taken a long hot shower. The airport looks almost brand new, upgraded to suit the expectations of so many tourists from Japan, America and China. By the time I collect my luggage and locate the taxi rank it is close to 11 pm. The driver barely makes eye with me as he helps load my luggage into the boot. He is silent as we drive through near-pitch darkness away from the white lights of the terminal towards the centre of town. Cairns airport is surrounded by wetlands close to the Barron River. When we flew up for Nonno’s funeral twenty years ago, Dino brought Nonna to

meet us at the old pre-renovated airport. Driving through the mangroves, my uncle complained about the local environmentalists lobbying for the habitat to be preserved. ‘Why would you want to keep these swamps? They’re mad’, he told us. Mum shot a sharp glance in my direction across the back seat of Dino’s car to make sure I kept my mouth shut. I had just ed The Wilderness Society and thought I knew everything. I arrive at my hotel on the Cairns Esplanade, booked because of its closeness to the car hire office. The young male concierge checks me in quickly and I make my way to a room which has, thankfully, already been cooled by the air conditioning in anticipation of my arrival. I unpack very little, knowing I need to be off early in the morning. I brush my teeth, wipe off the residue of plane travel from my face and neck and fall asleep quickly under cool, white sheets.

*

That night I am revisited by a dream I had at least once during my pregnancy. In this dream, I am walking through a seaside, touristy town, somewhere like Noosa. It isn’t a tropical place, just beachy and warm. I am strolling along streets filled with cafes and souvenir stores. Walking with me is an old crush of mine, a guy I used to go to school with. We are gossiping about mutual friends and he is making me laugh. Our conversation is interrupted by a roar of water behind me and I spin around to see an enormous wave, what I imagine to be a tsunami, rushing down the main street, tossing cafe chairs and bicycles and parked cars in the air. It’s coming for me. I turn back to say something to my friend – to grab his hand and tell him to run – but he has gone. He has run away and left me here? It is now too late for me to run and so I make a split-second decision to hold onto something solid and fixed to the ground in the hope I won’t be washed away. I have the feeling you get when you are body surfing, the second you decide to dive under rather that jump up with the wave bearing down on you. Right in

front of me I see an old-fashioned red mailbox, which I embrace like a child might embrace its mother in a moment of terror. I wake just before the enormous wave crashes over me. It is 3.17 am, an impossible hour – too early to be up and too late to catch a few hours of deep sleep before the sun rises. I think about the dream, wondering what it might mean. A friend told me the first time I had this dream that the tidal wave represents an overwhelming emotional issue that needs to be dealt with, one that I might have been ignoring. It can also mean clearing away old habits and starting anew. This second trip must mean something if I am dreaming about tidal waves of emotion. I decide to take half a light sleeping pill in the hope it will knock me out quickly but not make me too groggy later on. The pill works too well and I get up later than I want to, having forgotten to organise an alarm call with the concierge. I open wide the sliding glass doors of my room and step out on to my little balcony to get a good look at Cairns in the hazy morning sunshine. The sea is calm, the sky almost clear and the tide is out, revealing a large mudflat dotted with all kinds of birdlife – gulls, cranes, egrets and sandpipers – foraging for breakfast. I want to get out of my bland hotel room and down at sea level. I quickly shower, dress, pack and check out, hitting the streets in search of a decent cafe. It’s still a little too early for the car rental places to be open, so after coffee and eggs I wander along the boardwalk. Walking along the Esplanade, I merge into the early morning mix of older couples on their daily power walks, meandering backpackers and holidaying families. I breakfast ts and open-air bars and touring companies offering rainforest and ocean adventures. I am already getting hot and regret leaving my sunglasses in my baggage at the hotel. Soon after 9 am I pick up my car – a big four-door Holden – and program the GPS to take me to Edith Street in Innisfail. On my way out of Cairns, ing takeaway outlets, shopping centres and warehouses, I manage to get stuck behind a hearse. Driving on unfamiliar roads and still feeling the soft cloak of the sleeping pill over my body, I feel tentative about overtaking the dark, sleek wagon. I can see through the window at the back, where a pine casket rests with a native floral wreath on its chest. Strangely the coffin is surrounded by coloured balloons like you might have at a children’s birthday party. A tribute from grandchildren, perhaps, to be released at the

church or gravesite? It seems incongruous to me, too festive to reflect sadness. I idle behind the hearse and turn on the radio. The morning DJ on Cairns’s HOT FM starts a twenty-minute uninterrupted block of music with Beyoncé’s ‘Halo’, followed by Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’. According to the calm, all-knowing voice of the GPS, there are no twists and turns in the road to Innisfail. I just head south along the Bruce Highway for eighty kilometres and I’ll be there.

*

I arrive on the outskirts of town just before noon. I am comforted to see that Innisfail has grown since I last visited. It doesn’t appear to be one of those Australian country towns that are slowly dying, without any hope of renewal. I reflect for a moment on how different I am to the person who arrived here by train nine years earlier. So much has happened since Nonna died. My thesis is done, I am flying in planes, I have a career, I am married, I am a mother. I am happy. I keep driving towards the river until I can see the spire of Our Lady of Good Counsel. I turn off the GPS because I know exactly where I am now, and where I need to go. I find a park opposite the familiar church and walk towards the centre of town. I pause to read a plaque on a wall that tells me American troops were stationed in the area during the Second World War. Nonna once told Mum that trucks of visiting soldiers driving by the farm would beep their horns when they saw her in the fields. I walk towards Edith Street and I call my Uncle Frank on his home line. I can tell he wasn’t expecting my call but he doesn’t hesitate about meeting me. He’ll be in town in twenty minutes, after he takes a shower. ‘You don’t have to shave, Frank. You don’t need to impress me’, I tease him. He insists he can’t meet me without scrubbing up. I walk along the town’s streets, scoping the cafes for a place for us to eat lunch. I look, as I always do when I travel on my own, for something to buy my daughter. It is my way of feeling closer to her when we are apart, the anticipation of

presenting her with a toy or book when I get back home giving me an easy thrill. But there isn’t much I want to buy so I drift aimlessly around the fabric shop and the newsagent. I think about what it would have been like for those American soldiers stationed here, eager to splash their money around in a small pond. There must have been shops and street corners they frequented, places they could buy cigarettes, candy, magazines and souvenirs and check out the local girls. Twenty minutes es and I stand on the main street outside Innisfail’s biggest pharmacy to wait for Frank. I watch a steady flow of residents walk past me – shopkeepers, mothers with children, older women in cotton floral dresses, old men who look like distant relations – not one of them in any kind of hurry. Even the couriers seem relaxed. In the crowd I spy a familiar face – my Uncle Dino. He looks much, much older than the last time we met. He is now slightly stooped, his face set in concentration as he walks, trying his best, I figure, not to trip and fall, the dread of every elderly person I know. He is leaning on his wife Alice, who also looks much older but not as frail as her husband. I am so happy to see them that I don’t stop to think that my sudden appearance on Innisfail’s main street might be confusing to them. ‘Dino, it’s me Rebecca, Marisa’s daughter.’ Dino looks bewildered but Alice greets me with a smile and tells me I look well. We stop to talk for a brief moment as I clumsily explain why I am in town. Alice tells me they are late for a coffee date and they need to keep going. As I watch them walk away I know for certain I should have allowed them to by without saying anything. My date, freshly showered and shaved, turns up only a few minutes later. I tell Frank I have seen Dino and he says his older brother has been unwell for some time. We go to one of the cafes opposite our meeting spot and Frank has no idea what to order, so I order for both of us: fresh and frothy glasses of rockmelon juice, Greek salads with generous amounts of smoked salmon, followed by coffees, this time in short glasses. We talk, just like we did when he picked me up all those years ago at the train station, about farming and how business is going and the health of all the relatives. As Elsie had predicted, Pauline’s husband Alberto died soon after Nonna, but the rest of the family are alive and most of them are well.

Frank asks me what I want to do with my time in Innisfail. I say I would like to drive around the town, maybe see where Luigi’s farm used to be, talk to anyone who is willing to talk about the war, about what happened to the men and the women during that time. I want to know more about my greatgrandfather Luigi. Did everyone idolise him like my nonna and my mother? And my grandparents’ relationship – how did that start and how did the family feel about first cousins getting married? Frank has some ideas about who would know the most about these things and he promises to make some phone calls on my behalf. Over our lukewarm coffees, Frank and I reminisce about Nonna. He tells me he was a young boy when the men of the family were interned. He re Nonna getting dressed up to visit the mill office each week. Running the farms while the men were gone meant she had to see the mill manager to find out how much cane had been cut to calculate the wages for the cutters, who were paid by the tonne. She and Frank would drive from the South Johnstone farm to the mill office along deserted roads in all kinds of weather, picking up the post and dropping by Gee Kee’s general store on the way back. One day, when Frank had just turned sixteen, Nonna gave him the wheel and let him drive the old truck home. ‘I had driven trucks on the farm, of course, but that was the first time I ever drove on a public road. I was so excited she let me do that’, he says with a dashing smile. After lunch, we drive out of town to the tract of land in South Johnstone where the farm used to be. We get out and stand by the rough and empty roadside across from the site. Cane is still growing there but the farmhouse is long gone; the only man-made structure now is a string of telephone poles. Further up the road we find the old post office, which is still open, but the corner store that used to supply the farm with dried and canned goods is now selling environmentally friendly farm chemicals. The view across the fields, over the tops of the cane towards the horizon, is gorgeous but I find it hard to connect this green and silent place with the tiny, torn, sepia photographs Mum has of the farm when she was a little girl.

*

Frank drives me back to his place outside town, a one-bedroom house next to the enormous corrugated iron and timber shed where he spends most of his time. He makes phone calls to my aunties Elsie and Pauline, to see if they are willing and free to meet me. Before he makes us some tea, he hands me a bundle of documents – letters and photos and family histories – he has collected for me to look at. I start to read them but suddenly feel very tired and wonder whether I should check into my hotel and have a rest. I perk up when Frank suggests we swing by and see Maria Ballini. Her father, a Spaniard called Mattia Morillo, had befriended Luigi in his early years in Queensland, before he bought his first farm and before the family came over from Elba. She was yet another Ballini, but apparently a distant relative. We drive back into town and across the Jubilee Bridge to South Innisfail, where Maria lives on her own in a neat little second-storey flat. Her eldest daughter is with her when Frank and I arrive. We have turned up on her doorstep without warning and yet are welcomed into her lounge room as if we are expected. Maria is in her early nineties with a sharp mind and a detailed memory of the past. She can that this person arrived for a visit on a Friday even though the visit occurred fifty years ago. She has been interviewed by a number of historians writing about Italians in north Queensland and their books containing her recollections feature proudly in shelving near the kitchen. She herself wrote a history of all she can about her family’s early years in Australia and about her father’s close friendship with Luigi, or Gigi, as she also called him. A copy of it was in the bundle of documents Frank gave me at his house. Maria knew my nonna as well. Every Saturday for over a year, on Luigi’s behest, Maria taught the young Teresa how to read and write English, extra tuition to complement Nonna’s rudimentary lessons at the local school. Frank and I turn down the usual offers of hot drinks and food in favour of water. Maria sits in an easy chair in front of me as I take sips from a long thin glass. Frank sits at the dining table and Maria’s daughter moves in and out of the kitchen, listening but rarely speaking. I ask Maria’s permission to tape our conversation and she agrees in a moment; there is not even a flicker of stage fright in her eyes at the thought of having her words recorded. Instead she opens up to me easily, clearly in her element. Perhaps

she enjoys talking to someone who cares to hear about the past. Perhaps her children and grandchildren have tired of the stories by now. ‘I take after my mother’, she tells me assertively in response to my compliment about the clarity of her memory. ‘My sisters and brothers never asked a question but I was an inquisitive person and I used to ask about different things and I used to listen.’ She tells me how her father had met Luigi and the Signorini brothers on the street one day in the town of Mackay. Mattia had taken them for Spaniards and had wished them a bon di. They understood his meaning, Spanish and Italian being very similar languages, and replied with buon giorno. The men got talking and Mattia found out the Italians were looking for work. Maria says her father helped the men find jobs in Mackay and a friendship started, with the men travelling and working together in the cane. They used to look for cutting jobs together, always carrying a stash of bread, cheese and salami ‘because you never knew when you would get a feed’. Luigi and Mattia were sleeping in the barracks of Mr McDonald’s farm in Mackay when the 1918 cyclone hit. Maria says Abelardo Signorini was the first of the group to go up to Innisfail. He then wrote a letter to his friend Luigi beckoning him further north with the promise that ‘you will make your fortune here’. Italians like Abelardo were buying up farms on the cheap after the cyclone. I ask Maria what Luigi was like as a person. She pauses for a split second and gives me a stern look. ‘I don’t want to offend you but if you are going to ask me a question like that I am going to tell you the truth’, she says. ‘Absolutely, I want to hear the truth’, I tell her. ‘Well, Gigi, when he was an ordinary man, a labourer, he was a wonderful man. Once he got the farms and he got the money . . . Well, Dad and him started as very good friends and later they weren’t.’ I ask Maria to explain what caused the fallout between the two men. She tells me her father had loaned Luigi money to buy two horses; my great-grandfather needed them to work his farm but he was saving whatever he could to bring his family over from Elba. Luigi didn’t want to approach a bank or a moneylender

and so he asked his friend instead. The horses cost forty pounds each and the debt amounted to something like a third of the average yearly earnings for an Australian man at the time. It was repaid by Luigi, without interest, seven years later. But, according to his daughter, Mattia’s generosity was not returned by Luigi. ‘My dad hated to owe people money and he hated to go to the bank to ask for money’, Maria explains. ‘He thought he would ask Gigi. He only needed thirty pounds for a tractor to work his new farm. He asked for the money and do you know what Gigi said? “These are not the times to lend money to anybody.” Well, Dad came home as white as a sheet. He told my mother it was like a knife going through him. He couldn’t speak. For one week Dad hardly ate. I him sitting out on that verandah, looking out over the cane, thinking about Gigi and what he turned out to be.’ In the end a neighbour and fellow farmer, a Spanish man called Joe Donateau, wrote Mattia a cheque for the money. It was the end of the friendship between Maria’s father and Luigi. Mattia’s sense of betrayal is, for a moment, revived in the face of his daughter as she tells me this story. His hurt had clearly been shared by the curious young girl. Luigi had practically been a member of the Morillo family when he was living and working alone in the north. I have no words to respond to her, except to say that the story makes me sorry and sad. Frank doesn’t say anything. Maria’s daughter clears away the glasses and disappears into the kitchen. Maria changes the subject and we make small talk about my mother and my daughter for a few minutes before Frank and I excuse ourselves, thanking the women for their hospitality. Driving back over the bridge towards my parked car, I ask for Frank’s opinion. Does he believe Maria’s story about Luigi? ‘I’m not sure. I loved my grandfather. I always thought he was a good man. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. No one can tell. Maybe he did do unkind things to Maria’s dad but he was also kind to other people.’ We talk some more about current family politics, who was annoyed with whom, who was avoiding whom. As Frank speaks I sense a complex web of grudges, perceived insults and slights. I start to worry that my questions about the past might stir up trouble, exacerbate some already existing feud. Frank

sighs. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to live in family’, he says in a weary tone. And he is right. Most of my life has been lived in Sydney, far away from my mother’s or my father’s relatives. I don’t know anything about a life lived in a tangle of old relationships fenced in by the boundaries of a small town. Innisfail suddenly feels dense with history and memory. I can see it is a place that can push down on you despite its wide spaces and open sky. Frank drops me at my car and we make plans to meet at the bistro in the bowling club for dinner. I check into my room at The Barrier Reef Motel, which is now my only accommodation option. The place by the river where we stayed when Nonna died had closed down long ago. This motel is very much like that one, however, clean and basic with friendly staff. Only this time I will be sleeping near the cemetery rather than the river. I dump my bag on the bed and my mobile rings. It is Elsie. I tell her I am at the motel and was thinking about taking a walk to the cemetery to visit the graves of my grandparents. ‘Oh yes, they are there’, she says to me chirpily. ‘And all the rest. All the ghosts are flying around there. At least we know some of them. Some of them you wouldn’t want to know.’ She laughs her infectious laugh and makes me laugh with her. I arrange to see her the next day and she warns me that she will tell me the truth about everything. Just like Maria.

*

The temperature is cooling down and the sky is starting to darken for the evening when I enter the cemetery. I walk up the avenue we drove down the day we buried Nonna. I am positive my grandparents’ burial place is in the far-right corner in front of the cubic, ornate crypts of the Leottas, the Maranos and the Tomarchios. I can’t find them. I walk past graves that are old, cracked and eroded, so much so that the names of the deceased are barely discernible in the weatherworn stone. You have to trace your fingers along the grooves, as if you are reading Braille, to be sure who is buried beneath. But the graves that look worse, make me feel worse, are the newer

ones covered with faded plastic flowers in plastic urns. They make me think that those who once cared enough to bring tributes to their departed loved ones have not returned to tidy the tombstones. Perhaps they have forgotten or no longer care enough to visit. Or perhaps they are themselves lying in some nearby plot. I look through each row in the ‘Italian’ section and can’t find Ballini anywhere. I then veer back towards the avenue and find myself in O’Doherty and Johnstone territory. I move away from the Irish and the English and find another section of Italians, where the graves are packed together closely. The headstones look relatively new, festooned with saints and statues and fake flowers that have not yet faded. I recall the description I read about the conditions on the cramped immigrant ships sailing from Italy to Australia. Decades after that awful trip to the outer rim of the earth, these migrants are gathered together again, cheek to jowl with their countrymen from north and south, the end of the line. Behind the first bank of crypts, I find the grave I am looking for. Nonno and Nonna haven’t been moved like my mother considered doing. Next to them is the grave of the Sicilian woman Elsie pointed out, Lydia. She is waiting for her husband to her, the left side of the stone left blank for the date of his forthcoming death to be chiselled into the surface. I look at my grandparents’ combined gravestone. It has a marble face, which is attractive enough, but the grave is made of awful red brick and concrete. It reminds me of the houses my grandfather liked to build when he was a builder. On top of the marble, there is a photo of Nonno looking characteristically grim. In Nonna’s photo, taken after her husband’s death, she is very thin but smiling enigmatically like the Mona Lisa. The headstone reads, ‘Beloved mother and grandmother’. It also says Nonna had been born in 1910 and Nonno in 1912. He was two years younger than her. I hadn’t known that.

*

Frank and I meet for an early dinner. We eat a decent meal of local fish and

salad and drink soft drink with too much ice in schooner glasses. There are lots of people in the place and we try to ignore the noise from the poker machines and the weekly trivia night. Frank talks a bit about business but mostly he reflects on his life. He insists he never actively chose a bachelor’s existence; it was just how it turned out for him. ‘I put it down to circumstances, fate’, he tells me. ‘But my mother would always say it had nothing to do with fate’, he says with a smile. ‘It was God’s punishment for the fact I always liked women too much.’ I don’t ask whether he regrets never marrying or having children. He seems content in himself and it is hard to picture him as lonely, although my heart contracts a little thinking of him in his sparsely furnished house at night leafing through business papers and eating a cold dinner. I wonder too what kind of woman might have made him happy. A nice local girl from a good Italian family? A modern-minded Aussie girl with an education? A contestant from The Farmer Wants a Wife? I return to the motel early. Other guests are sitting outside their rooms, smoking and drinking, enjoying the mild night air. All of them are roughlooking men – truckies or seasonal workers – who size me up as I walk with Frank from the car to the door of my room. He glares at them, a protective gesture which makes me feel safe, like no one would dare mess with me because I have family in town. We plan to meet at the motel the next morning to visit Pauline, who Frank assures me knew Nonna the best. Before getting ready for bed I call my mum. I tell her about the cemetery visit and relay Maria’s story about Luigi. She responds as Frank had. She believes her grandfather had been an honourable and kind man. I tell her I can understand how a life of hard labour, of scrimping and saving, could create a mean streak in a generous man. Or maybe his generosity was limited to family? Mum doesn’t have any answers for me. Once in bed I continue to read Sugar Heaven. I have trouble imagining Devanny’s utopian vision of 1930s Innisfail as a place of peaceful socialism where ‘no colour line’ exists, ‘no distinction among nationals made’, a place in which ‘all skins alike [shine] like satin with the action of the sun’. I don’t recognise in her description of the Italian cane cutter Tony any characteristics of the Ballini men I know. Everything I have ever heard about my family confirmed them as apolitical and parochial, keeping out of

trouble and keeping company with their own kind. I switch off the light and close my eyes, hoping to fall asleep quickly despite the sounds of talking and drinking outside my front door.

8

A Family Affair

The next morning, after a deep and dreamless sleep, I wake up later than usual and walk the fifteen minutes into the centre of town. I find a good takeaway latte at Il Fiorentino’s, my nonna’s favourite coffee shop. I walk around the almost empty streets taking photos of various buildings: the Court House, the Shire Hall, the Church, the School of the Arts, the Central Hotel and The Canecutter monument. The old art-deco buildings are well constructed and well preserved, a reminder of the town’s vibrant past. Standing outside the Regent Arcade, once the Regent Theatre, I think about Sugar Heaven, about Dulcie, Hefty and their friends, the unionists and cutters of all nationalities, who assembled here in the book to discuss industrial action. It is starting to warm up, the sun’s heat gaining momentum, so I return to the motel, dress, pack and check out in time for Frank’s arrival. This time I suggest we park his ute at the motel so I can be the chauffeur for the day. I tell Frank I want to drop by the church before we go to see Pauline. The church was badly damaged by Cyclone Larry in March 2006 but has since been restored beautifully. We park around the side of Our Lady of Good Counsel and enter through the door closest to the altar. As we walk into the white, light, air-filled space we can see people preparing for a funeral. A casket sits in the middle of the centre aisle, just as my nonna’s had, only this casket is a darker colour and bears a wreath of red and white flowers. ‘I love this church’, I tell Frank. ‘It means a lot to me.’ ‘It means a lot to me too’, he says. We walk quickly to the back of the church so we are not mistaken for mourners. As we are leaving, Frank looks at the order of service for the funeral and realises he knew, albeit not very well, the woman being buried. She was Italian, a southerner, much younger

than my nonna had been when she died. We leave through the front door and I regret that my flying trip could not include an evening Mass.

*

Pauline’s house is on the modest farm that she and her husband bought in the 1950s. I had been to the house once before, on our first visit to Innisfail to visit Nonna as a widow. The family had put on a huge dinner to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday. I course after course after course being brought out, endless streams of food cooked by the various aunties in the family. The men sat and ate, engaging in subdued discussions in Italian. All the women were busy in the kitchen, cooking, cleaning, eating, ferrying plates to and fro, serving their men who rarely looked up and said thank you. The women stayed mostly in the kitchen, joking with each other, laughing and talking loudly in a mixture of English and Italian. From my seat at the long, makeshift dining table, it was clear where the real fun was. I went into the kitchen to be close to my aunties. Perched on a kitchen stool, watching them work and talk, I wondered if there was collective noun for aunties: An army? A siege? A charm? A blessing? Mum and Emily soon ed me. Nonna, the guest of honour, stayed at the dining table a short distance away from the men, picking at her food and not talking. She was, I expect, quietly ing judgement on the ability of her nieces to turn out a decent pasta al forno. When Frank and I arrive on her doorstep, Pauline greets us with smiles and hugs. She is just as she was when I saw her at Nonna’s wake. I am introduced to her daughter and son-in-law who are visiting from Melbourne. We have brought chocolates to share but Pauline has laid out coffee and cakes. We all sit down at her kitchen table to talk and I ask Pauline if she and Nonna had been close friends. ‘We were close but we were related’, she tells me. Pauline is Nonna’s cousin on her mother’s side. Her father had also immigrated to Australia and left the family behind. When Pauline’s mother Pierina died, the ten-year-old Pauline took the ship from Italy to Brisbane to be reunited with her father.

She didn’t end up living with him, though; a cane barracks was no place to raise a young girl. Instead she lived on the farm at South Johnstone with Luigi, his wife Marietta and my nonna. In 1942 Pauline married Alberto. Alberto was Nonna’s cousin on her father’s side, so Luigi’s nephew had married Marietta’s niece. Yet another union conceived within the Ballini family circle. Despite the thirteen-year age gap between them, Nonna and Pauline’s relationship was a close one. They were always together. Nonna would even take Pauline with her on her errand runs during the war. ‘There was lots of Mafia around’, Pauline says. ‘You would have to drive through miles of scrub. And Teresa had to take the payment to the cutters on the farm in Babinda. She was scared to drive on her own, so I used to go with her. She felt happier.’ ‘And you were going to protect her?’ I say wryly. Pauline had been a child at that time and even more diminutive than Nonna. I couldn’t imagine her being much help if they had been attacked by thugs. ‘We had a loaded shotgun under the front seat’, Pauline says matter-offactly. Pauline pours the coffee and then places some black-and-white family photos on the table for me to look at. I inspect each photo with care, asking questions about who is who, who is related to whom. All my aunties and uncles look bold, smooth and handsome in black and white and shades of grey. She shows me a photo of my nonna’s grandparents and great auntie on her mother’s side: Teresa, Guiseppe and Felice. So Nonna’s mother had named her youngest daughter after her own mother? This Teresa looks so different. She is dressed entirely in black and wears hardy black work boots. Her husband Guiseppe is sitting in a chair in his working clothes. He has a white beard, a dark, creased face with deep-set, sad eyes. He looks beaten down. I find it quietly amusing that my great-great-grandparents called their daughter Felice. She looks so poor and grim in clothes exactly like her mother’s. But apparently Felice had been quite a prankster. She and her brother Tebaldo used to love wrapping animal droppings in boxes, tying

them up with bows and leaving them at people’s doorsteps so they would think they were presents. Once they mixed ground chilli in with their father’s pipe tobacco and he nearly choked to death because of it. I pick up a photo of Nonna’s mother, Marietta. Mum has told me many stories about her grandmother, how terrifying she was. She was a short, stocky, intense woman who hated being indoors. She rarely cooked, instead spending hours in the garden and the horse sheds. She grew poppies and was a mixer of potions, something of a medicine woman. Mum once told me about a childhood incident when her grandmother gave her a draught to drink to cure a mild headache; it cured the headache by knocking her unconscious for twenty-four hours. There is another famous story about Marietta, that she contracted peritonitis at the age of seventeen, a lifethreatening condition even today. The story goes that the doctor attending her decided to operate rather than let his young patient die, as there were no drugs on Elba available to treat her. And so they tied Marietta to a wooden bench while the doctor cut her open, cleaned out her innards with boiled soap and sewed her back up. She was on the brink of death for months but recovered to full health. My great-grandmother had probably been born resilient but this experience must have forged her character into something flinty and fearless. I ask Pauline about Marietta, what was she like? ‘She was a hard woman’, Pauline says. ‘If you had a piece of bread, she would make you eat the last crumb. She used to make me drink the milk straight from the cow while it was still warm. I used to hate it but I did it.’ I guess that if Marietta wanted you to drink cow’s milk from the udder, you did it without question. I share with Pauline a similar story that my mum once told me about how Marietta used to force her granddaughter to eat raw egg. She would hold her firmly by the back of the neck and get her to suck the egg yolk through a hole in the shell, yelling ‘mange-lo, mange-lo’. Eat it, eat it. I spot a striking image in the pile of photographs, a formal head-andshoulders portrait of an older man. He is extremely well dressed, with a handkerchief that matches his tie in his pocket. He has round tortoiseshell glasses and looks very different to the other rugged, sun-darkened men in the photo collection. I ask Pauline who he is and she says that’s Tebaldo,

Marietta’s brother. I say he looks like he might have been a teacher or a shopkeeper, not a cane cutter or labourer. ‘Tebaldo wasn’t a very good man’, she says. She pauses for a moment, her face reflecting a change of heart. ‘Well, he was a good man’, she clarifies. ‘But he was a cook. He was more of a . . . a . . . he liked ladies’ things. He used to collect tablecloths. He would cater for weddings and the bride wouldn’t pay money, he would get paid in a tablecloth. He used to love opera.’ ‘So he was artistic?’ I say. ‘He was’, Frank interjects. He tells us Tebaldo had been skilled at fretwork, creating fancy objects out of timber. He made intricate replicas of Our Lady of Good Counsel and of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Back in Italy he had been a musician and used to boast that he had once played the clarinet in the Opera House in Naples. He loved to collect jewellery as well. Most of his clothes were tailor-made and he was always immaculately dressed even in the tropics. ‘So he was gay?’ I ask. Pauline smiles ever so slightly. ‘Yes, well, yes, he was like that’, she acknowledges. ‘This is Marietta’s brother?’ I ask. ‘Yes and my mother’s brother too’, Pauline responds. I ask Pauline if Tebaldo ever had a family of his own, knowing that for an Italian man of his vintage, sexual preference rarely interfered with marriage and children. ‘Yes, he married and he had two children’, Pauline says. ‘One of them was your nonno.’ I am startled. I assumed Tebaldo was just one of the numerous Ballini men roaming the cane fields of north Queensland. But this is a photo of my great-grandfather; it is the first one I have ever seen of him. He is someone my family rarely, if ever, spoke about. My nonno certainly never mentioned him. ‘Tebaldo and Oreste never got on. They were totally different’, Pauline

explains. ‘At one time they weren’t even talking.’ Tebaldo first arrived in Australia in 1925, three years after Luigi. He left his wife Angelina, his daughter Vittorina and son Oreste back in Elba. My nonno followed his father when he turned seventeen, arriving in Australia in 1929. Unlike the other Ballini men, Tebaldo rarely sent money back home to his family nor did he send for them to him in Australia once he had became established. It was up to the rest of the family, Oreste in particular, to provide for mother and sister. I take a photo of Tebaldo’s portrait with my mobile phone. I want to show this image to my mother and also to look at it later on. I have committed so many of the faces of my relatives to memory, but this one, my mother’s nonno, is completely new to me. It seems as if there has been an attempt, deliberate or not, to write him out of our family story. Or perhaps Tebaldo had removed himself, hadn’t wanted to be part of the tightly knit circle of Ballinis and Aglis, whose sole focus was growing their families and their fortunes. I put the black-and-white image of the colourful Tebaldo aside and it lies conspicuously among the photos of weddings and family gatherings on farm porches and in public gardens. Pauline makes another pot of coffee and we move on to discuss Nonno and Nonna, the beginnings of their relationship. While we talk I examine another photo I have picked out from the pile. It is of my nonno as an intense and good-looking young man. He is not smiling but then again he rarely smiled in photos, even less so in real life. ‘You know they were first cousins?’ Pauline asks. ‘Yes I know. Was it controversial?’ ‘I think it was for a while. You know they used to go into town to meet secretly for a kiss and that.’ Pauline laughs, the intrigues and dramas of the past seeming funny to her now. ‘Your grandfather used to come to the house a lot to see her but, you know, there was nothing strange about that. We were all family.’ I ask Pauline what Nonna had seen in her first cousin, what attracted her to him. She can’t really answer the question and then Frank chimes in. ‘You have to your grandfather was a figure around town. He was

a soccer player, a good one. He hung around a lot with Uncle Joe, your nonna’s brother.’ ‘Teresa liked Oreste’, is all Pauline can add. Their mutual attraction seems to make sense. It wasn’t as if my nonna had the freedom to pick from a large pool of potential boyfriends. Italian girls weren’t allowed to go out and meet other men, especially non-Italians. Most of the time, they were confined to the house and the company of women. I ask Pauline about what life had been like on the farm. She tells me they grew their own veggies, although they didn’t grow olives and they missed eating them. They used to make their own cheese, salami, butter and jam. Marietta mucked around in the stables and in her vegetable and herb garden while Nonna looked after the house, cooking and cleaning and washing, helped as much as possible by Pauline. ‘I used to have to scrub the steps with sand soap – I that’, Pauline says. The morning was consumed with chores. In the afternoon and evening they would knit, sew and do ‘fancywork’ by kerosene lamp, or candlelight in harder times. It established a pattern for life. ‘I still do that now’, Pauline tells me. ‘Chores in the morning and fancywork in the afternoon.’ I ask Pauline about what happened during the war, when the men were arrested and interned. She can’t recall much as she had only been a child when Luigi was taken away. ‘The policeman from Mourilyan came and asked the men to come with them and they did.’ ‘Did they resist or argue about being taken into custody?’ ‘No, they just went. It wasn’t a nice thing to happen. But we were aliens, weren’t we?’ She tells me Luigi was held in town at the showgrounds and then sent south. I ask her about Nonna’s role as the of her father’s business during the time Luigi was in the internment camp. ‘Teresa was the one who went to school in Australia so she was the one who did things. The other sisters didn’t. They didn’t have the English and they

had left school in Italy. They also had families to look after’, Pauline explains. ‘How did you and Nonna feel when the men were taken, living by yourselves on the farm?’ ‘We were nervous, anxious. The swagmen would come around and ask for food so we’d give them a bit of bread. They had long beards. I being a bit scared of them at the time.’ While the young Pauline might have felt threatened by the swaggies, she says they always took their bread thankfully and left them alone. I prod Pauline further, telling her I saw a plaque on a wall near the shire hall stating that American soldiers were stationed in Innisfail during the war. ‘Do you them at all?’ ‘Not really. Sometimes when we went into town to go to the shops we would see them but we never spoke to them.’ I ask her about racism and [British Preference], about the discrimination they faced as Italians before and during the war. ‘It was bad in those days. We were all wogs’, she says. I tell her I was surprised when I found out Innisfail was such a mix of different ethnicities. She says it has always been that way, although people tend to keep their own people close. That being said the Ballinis enjoyed good relations with some of the local Chinese families. ‘The Chinese were good people. They never caused any trouble.’ I ask her about the Black Hand, reminding her about her previous comment that Nonna would take her along on errand runs because they were scared of being attacked. ‘We were but in the end those people only caused trouble between themselves.’ ‘Those things never really took hold here’, Frank adds. ‘Except for that guy who got his ear cut off and then shot Mamone in the street.’

We consume the second pot of coffee and most of the cakes. Pauline’s daughter and son-in-law have listened to our conversation in silence but with interest. I start asking about cane cutting as Pauline’s husband, Alberto, had cut cane on one of Luigi’s farms for four years before he could buy a place of his own. Pauline’s son-in-law had also cut cane, but that was in the 1960s when they would cut burnt cane and the seasons were shorter. ‘It was much better to cut when they burnt it’, he tells me. ‘You could see what you were doing. But it was hard work. The hands were blistered the first couple of weeks then the blisters would turn into calluses. But you would get used to it. You’d start at 5 am, cut till eleven and then have lunch. You were back at it at one to cut until six and then do a burn-off for the following day before dinner. But if the wind wasn’t right you had to go back after dinner.’ He tells me that while cutters were each paid by the tonne, it was the gang that was paid as a unit and then the pay was split. So you didn’t want to be the slow one, or that could mean less for the gang. It would be like taking money from your fellow gang if you lagged behind. ‘It was a race. You tried to beat each other. If you were lucky to get the right gang, it was a friendship, a family’, he says. The average gang could cut ten to twelve tonnes of cane per day but it all depended on how pliant and orderly the cane was and the different varieties you were required to cut. I tell him that the work sounds terrible but he gives me a casual shrug. ‘Cutting cane, it was something you wanted to do rather than being forced to do.’ He says he still has his old cane knife in the shed if I want to see it. He brings it out for me to look at. Unsurprisingly, it is just like the descriptions in the books, although it is shorter and lighter than I expect it to be. In the middle of Pauline’s kitchen her son-in-law demonstrates cutting for me. Assuming a wide-legged stance, he grips the aged knife in a firm fist. Bending low from the waist he swings his arm up high and low down, severing the imaginary stalks. ‘You’d cut as low as you could to make the farmer happy’, he explains to me. ‘You cut too high, that was money wasted.’ He stops after a few swings and I feel relieved for him; even this quick demonstration has made him slightly out of breath.

Frank and I take our leave after about two hours of talking. We need to eat before seeing Elsie and then I have to be on the road back to Cairns. Pauline hugs and kisses me at the door and then lays a light hand on my arm. ‘Your grandmother went quickly. Within a week. She didn’t suffer.’

9

Preserving the Truth

Frank and I drive away from Pauline’s house towards the centre of town for lunch. We go back to the same place where we’d eaten the day before. Over sandwiches I tell Frank that during my morning walk I saw that the old School of the Arts now houses the Innisfail and District Historical Society Museum, a place I think may be worth a visit. It is supposed to feature an extensive collection of photos, documents and memorabilia about the town and the shire. He agrees, and says we just about have time to go there before meeting Elsie at Rosie’s place. Frank and I linger too long over lunch and when we arrive at the museum we have only half an hour to browse the exhibits before it closes. The place consists of a number of small, dark rooms on the second floor of the arts school. It has the exact atmosphere and smell of the secondhand stores you find in certain inner-city suburbs in Sydney or Melbourne. In the few seams of sunlight entering the rooms through closed windows I can see storms of swirling dust motes. I check my bag for my asthma inhaler just in case the thick atmosphere in the museum gets the better of me. Every surface and corner is crowded with objects – farming and household equipment, clothing and furniture, mainly – that would have been used by shire residents in days gone by. There are glass display cabinets full of photos and printed material. In one corner there is a wall of long-dead reptiles and insects – many of them venomous – preserved in large glass jars. The sight of a shelf full of pickled creatures, their opaque flesh and rubbery limbs, makes me feel queasy. The museum is best known for its portraits of the See Poy family, two large oil paintings that were restored by the Queensland Art Gallery in the late 1990s. I pick up a glossy four-page brochure about the portraits and go into

the second room to view them. One portrait shows three of the See Poy children – two girls and a boy – dressed in traditional Chinese costumes from the Qing Dynasty. The boy, the youngest of the three, wears a headdress with tassels and pompoms, and a simple dark blue tunic top with cream pants. The girls wear more elaborate tunics and pants with brocade in similar shades of blue and cream. They all wear plain slippers with white socks. The girls’ hair is pulled back severely, their side buns covered in ornamented fabric. The boy looks cross and defiant and the girls appear sullen. The younger of the girls even looks like she is pouting. These unhappy sisters – Victoria May and Ida Pearl – are the ones my mother said used to Nonna to embroider and make lace on Saturdays. I suspect Victoria and Ida weren’t so maudlin in real life, or those embroidery sessions would have been pretty dull and depressing. Perhaps the children had bitterly resented being dressed up in these clothes to pose for the painter in the tropical heat? After reading the brochure I learn the portrait was in fact produced in Hong Kong or southern China, using a conventional studio photo as a reference point. It is a relief to know the children didn’t have to suffer in stifling traditional dress for too long in order to have their likeness taken. The second portrait shows four of the See Poy children – the two girls and the boy along with a baby boy seated on a chair. They are all in formal Edwardian dress. The girls have exchanged their Qing Dynasty outfits for pea green, long-sleeved dresses with wide lace collars. Their long hair is loose and worn down, pinned to the side with matching ribbons. The boy wears black knee-length pants and a shirt with a Peter Pan collar. The baby is dressed in something that looks like a baptism outfit, a white lacy tunic and little cap. These two See Poy boys are called Johnstone and Gilbert. Later the fifth and last of the See Poy children would be born, Herbert. None of the children in this second portrait radiates the bad temper so evident in the first. Their faces are calm and they direct their eyes to the far right, perhaps at the photographer or a proud parent. The portraits perfectly reflect the double life lived by the children of migrants, caught between homeland tradition and new-world assimilation, not entirely comfortable in the clothing of either culture. Frank and I walk back towards the museum’s entrance where an older woman, one of the museum’s volunteer assistants, has been chatting to an older man while we are browsing. I explain my research project to her and

ask if she has any specific information about what happened to Italians in the shire during the war. There is something about my request that seems to annoy her. ‘No, we wouldn’t have anything about that’, she tells me sharply. She points me towards volume fifteen of the society’s magazine, which contains some family histories about Italians in the area, with very little mention about their treatment during the war. Even so, I buy it along with a copy of Delia Birchley’s history of the shire, God’s Own Country. While I am chatting to the woman, Frank talks to the man. My uncle then introduces me to him and explains the family connection. ‘I knew Louis’, the older man tells me with a warm smile – Louis being the name he knew Luigi by. I tell him I am researching what happened when the men in my family were interned as enemy aliens. He tells me that in 1942 he and his brother, both young boys at the time, were asked by one of the local policemen to help fetch sandwiches for the Italians who had been detained and held in the showgrounds. They were all about to be sent to Townsville and the copper thought it would be a good idea to give them some food for the trip. They went to Vito’s continental deli in town. ‘You could get spaghetti and chicken there for one and nine pence’, the man recalls. Vito prepared two buckets of sandwiches for the internees, only to be told once he had finished that he too would be taken into custody. The deli owner was shipped off with his sandwiches to the showgrounds. ‘I’ll never forget the look on Vito’s face when he realised they were taking him away, too’, the man says.

*

Frank and I drive to my Auntie Rosie’s flat. It is one of six units built around a cul de sac, tailored to the needs of old people who aren’t quite yet ready for the nursing home. Rosie is living in the same flat my nonna lived in after her husband died. On the phone the previous day, Auntie Elsie

insisted we meet there rather than at her house. She is over having to entertain visitors, even special ones like me. Rosie is the tallest of my aunties, and the only Sicilian to marry into Luigi’s side of the Ballini clan. Her husband Guilio had ed away years before of Parkinson’s disease. Rosie greets us with kisses and hugs at the flyscreen door and seems virtually unchanged, although when we go inside I notice she moves from the kitchen to the lounge room tentatively. Her arthritis is causing her pain. Rosie – gentle, soft-hearted and softly spoken – belies the stereotype of southerners so popular among the rest of my relatives. The apartment is immaculate and smells like cleaning products and air freshener. Familiar family photographs stand in silver frames all around the room alongside high-resolution colour photos of her children and grandchildren whom I’ve never met. I have brought flowers for Rosie but overlooked getting a present for Elsie. ‘Good thing you didn’t bring me flowers’, Elsie says with some vehemence from her seated position on the couch. ‘I would have had an asthma attack.’ I immediately feel guilty. Elsie stands up so we can kiss and hug and I tell her she looks well. She says she is falling apart. We sit down while Rosie frets about putting my flowers in water and providing us with coffee or tea. ‘Do you want something to eat? You must be hungry. This is terrible, terrible’, she says to us with genuine concern. ‘I can’t get you anything?’ Frank and I refuse everything but water. Elsie, ignoring Rosie’s fussing, gets straight to the point. ‘So you want to know about the family?’ she asks. I look at my favourite auntie sitting in front of me. She is over seventy and still so vibrant it is easy to forget she has been a grandmother for a decade. It is no effort to imagine her as the blue-eyed, blonde-haired curvaceous beauty she had been in her youth. ‘I sure do’, I reply. ‘I want you to tell me everything you know.’ ‘Do you want the truth?’ Elsie asks. It sounds like the truth will be delivered regardless of whether I answer yes or no. ‘Of course’, I say.

‘Because people don’t really like the truth’, she proclaims. ‘They don’t want to hear it but I tell them the truth, the good and the bad.’ ‘All right’, I say to her. ‘I have just found out a lot about Nonno’s father Tebaldo from Pauline. Tell me about him.’ ‘Tebaldo was a homosexual but he was also a pain in the arse’, she says. ‘His poor wife was long suffering. But would you be with a man like him as a husband?’ I ask her about Tebaldo’s wife, Angelina – what had she been like? ‘Well’, responds Elsie, ‘Angelina was Sicilian and you know Sicilians, they go for a lot of gold . . .’ ‘Yes’, says Rosie interrupting, albeit quietly, ‘I wear a lot of gold myself’. I look over at her and notice she has only a modest amount of jewellery on, both silver and gold. She is being sarcastic. ‘Oh, you’re different’, Elsie says with a chuckle, ‘you are just a misfit’. Rosie gives me a look with her big dark eyes that my nonna used to say reminded her of a Jersey cow’s. ‘I am not offended, it’s all right’, she says. She is clearly used to it. Elsie continues on with her story, telling me that Angelina came from a very wellto-do Sicilian family and she was an extremely beautiful woman. ‘She had lots and lots of jewellery, gold and such, and over the years Tebaldo sold it all to do what he wanted to do and buy what he wanted to buy. The family really suffered. Oreste, his sister and her husband, their daughter Laura, they all suffered.’ Elsie tells me there was a lot of friction in my nonno’s immediate family once they were reunited in Australia. In the end, to keep the family together but to ensure some semblance of peace, Nonno bought a house for them and then divided it in two. Tebaldo lived his life of opera, fine food and elegant tablecloths in the back section; the rest of the family lived in the front. According to Elsie, life was no more harmonious in the other Ballini household, where Oreste and Teresa lived with Luigi and Marietta and then later with my mother.

‘Nonna Marietta would always be going, “Tere, Tere, get me this, get me that, get me a glass of water”. She sat down on a chair for the last ten years of her life. She could have walked right up until the day she died but she had Teresa to wait on her so why bother? And then Oreste would be at the back of the house in his shed and be yelling, “Tere, Tere, get me this, get me that”.’ I say it sounds like my nonna was a bit of a slave to her mother and to her husband. ‘Not a bit’, Elsie corrects me, ‘a lot. And your mother got left out. With Teresa, it was her parents and her husband vying for first position and as much as Zia tried she couldn’t fit Marisa in. I felt sorry for Marisa. I used to feel sorry for Zia Teresa to a point but then again I used to tell her, “You are doing it to yourself, you are creating it”. But when you have done it for so many years it is hard to break the mould.’ In all my interviews and discussions so far, there has been very little talk about my mother. I am immediately struck by my own naivety. How could I expect to ask questions about her parents and not be confronted with some unknown truths about my mother’s upbringing? I knew that she and Oreste never got on, that he was distant, sullen, often cruel and sometimes violent. But I never knew he saw her as competition for his wife’s affection. I suddenly feel a keen sadness that my mother’s childhood had been fractious and lonely. Once Elsie starts to talk, it is hard to get her to stop. She talks on and on about this person and that person, events that happened after the war, relatives back in Italy, more recent fallouts and frictions. Things about living persons that are either too scandalous to print or irrelevant to my task of uncovering more about Nonna and what happened during the war. Before long, an hour has ed. I look at my watch and it is nearly time for me to leave to drive back to Cairns. I haven’t even begun to ask about the war, the internship of the men, or Nonna’s courtship with Nonno. I want to ask Elsie more questions, particularly about Nonna and Nonno when they were younger, but I just don’t have the time. I promise Elsie I will come back soon and that I will drag my mother with me. ‘You know they were forbidden to go near each other because they were first cousins?’ Elsie tells me as we rise from our seats to say goodbye. I tell her I did know this.

‘I bet you didn’t know there was a hole in the wall that connected the bathroom to the storage room on the farm in South Johnstone. They used to arrange to meet there so they could touch each other through the hole.’ Elsie grins mischievously. It sounds to me like an erotically charged scene in The Piano. The image of the young Oreste and Teresa brushing fingers through a fortuitous gap in a timber wall jars with the previous story about Nonna being badgered into exhaustion by the demands of husband and parents. Then again, as Nonna once told me herself, everything changes once that wedding ring is slipped on your finger.

*

I drive Frank back to his car at the motel and say a quick goodbye, promising to return soon to Innisfail with my mum. I have urged him at different moments during my visit to consider a holiday break in Sydney but he tells me he isn’t the type for holidays. We had managed to lure him down to Sydney for my wedding but only after Mum cajoled and threatened him. I watch him in the rearview mirror, standing by the roadside watching me as I drive away towards the highway. I get lost on the way to Cairns; I had forgotten to charge my GPS and it dies soon after I leave the centre of town. Before long I realise I am driving in the wrong direction, stuck in narrow roadways on the outer limits of Innisfail, in fact, heading towards South Johnstone. I pull over to the side of a road near a banana farm where I can see rows and rows of trees, their huge bunches of fruit covered by colourful sacks to protect them from the tiny bites of birds and insects. As my GPS recharges on the car battery, I pick and eat two under-ripe bananas hurriedly, one after another. I eventually start to make my way back to Cairns, hoping to reach my hotel before the sun begins to set.

*

Later that evening, I call my mother to tell her about some of the things I had heard that day. I especially want to know about her grandfather, Tebaldo – why she hadn’t ever told me about him. ‘I didn’t mean to keep him a secret from you’, Mum says. ‘But he always lived separate from the family. Whenever we moved somewhere he would come, only he would build himself a private cubby house and live there on his own’, she explains. She says that what Pauline told me about his love of opera, cooking and beautiful, expensive things is true. She also agrees with Elsie that he was a terrible spendthrift and brought hardship on his family. She tells me some new things as well. That he had been a cook in the First World War and had been shot in the finger, the wound earning him a war pension. That he never went to school but taught himself to read and write. And that, in his later years, he developed an obsession with an Australian pop singer. ‘He had about eight pictures of John Farnham on his walls, mounted in elaborate wooden frames he made himself’, she says. ‘I don’t know if he had an active gay life’, Mum tells me, ‘but I do know he had no interest in his wife Angelina or women generally. My grandparents were the ones that sent money back to his daughter and wife in Italy and in the end it was my grandparents that brought them over to Australia.’ Tebaldo had no interest in family life but he had a wonderful social life. ‘He used to have parties in his own place, with beautiful food he had made, laid out on a table with gorgeous linen. He would entertain men who also loved opera.’ Mum says her grandfather lived an extravagant lifestyle for the times, spending everything he earned, having all his clothes made, collecting expensive jewellery (or more likely taking Angelina’s family jewellery) and giving away the best pieces in his collection to friends. ‘I got the dregs of his jewellery. You know that cameo ring I gave you a few years ago? That was his pinky ring.’ I know the ring she means. It is made of peach-coloured coral and features the head and shoulders of a Grecianlooking woman with an elaborate hairstyle of braids and heavy coils of curls cascading across her bare shoulders. Her gown is low cut, her face rendered in profile as with all traditional cameos. She has a haughty look and large, drooping eyes. As a woman’s ring it always attracts comments from strangers and so I could imagine it must have provoked envy and suspicion

worn as a pinky ring by an Italian cook in Innisfail in the 1930s. I ask Mum if her father really hated Tebaldo. ‘He did. They barely spoke for most of their time together in Australia. When Tebaldo was older and we were all living in Adelaide, my father started to feel a bit guilty about shunning him for all those years, you know, family duty and everything. So we would visit him in his section of the house. My father would walk in and say, “Are you all right?” Tebaldo would say “yes”, and Dad would walk outside and sit in the car while my mother and I stayed and had afternoon tea.’ Mum asks me if the trip has answered all my questions. I tell her I now know a lot more about the family, particularly the men, the relationship between people, how everything was complicated and how everyone was connected. I also have some idea about what life was like back then for the cutters and the women on the farm. But I didn’t manage to extract much out of anyone about what happened when Italy entered the war, when the men were detained and what life was like for them in the camps. I figure I will have to do some exploring on my own in the National Archives or elsewhere, see if there isn’t any documentation relating to Luigi, Oreste or any other Ballini men. Mum tells she knows a few things and we agree to talk at length about it when I return. I don’t say anything to her about what Elsie has told me, about Nonna’s slavish life waiting on her parents and her husband, and about how her daughter endured a lonely upbringing as a result. That will have to wait for a later time, when I can look her in the face as I ask my questions and hear her answers.

*

Waking up the next morning on my last day in the north I can smell something burning in the air. I wonder whether it is the fires raging on the tablelands that I had heard about yesterday on the car radio. On the way to the airport my taxi driver tells me the fires are much closer, only a few kilometres south of Cairns.

‘The Aboriginal community lights up the scrub every year’, he says. Heading home I am already planning my next trip back. My task is incomplete and two days has not been long enough. I haven’t asked the right questions or pushed for the full answers. I’ll come back again, this time with Mum, and finish what I started.

10

Dividing Lines

Only a few weeks after my return from Queensland I start the next phase of my research, namely to find out all I can about Luigi’s and Oreste’s internment. I type ‘Ballini’ into the name search on the National Archives of Australia website and it generates a list of seventy-four different items held in their collection. Only some of the documents are available online; others are held in archive offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Canberra. The website tells me the National Archives won a UNESCO award for innovation in preserving heritage documents and I can see why. I click on one of the items relating to Tebaldo and it turns out to be his application for registration under the Aliens Act. In September 1939, at the very start of the war, the minister for defence ordered all enemy aliens in Australia to report to the police and . When ing they had to supply four photographs and sign a loyalty oath. The grey, torn one-pager I find online was issued to Tebaldo on 7 October 1939, months before Italy entered the war. It lists his occupation as ‘chef’ and his employer as the Roma Ria restaurant. Next to ‘present address’ is written ‘97 Blende Street, Broken Hill’, yet the certificate was issued in Babinda. Why was Tebaldo in Broken Hill and how long did he live there? I make a note to ask my mother about it. At the bottom of the form there is a port photo of Tebaldo, looking grumpy, thin and far less dapper than in the photo I had seen at Pauline’s. The archives also contain the applications for alien registration of most of the other Ballini men. It seems like the women didn’t need to apply, or at least their documentation isn’t listed. There are naturalisation certificates and immigration papers for so many familiar individuals, a roll call of relatives – Elide, Inez, Dina, Alberto, Joe, Pauline, Marietta and even a

Mary Ballini. But the documents that interest me the most are the ‘Queensland investigation files’ on Luigi and Oreste. These papers contain an of every important interaction between the State and the two men from the moment they were arrested until their release from internment. I ring up the archives’ Brisbane office to request the files be digitised and sent to me. The extremely helpful and friendly archivist on the end of the phone tells me the alien investigation files are some of her favourite parts of the collection. ‘They make for such interesting reading’, she says. She is always surprised Australians are so unaware that we interned enemy aliens during the war. ‘Some of them didn’t do much to deserve it, did they?’ she says. I tell her I didn’t think my great-grandfather and grandfather had done anything to deserve it but I needed to know for sure, which is why the files are so important to me. They will take a month or so to arrive. Until then I have a number of other documents relating to Luigi and Oreste that have already been digitised and are available to , save and examine. I open the first of these, my great-grandfather Luigi’s moss-green prisoner-of-war report. It states his ‘place of capture’ was at the South Johnstone farm and the date of capture was 21 February 1942. This makes him part of the group of Italians summarily detained after the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin. In Alien Justice, Kay Saunders writes that for many in Australia at this time, an invasion of the country seemed imminent, that ‘the largest single round-up’ in Queensland happened on 13–14 February in the lead-up to these two momentous events. Almost all male enemy aliens between the ages of twenty and sixty were removed from the Cairns district during the February to April period. By late March, ‘nearly every Italian household in the district had suitcases prepared [because] no one knew whose door would be knocked on next’, according to Diane Menghetti. A number of Luigi’s personal particulars appear on the form: his height, his weight, the names of his parents, his number of children, and so on. At the time of his internment he was sixty-one years old and his reddish hair had gone white. Under the section ‘special observations’ it says he ‘visited Italy

in 1930 for a few months’. Had the authorities viewed such visits back to the homeland as incriminating, evidence of allegiance to Italy over Australia? On the top of the form the word ‘Italian’ has been stamped in capital letters and purplish ink but by then Luigi had been a naturalised British citizen for twenty-five years. Rather than viewing naturalisation as evidence of loyalty to Australia, the army ‘showed particular mistrust of naturalized persons’, Margaret Bevege writes in Behind Barbed Wire. It was seen as a kind of ruse, the means by which the crafty migrant could access all the benefits of citizenship – including ownership of land – yet remain emotionally loyal to his country of origin. As proof of this, the army pointed to a small group of devoted Italian fascists living in Australia who were also naturalised British citizens. In addition to his date and place of capture, Luigi’s report lists what personal effects he was carrying when he was taken into custody, namely twenty-six pounds and ten pence and two suitcases. This is all he took from his home to the camp he was to live in for eighteen months in the South Australian bush. Attached to this report is a statement by Luigi detailing the extent of all his property in Australia: the South Johnstone farm and house, including tractors, a truck, a car, five horses, one pig, cows and chickens, which he valued at ten thousand pounds; and a second farm, a ninety-five-acre estate at Babinda, including its three-storey wood and concrete home, another tractor and more horses, which he valued at eleven thousand pounds. There is also his half share in a third sugar farm in Mourilyan, another house, more farming equipment and horses, the value estimated at eight thousand pounds. He also lists an with the National Bank of Australia, the balance undisclosed. To put these figures into perspective, the average male wage in the state of Queensland during this period was around five pounds and fifteen pence a week. To have bought all this property, both land and kit, was quite an achievement for a man who had arrived in an unknown land with a suitcase full of family photos. I wonder whether, while he was listing his possessions to the officer typing up the form, Luigi had felt a sense of pride at what he had accumulated. Did he dare conceal any lump of money from the authorities under a mattress? And did the officer typing up the information feel a stab of envy noting down this old dago’s inventory of property and possessions? Along with this report, I also find a copy of Luigi’s ‘Service and Casualty

Form’, which lists in handwritten pen the dates he was interned, transferred to various camps and, in red ink, released. I note down the places and times and then turn to look at Oreste’s documentation. The comparison between uncle and nephew is stark. The sum total of my nonno’s personal effects when he was arrested was two pounds, ten and six pence and one suitcase containing his work clothes. He had thirty-seven pounds in his bank in the Innisfail branch of the Bank of New South Wales. He owned nothing else, despite having lived and worked in Australia for ten years. Under the section entitled ‘special observations’, the dates and details of a trip back to Italy to see his mother and sister had been included. He left Australia on 4 October 1938 and returned on 16 December 1939, a few months after England had declared war on . Another green form indicates Oreste had been captured on 16 July 1940, four weeks after Italy entered the war. This meant he was part of the early roundup of Italian fascists, communists and suspicious characters. My nonno’s ‘Service and Casualty Form’ is more detailed than Luigi’s, with seven different line items detailing movements in and out of camps. He was interned for a much longer period than Luigi as well; neat red-ink handwriting indicates he was released on 4 March 1944, months after Italy had surrendered to the Allies. So the police and the army viewed and treated Luigi very differently from Oreste. These documents raise as many questions as they answer. Their complete files, when they arrive, will hopefully tell me why my grandfather was picked up so early and interned for so long.

*

I print copies of the documents to show my mum when she comes over to visit one Monday afternoon. It’s been months since I returned from my Innisfail trip and we haven’t yet been able to sit down for a proper talk. Up until now I have only peppered her with a few questions over the phone whenever I needed to fill a gap in a timeline or round out an observation about a person or an event. I give her the folder of archive documents to look at. She holds up each page to the light in order to better read the faint

impressions on the paper, the digital shadows of handwriting and typeface. She always told me Luigi was a wealthy man when he was interned, and here was the proof. She suggests I come over on the weekend so we can talk alone and at length about the stories her parents and her grandparents told her. ‘I know all the stories because as a child I was sickly and so my mother would sit with me and tell me all the things that were happening and had happened in the past.’ My mother was also privy to all the adult conversations around the dinner table. As an only child of the youngest of Luigi’s children and living an isolated existence on a remote farm, she would have little choice but to sit in silence and listen while the adults reminisced.

*

The following Sunday Mum and I sit in her formal lounge room to talk. I switch on a digital recorder lying next to me so I can look at her while she speaks and not be forced to scribble frantically in my notebook. I start with a warm-up question. I want to know if she has any memories of the place where she lived when she was a young child, the second farm Luigi bought in Babinda, and what life was like there. ‘I the fires. I that really clearly’, she says. ‘I looking out of the window, watching the fires alight on the farm, night after night. They were unbelievable, quite spectacular.’ She tells me they stopped lighting the fires long ago and that now machines do the work. She was about three or four when she stood at the window to watch the fires. I can easily imagine her at this age – straight dark hair and underweight – standing on the wooden floorboards in a cotton nightie made by her mother and undoubtedly embroidered here and there with little flowers or flourishes. I imagine her standing at the window, sensing the quivering heat behind the glass. Along with the fires, Mum re the heavy rains and a cyclone that hit

Innisfail during her childhood. They had to retreat to the upper levels of the house to avoid the floods that came afterwards. I then ask her what Nonna had told her about what happened when Luigi was taken away by the police to be interned. ‘It happened one morning. The police officer who came to the farm knew my grandfather pretty well because Gigi had a high profile in the district. The policeman came in a truck with soldiers . . .’ ‘Were they armed?’ I ask. ‘Yes, they were armed with rifles because everyone had rifles in Queensland. The officer was very upset and said, “Look, Luigi, we have to pick up everyone of Italian origin, regardless of whatever.” So Gigi was taken – they didn’t put him in handcuffs or anything – and he went with the officer down to the barracks near the main house where most of the cutters lived and they just collected everyone who was Italian on that farm. And then they went from farm to farm.’ I ask Mum whether Luigi or any of the other men complained or resisted. Mum says no, they were shocked at what was happening but they went with the police like law-abiding citizens. ‘They were surprised. When the war started there was a lot of talk, a lot of conjecture about what might happen to them but this was the last thing they imagined would occur. Most of these men were naturalised and had been living in Australia for years.’ Mum tells me there was no dramatic farewell at the farm between the men and the women because Luigi believed the matter would be sorted out in a few days. ‘They didn’t really say goodbye properly because they just thought they were going to have a talk with the police. “We’ll go there and tell them that we are not going to any underground movement or fifth column and that will be it.” They never had any idea they were going to go into any camp.’ ‘What happened next?’ I ask. With Luigi being held at the showgrounds, what did his wife and daughter do? ‘My mother – who was the only woman on the farm who knew how to drive

– took her mother and went to see what was happening in town. They went to their lawyer, Mr Vandeleur, and he was just as surprised as they were. But he said to them, “Well, we are at war. You are Italians, you are fascists and on the side of the Germans and we just need to find out who is sympathetic and who is not.” After this my mother and Nonna Marietta went to the showgrounds to find out what was happening. There were lots of other women there. There was one woman who was arrested – a Sicilian – who was really outspoken and angry, and she screamed and yelled and so she was arrested. I think she was interned but I am not sure. My mother couldn’t find out what was going to happen to her father but she was told by the police that he would be taken care of and not to worry.’ According to my mother, Nonna spent the next few days running around town seeking the counsel of anyone in a position of authority, hoping they might tell her what would unfold. As the only Ballini woman with sufficient written and spoken English, it was a role she was obliged to adopt, that of advocate for the family. ‘My mother went to see the lawyer, went to see the mayor, went to see the bank manager, went to see the police sergeant. All these men knew Gigi well and they all knew my mother because she had cooked dinners and lunches for them. She just wanted to get information. But they kept assuring her it would be fine.’ During this period, Nonna and Marietta were allowed to visit Luigi at the showgrounds at certain times. They took him food and clothes. All Nonna’s consultations with the local men of influence had yielded few answers. After a week the detainees were told they were going away for a while. This was because they couldn’t all be accommodated at the showgrounds and also for security reasons. What if they rioted? Planned an outbreak? Mum says the men were assured they would be informed about where they were going to be sent. When Luigi realised he was leaving Innisfail, he met with his youngest daughter to break the news and also to give her as much information as possible about how to run the farms in his absence. How must Nonna have felt at this moment, sitting with her father, trying to absorb all the details about the operational and financial tasks involved with running three large sugar farms? Who to pay what, and when? Perhaps even how to find

cutters at a time in which labour shortages were hitting the sugar industry hard. Did she take it all in, making notes with a stub of a pencil usually reserved for her shopping lists? Or did she sit looking at her father, her mind crowded with anxious thoughts about her new responsibilities, shouldered for such an undefined period of time? They had no guarantees about when Luigi would return. My great-grandfather was taken with other men from the area by train to Townsville where they were questioned by the military. From there they were transferred to another train and sent to Gaythorne, arriving on 5 March. After four days in the Brisbane camp, Luigi was transferred to Loveday, a place purpose built in the South Australia desert to house enemy aliens. He arrived there on 14 March. During this period and for some time afterwards, the women of the family had no idea where he was. ‘They didn’t know he was in South Australia for a number of weeks’, Mum tells me. A letter finally arrived from him, sent from Loveday camp, explaining his whereabouts, with no information available about when he would be home. Mum’s of Luigi’s arrest sounds like almost every other story I have read or heard about Italians being collected by the police for internment: a knock at the door or a visit to a workplace by armed police, a hastily packed bag, family left behind, uncertainty as to when they would return. Internees were shocked and surprised at being arrested; some felt shame. One Queensland woman re how her father was taken away in April 1942 when she was eleven years old. ‘They barely stopped to let us say goodbye. Like he was a criminal. Like cattle.’ She recalls her father closed in at the showgrounds, roped off and guarded by soldiers armed by rifles with bayonets. The arts patron and businessman, Claudio Alcorso, writes in his memoir about how, when he was arrested, the police combed through his apartment and confiscated all his newspapers, magazines and books, evidence they believed of his fifthcolumn activities. ‘The thought that I might be interned in the event of war with fascist Italy had never entered my mind’, Alcorso says. He was a committed anti-fascist who had tried to enlist in the Australian air force to help the Allied war

effort. Being arrested was just the first step in a long journey for the enemy alien destined for the internment camp. For Italians in the north, there was a train trip from their hometown to Townsville to be processed. In general, internees were transported around the country in trains with a mark across them to show who was inside. En route, crowds assembled at certain points to stare, even jeer, at the captive engers. Internees had wondered whether, if the military hadn’t held back the crowds, they would have been attacked. On his age south, perhaps Luigi consoled himself thinking that once he reached Townsville he would be able to plead his case, clear up this mess and get back home to his family and his farms. I ask Mum why she thinks her father and grandfather were interned. ‘They were just picking up Italians, you know, it was the war’, she says. But I think to myself that there must have been more to it than that. Why was my nonno arrested so soon after war broke out while they waited till later on to arrest Luigi? I hoped the Queensland investigation files, when they arrived, would answer these questions.

11

Recording History

When the investigation files finally arrive on my doorstep they fill a large postbag. Ripping open the dirty white cardboard sleeve is like unwrapping a longed-for Christmas present. There are two folders of documents inside; one is twice as big as the other. I had assumed that, given he was interned for longer than Luigi, Oreste’s file would be larger. It isn’t. Luigi’s file contains hundreds of pages, collated with his appeal and release documents at the top and the very first documents in the file at the bottom. Leafing through these papers is like watching his life in reverse through the spectacles of a Queensland police officer or army bureaucrat. Most of the documents are memos and reports circulated between the Northern Command of the Australian Intelligence Corps and the police in Cairns, the investigating officers responsible for monitoring enemy alien activities. The attitudes of local police had a big part to play in who was interned and who wasn’t. While the military were responsible for the machinery of internment, the local police were responsible for preparing the lists of potential suspects. The military recognised that there was potential for ‘gross misuse’ of police power but time and labour constraints made police involvement necessary. Luigi’s file shows he was a person of interest and candidate for internment as early as July 1940, a few weeks after Italy entered the war. A July 1940 memo names Luigi as a fascist leader. Another memo from later that year states, ‘Luigi Ballini is regarded as a Fascist in sentiments and activities. It would be appreciated if you could have this person kept under surveillance with a view to ultimate internment.’ Reading the earliest documents in the file, it’s hard not to be confused by the conflicting views of the police and the military about whether Luigi was

or wasn’t a fascist and potential fifth columnist. In some, it’s clear the police see Luigi as an active fascist. For example, a report in July to Northern Command by the Cairns police named both Luigi and his son Joe as taking ‘a very active part in Fascist meetings’ held in the Innisfail district:

[Ballini] has . . . made frequent visits to Cairns, Babinda, Cowley, Mourilyan and Innisfail, and I have known him to be in attendance at gatherings of Italians which were held in Martinuzzi’s Flat in East Innisfail, Dr Rigano’s residence, Edith Street, Innisfail, Barbera’s residence, Mourilyan Road, Signorini, Nerada Line . . . and E. Molacchino, Ranking Street, Innisfail, where it was apparent that meetings were in progress. Since the internment of some of these individuals they have not been so open in their gatherings, but I have received word that Ballini frequents Babinda, and I have observed him proceeding to Mourilyan and Cowley at intervals, and I am satisfied that he is an active member of the Fascist Party.

Nowhere in this report does it mention that the places Luigi goes to are where his farms and business interests are located, or that the men he meets with are old friends and business partners. However, in a confidential report by the inspector of police in Cairns in November 1940, Luigi is described as a man of ‘good character’ and ‘pro-British in his sentiment and outlook’. In this report Luigi denies any connection with the Fascist Party or with fascists and the inspector believes him. He also tells the inspector a story showing that in the past he had opposed fascist activity in area. When the Italian Consul Marsano visited the Innisfail district in the mid 1930s he approached Luigi to help him form an exclusive Italian Club, open only to Italian residents. The consul’s suggestion was common at the time, part of the campaign by Mussolini to promote the fascist cause abroad by winning over expats and recruiting them to or start Italian language schools or clubs. Luigi told the consul that it would be ‘a bad thing for the district unless all the nationalities were itted to hip of the club and he refused to have anything to do with the business unless the latter conditions were agreed to’. The consul would not agree and the matter was then dropped. ‘[Ballini] now states’, writes the inspector, ‘that Marsano’s

idea was to have a Fascist Party in Innisfail’. Despite this policeman’s good opinion of Luigi, the memos and reports about my great-grandfather accumulate through 1941 and into 1942. The label ‘fascist’ was beginning to stick. It didn’t help matters than the L’Italiano newspaper named Luigi as one of the fascist leaders in north Queensland. And there was an incriminating description of him in fascist propaganda: ‘L. Ballini [has] an adventurous and warlike spirit. His is one of the pioneers of the sugar industry . . . He is esteemed by Italians and Australians alike . . . [and has] kept up the best traditions of our race.’ Yet there is no reference to his involvement with or of fascism in that newspaper. Another mark against him – further ‘proof’ he was a fascist leader – was that Luigi was seen to be complaining about the internment of his friends and agitating for the release of a particular individual, a friend called Antonio Barbera. One report in December 1940 from the police in Cairns advised Northern Command that ‘Luigi Ballini made a visit to Babinda last week accompanied by some other foreigners. Ballini is moving in a quiet way for the release of Barbera from internment.’ At the bottom of the report there is a handwritten note in black pen: ‘Barbera cannot be helped. Ballini may be interned also.’ Another memo dated earlier, in November 1940, describes Luigi as ‘a very close friend of Dr Rigano, who had been interned with Barbera, and remarked that he did not know why they should put such good men away’. When evidence that was beneficial to Luigi was uncovered by the police it was often dismissed and or even construed as evidence of guilt. In one report, dated 11 January 1941, a policeman describes a visit to one of Luigi’s solicitors, F.H. Beckey, to question him about his client. The lawyer vouches that Luigi is ‘okay’ but the policeman is unconvinced. While the policeman’s investigations did not uncover ‘any statement [against Ballini] of a reliable nature’, he was still convinced the man wasn’t to be trusted, citing again that Luigi had been observed in the company of other alleged fascists and had questioned the internment of Dr Rigano and Barbera. In February 1941 Luigi donated one hundred pounds to The Red Cross. He also sent a letter with the money, which was then published in the South Johnstone Advocate. In it he writes: ‘Australia, my adopted country, has been my home for 30 years, and during that time has twice engaged in war to defend the principles of liberty and democracy – those virtues which we

all experience, appreciate and fully desire to see continued.’ The newspaper clipping is included in Luigi’s file with a memo from the Cairns police stating ‘Ballini is known to be a Fascist sympathiser and it would appear that he is trying to purchase liberty at his own price’. Luigi’s file also contains another newspaper report on Luigi’s donation of eighty pounds to the Defence Co-ordination Department. In March Luigi wrote a letter to the Northern Command in Brisbane in response to their request that he fill in a three-page form listing all his personal details and answering some vital questions. These are questions he would be asked over and over again after his arrest and detention:

Do you communicate with any foreign country? No. Do you receive any foreign newspapers at home? No. Are you associated with the Black Hand? No. Are you a fascist? No. Did you contribute to any Italian fund during the Abyssinian War? Yes, to the Red Cross. Do you want Great Britain to win the war? Definitely yes. Why?

In the three centimetres available to him to write the reason he desired an Allied victory Luigi writes, ‘Because I would’ in his neat cursive. In his letter sent with the form, Luigi writes that he ‘can safely say that I have never been disloyal in my actions’. He adds, ‘I know that I have come into disfavour with the Italians owing to my ing British Preference in the South Johnstone area’, and that anyone making any allegations that he is not a loyal British subject ‘would be an enemy of mine’. He ends his letter stating, ‘I see no reason at all why I should be interned’ and refers the reader to personal references from British persons, two JPs and a chemist,

who all write glowing s of his character and loyalty to the British Crown. Northern Command considered the documents and their verdict on Luigi was ambivalent at best. ‘The evidence against Ballini is really confined to association with other Italians and the allegations that he is a Fascist leader’, the army captain writes. He believes that if Luigi was interned and if he appealed and managed to impress the Advisory Committee charged with reviewing his case, ‘it is more than possible his release would be recommended’. The fact that his son Joe is interned at this stage is noted in this and a number of reports in his file. (A handwritten note in Oreste’s file indicates that Joe itted to ing the Fascist Party in Babinda in 1939 and had not resigned his hip at the time of his detention.) Despite the relatively weak case against Luigi, two months later an order to enter and search the South Johnstone farm was authorised under the National Security Regulations. But there was a screw-up with the paperwork. The police put Luigi’s name on the warrant but his brother-inlaw Tebaldo’s address. The muddled warrant is dated 7 May 1941 and was issued on the basis of evidence that Tebaldo was stopped in transit from Mirriwinni to Wangan with a burst suitcase ‘disclosing Italian papers headed [the] Italian Fascist Party’. The police searched Tebaldo’s premises three days later and found a variety of reading materials, including letters written in Italian, newspaper cuttings and magazines, the libretto of La Boheme, ‘a booklet containing poems to Mussolini, etc.’, religious pictures in frames and, oddly enough, nude studies of women. The report states that while there was ‘nothing of a subversive nature found’ in Tebaldo’s bag, ‘this would not prove he has no Fascist tendencies’. ‘Travelling around the country at his leisure must give rise to suspicion’, the police officer writes. The fact that Tebaldo was also ‘an associate [of] Luigi Ballini, who is looked on as a Fascist and a disloyal person’ was another strike against him. Tebaldo was eventually interned on the basis of these materials and his itinerant ways.

At the end of this report from Northern Command dated 11 May 1941, there is an interesting note written by the investigating officer, reflecting the level of tension in Innisfail at this time: ‘When I returned to Innisfail at 1430 hours on the 9/5/41 I counted no less than 30 Italians congregating on Nolan’s corner. I heard further evidence that there would be trouble between the Italians and the British before long. One Jugo-Slav who has a cane farm states that no Italian will cut his cane. He would cut his throat. Meaning the Italian’s throat.’ It took the authorities a few months to sort out the mix-up with the warrants and to issue another one for the South Johnstone farm. In August and September further appeals were made to the Cairns police by Army Intelligence to search Luigi’s premises. The army captain urged, ‘Before a case for detention can be prepared further concrete evidence of disloyalty and anti-British activities is essential in order to strengthen the case’. By then the Italian community knew it was being scrutinised for any signs of disloyalty or suspicious behaviour. A memo about Luigi, dated 15 September 1941, from Captain Brown, a police officer in Cairns, to Northern Command confirms Italians in Innisfail were a community under the microscope:

[You] will appreciate the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find any Italian making a disloyal statement under circumstances likely to result in his internment. It is suggested as Luigi Ballini has been proven to be an associate of Fascists and that Tabaldo [sic] Ballini made straight for his place with Fascist literature that he has shown sufficient anti-British activity to ensure his internment. If this section has to wait until an Italian makes a disloyal statement in front of someone capable and willing to make a declaration then he will probably never be interned. It is suggested that it is the fool who is caught this way and not the clever suspect we are most anxious to trap. Such a scare has been thrown into the Italians in this area that most of them are dumb in front of strangers.

On the 14 October a search of the South Johnstone farm finally took place at 3 pm. The report of the search dated 20 October states that ‘numerous

books of a subversive nature’ were found along with bank draft receipts that showed Luigi had sent two thousand pounds to Italy since 1940. Luigi explained to the police he had friends there and wanted to send them money. The search also found he had a truck, a car, four cameras, three pairs of binoculars and a radio set, all objects the war laws prohibited enemy aliens possessing without written permission from the police. Interestingly, in the transcript of Luigi’s first appeal against his internment he mentions that one of these cameras was ed but there is no evidence on file that he had permission to possess the contraband items or not. They did, according to the report, know these items were banned and this was a mark against Luigi as was the behaviour of his wife when the police were conducting their search:

While we were searching the premises, I noticed Mrs. Ballini trying to plant some rubbish down the back yard. I informed Det. Hird, who had a look and found 1 camera and a pair of binoculars. Mrs. Ballini was trying to hide the articles, so that we would not be able to find them. This is an example of how cunning these people are.

The police officers judged Luigi to be ‘very shrewd’ with ‘a ready answer for every question’. ‘During a conversation with him he stated, “I wish I could be of some assistance in helping round the Fascists up!” He stated that he wanted to help the authorities, yet his own son is interned.’ The report on the search concluded that while there was ‘no evidence available to prove Ballini is engaged in any subversive activities . . . he would aid the enemy should he be given an opportunity’. The case file is silent then until the end of February 1942, when a report details Luigi’s arrest at the farm. No further incriminating evidence was gathered during this period but Pearl Harbour was attacked and Singapore fell to the Japanese. The relatively weak case in favour of Luigi’s internment became stronger. The shadow of enemy planes flying over cane fields and undefended country towns changed everything.

*

Reading Luigi’s file over and over, I am left with a feeling that his internment was inevitable. Once Singapore fell, there was nothing he could have said or done, no amount of money donated to Allied causes or character references from pro-British sources, to avoid the camp. He couldn’t even point to his long-standing naturalisation papers as evidence of his loyalty to the crown. I am also struck by the language in the police reports and memos from Northern Command, the constant characterisation of my relatives as ‘shrewd’, ‘cunning’ and ‘clever’. They were, of course, but not about this. Claudio Alcorso writes in 1994 that, when he read his file many years after his internment, he reacted with dismay:

I found evidence of more than malice. I found ignorance and incompetence mixed with racist prejudice and compounded by the long held belief often enunciated by senior intelligence officers: if I had my way all Italians would be interned. Three and a half years of confinement made me understand that a dogmatic mentality was not the sole prerogative of German and Italian Fascists.

In contrast to Luigi, the case in favour of Oreste’s internment was more straightforward. First of all he was a man of military age and capable of bearing arms. He had recently returned from a trip to Italy, after the start of the conflict but before Italy’s entrance into the war. I knew this before now, but what I didn’t know was that there was a well-founded allegation he was a member of the Fascist Party in Sydney. In his slender file there is a report from the Eastern Command, dated 9 August 1940, revealing that he was ‘a member of Fasci o Luigi Platania, Sydney as at 1939’. The Sydney branch of the party was run by Ignazio Luchi, who had employed my grandfather at his company, which manufactured plastic figures and ornaments. Oreste worked for him for two years until 1938. A search of Luchi’s workplace in the suburbs of Waterloo in June 1940 uncovered two letters from my grandfather asking his former

employer for some gelatine moulds of nude women, saints and the Madonna so he could make statues as a hobby. In July, a search of Oreste’s premises in Commonwealth Street in the city uncovered a Fascist Party circular, but by then my nonno had left Sydney for Babinba to the rest of the family. A warrant was then issued for my nonno’s arrest and they pursued him from Sydney to the north. He was captured in Innisfail in September. My nonno, the fascist. I don’t know what to think.

*

I call Mum and ask her if Luigi ever described what happened to him when he arrived in Townsville to be questioned by the military authorities. Mum says they asked him a battery of questions, a repeat mostly of what they asked in the form he completed the year before: Was he a good Italian? A good fascist? Did he give any money to Italian causes? Luigi insisted that he was a loyal Australian, who was against Mussolini and Italy’s involvement in the war. ‘My grandfather kept telling them, “I love Australia, I am naturalised”’, she says. In contrast, when Oreste was questioned by the authorities after his arrest Mum says he was belligerent and made matters worse for himself. ‘My father was very bad tempered and he got pissed off when the guys were asking him all these questions. They asked him, “Are you a good Italian?” and he said, “yes”. “Are you a good fascist’, and he said, “yes I am!”.’ I ask Mum if she thought her father was a good fascist. ‘No. But that’s why he was in for so long, because he shot his mouth off. He thought Mussolini was an idiot.’ Whatever the truth of the matter, both men were sent from Townsville to Gaythorne, the Brisbane internment camp and holding place before the journey to the camp in South Australia. In Gaythorne they would have encountered, as Margaret Bevege describes it, ‘a turbulent mass of incompatible, unhappy men’ on their way to camps in New South Wales,

Victoria and South Australia. At Gaythorne both men entered the system as internees and were each allocated a number. The Queensland internee numbers started at 7000. Oreste was 7279 and Luigi was 7576.

12

Camps Divided

While the men were cooped up in the internment camp, life on the South Johnstone farm had to go on for the women left behind. Some things did not change. There was still food to be prepared and cooked for the family as well as for the few cutters left in the barracks. There were still endless chores to be done – yards swept, dirty clothes to be washed, wrung and hung, shirts and dresses mended. But there were changes you couldn’t help but notice. A curfew was imposed in February 1942 on enemy aliens in Queensland, which meant the remaining Italians in the town could not be outside their place of residence between 8 pm and 5 am. The atmosphere in town was also different. The Italians would steel themselves as they walked the streets, not knowing whether people who once smiled at them in recognition might now avert their eyes or glare at them with suspicion and resentment. Nonna told Mum the Italian women would have to wait at the back of some shops to be served, wait until all the English had been taken care of first. Nonna and the other Ballini women had been used to living in a climate of partial hostility. The 1930s were particularly difficult for Italians, who were regularly attacked in the press. The women were used to being called wogs and dagos. But during the war hostility towards Italians naturally increased. For some groups in Australian society, internment of enemy aliens did not go far enough. Organisations such as the Returned Services League and the Country Women’s Association wanted all aliens – even women – detained until an Allied victory was secured. Measures were under review to restrict land acquisitions by aliens. Others called for the disenfranchisement of all naturalised enemy aliens for the duration of the war. The leader of the opposition, Arthur Fadden, called for a review of all certificates of naturalisation in the previous five years. The RSL even called

for internees’ farms to be confiscated for redistribution to returned exservicemen. In some ways the Ballini women were fortunate. They owned the farm and had money saved. There were friends of Luigi, of different nationalities, who helped them out and provided advice. There were decent and brave neighbours and friends who, despite the propaganda, stuck to their relationships with Italians. It was far worse for other families, the women who couldn’t work because they had small children and no English and had to get by on the small pension the government provided. It was rare for women to be interned but there were some cases in which both mother and father were sent to camps without their children. If a relative or friend couldn’t take the children, they were sent to a home or into foster care. Businesses went bust, families lost houses or were evicted from rental properties. The stress took its toll of the mental and physical health of the families of internees. When Mum and I get another chance to sit down and quietly talk about her family, I ask her how Nonna coped when Luigi was taken. ‘She was scared. She told me she was scared all the time.’ ‘Scared of what?’ ‘Of making mistakes. She had never had to handle all the details of the business. She had to deal with the ant, the lawyer, the bank manager.’ When Luigi was taken, Nonna had been the family cook. Now she controlled all her father’s money and legal affairs. Her father had taught her how to drive the car and she had driven it regularly to the mill and into town, and now she learned quickly how to drive the family trucks and the tractors. One of her harder tasks was to find and pay the cutters to keep the farm going. At this point in the war there was a shortage of at least one thousand and three hundred cutters in the north Queensland district. ‘The younger boys, Frank and Dino, were too young to start cutting’, Mum tells me. ‘Nonna had to find some men who could help her run the farm, and that was difficult.’ The only thing keeping Nonna from panicking in the first few weeks after Luigi’s arrest had been her belief that he would return before too long.

‘Everyone told her that her father would be back very soon so she just kept telling herself, “I just need to last the next few weeks”.’ After three or four months, it was clear that Luigi was not on his way back to them. ‘That was a depressing time for all the women’, Mum says. ‘My mother said she was always anxious.’ Nonna knew the amount of money that was at stake if she couldn’t keep the farms going. There were few people around her she could confide in to share her worries. Her mother was in her own world of the garden and the horses. None of the other sisters could drive or had sufficient skills in written or spoken English, so they couldn’t help her with the farm istration. Everyone except Inez had their own families to look after. And yet the sisters thought little Teresa was having the time of her life. Their father had given her his chequebook and while Nonna wasn’t paid a wage as such, she was allowed to open an at one of the dress shops in town. She bought five outfits that year, including matching hats and bags. Luigi wouldn’t have his daughter doing business on his behalf looking like a washerwoman. When Luigi was arrested Nonna was nearly thirty years old. Nonna’s sisters, especially the eldest, Dina, liked to make fun of her spinster status. In 1930, Teresa and her parents had gone to Italy for a short holiday. Before they’d departed, Auntie Dina mocked Teresa’s trip as a husband-hunting expedition. ‘So you’re going over the Italy to buy yourself a husband?’ Dina asked. ‘Yes, Dina’, Nonna replied quickly. She slapped her hand on her crotch. ‘I am putting a big sign here. “Men Wanted”.’ ‘Why wasn’t she already married?’ I ask Mum. She tells me that during her twenties there had been numerous tentative proposals, one tragic and failed romance and a broken engagement. ‘The man she wanted to marry, who she had fallen in love with, was a doctor – northern Italian, tall, blond with blue eyes. He got the sister at the hospital pregnant and he had to marry her. I think my mother was profoundly hurt.’ After the caddish doctor there was an Elban man, Utilio. The short engagement was broken off because of a rumour that he preferred little children to grown women. Nonna didn’t believe the story,

Mum tells me, until ‘she saw him talking suspiciously to some kid. The next day she told him she didn’t want to know about him any more.’ Two scandals were probably enough for Luigi, who wasn’t enthusiastic about his youngest daughter marrying anyone. ‘The tradition was the youngest girl stayed at home to look after the aging parents’, Mum explains. While the relationship between her parents started before Oreste was interned, Mum can’t whether they became engaged before or after the war. Perhaps they wrote to each other and something had been decided between them while he was in the camp. Certainly in Oreste’s investigation file he refers to Teresa as his fiancée and talks to the camp officials in his appeal about his desire to return to Innisfail to be married. Maybe Nonna, lying in her bed at night in the still, close air of her room at the farm, worried about more than just the family business. Maybe she dreamed of Oreste and the chance he offered her to escape her parents, the chance to create a life for herself.

*

Oreste had been sent from Gaythorne to the Hay internment camp in the Riverina district of New South Wales. This was the camp where the majority of north Queensland Italians were interned, along with Germans and Japanese. While less than a third of all Italians living in Australia were interned, ninety-seven per cent of all ed alien Japanese were held captive. After Pearl Harbour, Japanese prisoners of war and internees were sent to Hay. At Hay there were also around one hundred and twenty, mainly Jewish, refugees from a ship called the Dunera. The Dunera was the only ship dispatched to Australia after the federal government agreed to accept six thousand internees from the United Kingdom in July 1940. Its engers comprised 2542 detainees, all classified as ‘enemy aliens’. There were 2036 male German refugees who had fled Nazism, most of them Jewish, along with two hundred Italian prisoners of war and two hundred and fifty German Nazis. Conditions on

board the Dunera were terrible, with overcrowding, harsh treatment by crew and tensions between the detainees. When the boat arrived in Sydney on 6 September 1940, the engers were interned in various camps at Hay, Orange and Tatura. Oreste stayed at Hay from the end of November 1940 until the middle of June 1941, after which he was transferred to Loveday near Barmara in South Australia. The countryside around the Loveday site is the mirror opposite of the terrain around Innisfail. There are no mountain ranges, tall green trees, vigorous rivers or lush fields, nothing but vast, desolate, brown and dry land stretching into forever. Instead of breathing the wet air of the humid north, you inhale the fine dry dust of the South Australian bush. The heat is different, the sun is different, even the sky looks different. There are fewer clouds and so it feels larger, emptier. When Oreste was marched into the camp on 16 June 1941 it had been operational for almost a year, the first contingent of Italians having arrived five days before him. The Loveday complex covered around a hundred and eighty square miles of cultivated land, making it one of the largest internment camps in Australia. Approaching the place that would be his home for the next three years, my nonno would have seen a sprawling settlement of galvanised iron roofs and light-coloured timber huts encircled by grey barbed-wire entanglements. The huts were arranged in concentric circles, each sleeping thirty people in tiered bunks with straw mattresses. There were tall towers around the camp from where sentries kept watch, although who would be mad enough to escape into the endless open space that surrounded the place? There was nowhere to hide. Any vegetation that might provide cover was destroyed during the construction of the camp. Oreste and Joe were already in Loveday when Luigi arrived in February 1942. Tebaldo had been transferred to the camp a month earlier. It was a well-established community by then. Luigi knew some of the men from his earliest days in Australia and from the Innisfail region, including men he had employed as cutters. It was a coerced reunion of compatriots. In his autobiography, Claudio Alcorso writes that the north Queensland cane cutters formed ‘a special group’ in Loveday, maintaining the bonds forged through their gangs back on the farm. The time the Ballini men would be forced to spend together in the camp depended on two factors: the course of the war and the success of any appeal they might lodge against their

internment. The outcome of both was equally uncertain. By the middle of 1942, internees started betting on the possible length of their imprisonment, and of the war and the prospect of an Axis victory. I ask my mother what her father and grandfather told her about life in the camps. She says it wasn’t a popular topic of conversation but they had said they were given plenty of food and good medical treatment if needed. There were lots of things for them to do if they felt inclined. Like many of the other internment camps, Loveday had a thriving vegetable garden and a workshop where arts and crafts were produced as well as paintings and sculptures. Internees formed musical groups and put on concerts and operas. (I wonder whether Tebaldo pushed for a performance of his beloved La Boheme.) There was gambling, especially card games. There were also secret stills to make grappa, which the camp officials knew about and tolerated if things remained peaceful and quiet. Internees made barely drinkable wine from local grapes and played all kinds of sports – boxing, tennis, bocce – but watching and playing soccer was the most popular pastime. Oreste played his beloved game with Germans as well as Italians, as much as he could, and Mum says his remarkable skill at the game made him almost famous among his fellow internees. There was a serious side to the camp as well. You could learn or improve your English or Italian language skills in a school run by internees, former teachers and university lecturers. Oreste improved his written and spoken English in the camp but Luigi didn’t need to. Camp newspapers and bulletins were produced by internees who were journalists and writers of various political persuasions. More importantly, there was some paid employment available inside the camp. Internees could continue with their usual occupations as doctors, dentists, carpenters, cobblers, gardeners, barbers and cooks. This meant the camp could be close to self-sufficient through internee labour. You could also volunteer to work outside the camp for a small wage, generally a shilling a day. Many internees opted to do paid work to alleviate the boredom of camp life as much as to earn a little money to buy goods from the camp canteen or to send back to their families. In Loveday, most of this outside work was agricultural. The tonnes and tonnes of vegetables the internees helped grow provided much needed produce for the population living outside the camp gates. This helped both an industry hit by labour shortages and consumers

hit by rationing. The tomatoes internees grew were used in the nearby Berri factory to provide juice for the troops. The internees were so successful at growing vegetables the CSIRO involved them in a program to produce seeds for market gardeners around Australia. Mum jokes to me that in some ways the time the Ballini men spent in the camp was the longest holiday they had ever had. They were free from the crushing, relentless manual labour they had performed since they were children. The greatest hardship they suffered during their internment was not physical but emotional: boredom, uncertainty, frustration, some anger and, of course, worry about the women and the farms three thousand kilometres away. The internees could write a restricted number of letters to family and friends, but they were always censored. In Luigi’s investigation file there is a letter from his grandson, Giulio – Rosie’s future husband – written on 20 September 1942. The envelope on the letter attracted the censor’s attention; under the stamp was written the word ‘Agli’. A code word for something? The interpreter didn’t think so and put it down to the fact Giulio was in a boarding school and had to put his last name on everything he owned, even his writing materials. There are no copies of any other correspondence between Luigi and the family in his file, but Mum tells me her grandfather wrote as many letters as he could, asking Teresa how everything was going with the business and the family. Mum tells me both Luigi and Oreste had said they were not mistreated by the military during their internment. In fact the relationship between the internees and the men guarding them was quite cordial. The military charged with running the camp seemed to adopt a benevolent, if slightly condescending, attitude to the internees. According to Loveday’s camp commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel E.T. Dean, the different nationality types in the camp exhibited distinct characteristics. The German required ‘strict discipline and firm control’. The Japanese was a model prisoner due to his ‘fanatical desire to maintain “face”’. The Italian, however, was ‘naturally temperamental’. He ‘needed firm handling, but once shown who was in command [he] had to be led like a schoolboy’. The camp commander recommended the different nationalities be housed separately to avoid inevitable racial conflict.

The Italian internees in the camp were ‘organised under an elected hierarchy of leaders’, something the military thought would maintain order in the camps. One of camp leaders of the Italians at Loveday was Dr Piscitelli, a fascist sympathiser from north Queensland. Another camp leader was Prince Alfonso Del Drago, an Italian noble who had been exiled, it was said, because of trouble with women and gambling debts. There were also elected ‘street leaders’, men who would ensure the general tidiness of each hut and the orderly distribution of various items like writing paper, toilet paper, mail from home, soap and fruit. Despite this attempt to impose order through designated leaders, Loveday was a place divided by politics and loyalties, with various blocs vying for dominance. The first bloc in the camps was the fascists, who numbered around three hundred. They used to meet in the mess room for discussions about the war. They would sing songs, salute and yell slogans, and spread propaganda around the camp about fascist victories in Europe. The second, smaller group of around seventy to eighty men was made up of anti-fascists who worked hard to counter fascist activities with their own campaigns. The final bloc consisted of those apolitical internees who thought politics was for people with money in their pockets and time on their hands. Even the Australian authorities overseeing the camp recognised that these ‘indifferent’ internees were caught in the middle. Were these men forced to pick sides? In the end, the policy of interning political rivals in close quarters actually resulted in a murder. sco Fantin, a former textile worker from Vicenza, was killed at the camp in November 1942. After months of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of internee fascists, Fantin was assaulted by a pro-fascist one evening while he was drinking alone at a water fountain. There was an inquest that led to a murder trial in the Adelaide Supreme Court and the attacker, Giuseppe Bruno Casotti, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received two years’ hard labour. After Fantin’s death was made public, camp officials started to separate anti-fascist and fascist internees as well as Jewish internees from openly fascist prisoners. In addition, anti-fascists were released in greater numbers if they could satisfy the authorities that they posed no threat.

13

Luigi’s Release

As soon as he entered the system, Luigi knew he had the right to lodge an appeal against his detention. The fact an enemy alien, even a naturalised one, could apply for such an appeal was controversial at the time, particularly among those agitating for the full internment of the entire enemy alien population. The federal parliament had debated the appeals process on 2 April 1941. Archie Cameron, an ultra-conservative member of the South Australian seat of Barker, moved a motion that the minister for the army had lost the confidence of the house because of his handling of the trial and release from internment of certain enemy aliens. Cameron was concerned that aliens were being released into the community when they should all remain behind bars:

Some claim to be anti-Nazi, but on that claim there must rest grave doubts . . . Certain Jewish refugees also have been interned and a lot of ‘hot air’ is being talked about them. I have heard talk of ‘friendly aliens’. I do not know what a ‘friendly alien’ is. I know when my country is engaged in a life or death struggle with and Italy any man of German or Italian birth is an enemy alien. If he is friendly to this country, then he must be a traitor to his own.

Cameron then went on to say that he felt ‘the better educated and wealthier’ an enemy alien was ‘the greater his opportunity for becoming a potential danger to this country if he be allowed his liberty’. At the end of a lengthy debate the Minister for the Army Percy Spender replied to the motion against him, which was not carried, defending the processes by which

enemy aliens could have their internment decision appealed. ‘If we are fighting for anything in this war’, Spender said, ‘we are fighting for the elementary principles of justice’. There were two different appeal bodies for the different ‘types’ of internees: Advisory Committees heard the appeals of naturalised British subjects and Alien Tribunals heard the appeals of enemy aliens. These committees generally consisted of a legal chairman and two . While they could recommend that an internee be released, their recommendations were not binding. The decision to release or not rested with the deputy director of security, who would then make a recommendation to the attorney-general. In the last chapter of Sugar, Tears and Eyeties, Peter Dalseno describes the workings of the tribunal from the point of view of the anxious internee pleading for his freedom:

The much-awaited Tribunal was in motion . . . The Tribunal posed the questions. It had no inclination to provide answers . . . The longer the interview, the thicker the folder, the more did the internee believe in the importance of the interrogation . . . and the more he felt intimidated. The Tribunal consisted of four officers headed by a Captain Sexton. They sat on the one side of a long table while the prisoner sat on the other . . . The farce was laughable if it wasn’t serious . . .

Some of those serving on these committees recognised the difficult task facing an internee arguing for his release. In a letter to the minister for the army written in December 1940, the chairman of the Aliens Tribunal, Justice E.E. Cleland, voiced his concern about the appeal procedures:

I find my duties are particularly distasteful because there is nothing ‘judicial’ about them. First of all, I understand that the onus of satisfying the Committee that any person detained is loyal lies upon . . . [him] and the more general and indefinite the charge against him, the more difficult it is for him to satisfy the Committee . . . [T]he oath of the person detained [is] subject to cross-examination and, on the other hand, the unsworn efforts of

more or less anonymous individuals (always described as being ‘a particularly reliable agent’) and some of these reports may be personally malicious . . . and sometimes, no doubt, inspired by patriotic hysteria.

Luigi’s investigation file shows he appealed his internment to the South Australian Advisory Committee at least twice. He had two hearings, both held at Loveday, while other internees were required to travel to capital cities to attend their appeals. Luigi’s first appeal was in front of a fourmember on the afternoon of 15 July 1942. They questioned him about the reading materials found on his farm, the alleged fascism of his son, about his trip back to Italy in 1930, money sent back to Italy, and his donation to the Red Cross during the Abyssinian War. He told them he knew that the Fascist Party was active in Babinda but he didn’t know anything else about their activities elsewhere in the region. He denied almost all the other incriminating evidence against him – that he was close friends with Rigano and Barbera and had agitated for the latter’s release. He also tried to explain why Marietta had buried the camera in the backyard during the search of his farm. ‘One [of the cameras] was ed and the another one belonged to my brother-in-law, and my wife evidently thought she might get into trouble, hence she tried to bury them.’ The appeal was unsuccessful and there is nothing in Luigi’s file to show the ’s reasoning for keeping him interned. Luigi’s second appeal was over a year later in front of Justice Reed and Captain Sexton on Sunday 29 August 1943. In his testimony at this second hearing, Luigi rebuts some of the allegations against him but mostly he just pleads with the committee to be released. He comes across as a man painfully confused about the reasons for his detention and slightly desperate:

I don’t know anything about Mussolini’s regime myself, but I think it is a good thing he is finished because the Italian people don’t like him. I am very surprised and very sorry that Italy and Great Britain are still at war. I am

sorry for Italy but I am sorry just the same for Great Britain. I want England to win. My days are done but I have 10 [grandchildren] who must live in this country, and therefore I want this country to win. It’s obvious. I have no idea why I was interned. I have always done my best. I have gathered no idea from any questions which have been asked me.

In this second appeal the reasoning of the committee is provided. Sexton reports ‘nothing adverse’ about Luigi, in other words he has behaved himself in the camp. They describe him as ‘a quiet type’, ‘inoffensive’ but still ‘very alert both mentally and physically’. They recommend his release firstly on ‘ of his age’. While they recognise there is ‘very little direct evidence against him, a considerable amount of suspicion exists’. They refer to the Advisory Committee’s report on his last appeal, which is missing from the file I have, but must have reiterated the views in his dossier compiled by the police and the Northern Command. In the end, though, the decision to grant the appeal is a pragmatic one: ‘We consider that in spite of the suspicion, he might be released to relieve the Commonwealth of the expense of keeping him.’ By this time, the course of the war was favouring the Allies and labour and food shortages were acute. The cost of running the camps was piling up. Internment historian Johan Peter Weiss confirms that appeals at this stage were allowed not because of concerns for the rule of law but for economic reasons: ‘The lack of accommodation and the logistic problem of guarding and feeding such a huge number of people played a bigger part than magnanimity.’ The Advisory Committee was prepared for Luigi to be released from the camp ‘as long as adequate safeguards’ were provided. His release was conditional. He left the camp and moved to Adelaide where he stayed for a few months. In Adelaide he was given ‘suitable employment’ by the government; Mum tells me he worked at a train station in Adelaide as a porter and was obliged to wear a uniform. He also spent his time there pushing the system so he could return to his farms. Luigi’s Adelaide solicitor wrote to the deputy director of security on 17 November to say that his client’s farms ‘were being neglected through lack

of labour’ and that ‘our client believes that he can perform better service for the country working the farms than in his present occupation’. A month later, on 17 December, Luigi was given permission to return to South Johnstone to work and live on the farm provided he reported to the police station once a month. The relevant permits didn’t arrive until January so Luigi missed another family Christmas at South Johnstone. When he did arrive home, ex-internee Luigi Ballini had to report to the police each month. His investigation file is filled with the same proforma report from the Cairns police: ‘The Police . . . [have] come into with L. Ballini regularly since his release, and have found him to be conducting himself in a well behaved manner. I have not heard him make any disloyal utterances to date, nor have I received any complaints regarding his conduct.’ These reports continue until 12 March 1945, when Luigi’s restriction order is revoked, just before the end of the war with Japan.

*

Some former internees discovered that returning to life as usual after their detention was near impossible. Their love for and loyalty to Australia had been questioned. Internment had changed them. For some their sense of belonging to this country would never be fully restored. Months after his release, Claudio Alcorso was convinced that the authorities were looking for reasons either to send him to Central Australia or to re-intern him. ‘I was cowed and terrified of drawing attention to myself, I wanted to disappear.’ For tobacco farmer Osvaldo Bonutto, internment meant significant financial loss but it had also been a ‘bitter blow’ for him emotionally:

It nearly shattered my faith in and love for Australia. For a long time I did not tell my son and my daughter the story of my internment. Neither my

wife nor I wanted to poison their minds against their native country. We wanted them to grow up into good, loyal, proud Australians. Finally I told them because I did not want them to think that my silence and reluctance to acquaint them with the whole matter indicated a guilty conscience and that my internment after all may have been justified.

While Bonutto and Alcorso openly discuss the dark legacy of internment, other former internees – my relatives included – took a pragmatic, almost blasé, approach to what occurred. ‘Well, you know, there was a war on and Italy was the enemy and while we didn’t deserve it, they did treat us well in the camps’, is the common refrain. There is little anger or bitterness evident in the voices of these men and women who reflect on the internment experience with reserve and detachment. Instead of dwelling on the past, they are eager instead to emphasise how they are proud Australians, how Australia is a free and tolerant country, the best country in the world, their real home. Rarely do you hear them call for an apology or some compensation for their unfair treatment. Internees have never been compensated for their time in the camps. The story goes that Luigi returned and slipped easily back into his role as the head of the household and a local community leader. But I wonder whether it was that easy for him. Had he lost some of his pre-war confidence and optimism? Did he feel unsettled, insecure, defensive, as he had in the early years when he was a new migrant? Did he walk down the street in Innisfail thinking about whether any of the men or women who ed him might have informed on him to the police? How long did it take for things to return to normal? There must have been continual reminders of what had happened. For example, late in 1945 the reading material confiscated from the South Johnstone farm in the October 1941 search was returned to him, but not the cameras and the binoculars. Did he keep the once-incriminating evidence or did he destroy it? The accusation that he was fascist and anti-British did not disappear with his release from the camp. In official documents in Oreste’s file dated after the war, both Luigi and Oreste were still described as known fascists.

Johann Peter Weiss writes that ‘as late as the 1950s, security and police kept files on Italians naturalised or living in Australia since before the war, and on former internees who applied to sponsor their Italian relations or friends.’ The assumption endured that to have been interned meant you must have done something to deserve it, ensuring those men often kept silent about their experience for decades to come. Once Luigi returned to South Johnstone, Nonna went back to being the family cook. Luigi thanked her for keeping the farms going and took back the chequebook. She kept driving the car and, of course, she kept her wardrobe of beautiful outfits, which she wore to church and rare visits into town. I wonder whether she missed her short-lived independence, the small chance war had given her to be her own person, free of men.

14

A Bribe for a Groom

There is a story about my nonna, a story about something extraordinary she did during that war, that my mother tells me is absolutely true. It is a story her mother shared with her and no one else. I want to believe it, because if it is true, then it sheds a whole new light on the kind of person Nonna was – and the person she might have been if she had been born in a different era. Mum tells me Nonna bribed a government official to get Oreste released from internment so they could be married. ‘Most of the men in the area had been released, it looked like the Allies were going to win, but Nonno was still in the camp. My mother was thirty-two years old and desperate to be married. Dad seemed like her best option.’ Luigi, who had just been released from the camp, had heard on the grapevine that it was possible, at this late and promising stage in the war, to hasten the release of an internee if you paid a bribe to a certain person. Nonna told Mum this person was ‘a minister’. Luigi found out the details of when and where this minister would be and set up a meeting. He arranged the money for the bribe – two hundred pounds in cash. He then gave the money to Nonna and she went to meet the minister. ‘Why didn’t Luigi go and pay the bribe himself?’ I ask my mother. The minister apparently stipulated the person coming had to be a woman. ‘So my mother drove to a large hotel in Cairns to meet this man. She never told me what hotel. When she arrived, there were a whole lot of men in white shirts sitting on the balcony, drinking and smoking. She went to the reception to ask for this man and his room number. She went up the stairs and knocked on the door. He opened the door and she was shocked because

the man had no tie on and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. He had a waistcoat on and no jacket. She was petrified. He asked her in and she put the money that was in an envelope on a table in the room. There was a note attached, “Oreste Ballini”, so he would know who she wanted released. Mum said the man asked her if she wanted to sit down and have a drink but she said no. She got in and got out.’ I find it so hard to believe Mum’s story that Nonna bribed a minister to hasten Nonno’s exit from the camp. There is no story like it in any of the s or histories of internment I have read. I doubt whether this man was a real minister. Maybe he was someone who worked for one. And then I wondered what minister it might have been: army or attorney-general, in the Queensland Government or the federal government? All my readings indicate that the only way you could get released from internment was to have a tribunal or committee recommend your release to the deputy director of security, who would recommend as such to the attorney-general. For Oreste, the confirmed fascist, getting out of internment was always going to difficult. When he was first arrested and sent to Gaythorne, an enemy alien had no right to appeal his internment but a naturalised citizen of enemy alien origin did. Oreste insisted he was a naturalised citizen but he couldn’t produce his certificate. When the certificate was found and he was able to put in his appeal in September 1940, he was told he should have applied within seven days of his arrest back in the July, therefore his appeal was denied because he was ‘out of time’. Oreste’s investigation file contains no hearing transcripts, but one document indicates that he made three applications for appeals and was continually denied. Then Oreste later made matters worse when, on 8 June 1942, he wrote to the camp commandant at Loveday:

Sir, I have been interned for nearly two years and during all this time I have not heard any news about being called for an appeal against detention. Therefore, if my naturalisation has meant nothing what else could I expect but to retain back my own nationality.

Therefore I desire nothing else but to be denaturalised and ask that my application for denaturalisation be forwarded to the proper authority. Ballini O.

This was a huge step. While naturalisation hadn’t protected him from internment, applying to be denaturalised would be seen as an act of disloyalty. Combined with his fascist links, it could see him locked up for the duration of the war. Did Luigi or Joe counsel him against it? Or even his father Tebaldo? Did Oreste listen to them even if they did? Oreste’s request for denaturalisation worked its way through the system and, on 16 October 1942, he was interviewed by Captain Sexton and made the following statement clarifying the reasons for his request to be denaturalised:

I only became naturalised to find work. At the present moment I am ashamed to have changed my nationality . . . I am ashamed I am a British subject and desire that my naturalisation be cancelled. I am a Fascist and an Italian . . . I want Italy to win the war, and as I always tell the truth it would be a waste of time for me to appear before a Court, as no country could possibly release me when I say I am a Fascist and an Italian and want Italy to win the war.

In January 1943 his request for denaturalisation was granted. He was now an Italian again. Interestingly, Oreste applied for naturalisation again in 1948, long after his release from internment, and the documents relating to that application are in his investigation file. His request was denied. The deputy director of security in Brisbane wrote in a letter to the department of immigration:

Although this man has not come under any adverse notice since his release [it is our view that] the present application is only being made as a matter of convenience and that Ballini is not influenced by any good feelings towards this country. He is now a married man and it is possible that he again wishes to become naturalised in order that he can get a title to his land and establish a home. This man previously enjoyed the privileges of naturalization, which he chose to discard.

By marrying him, Nonna acquired his nationality but decided to apply to have her naturalisation status retained. This was granted despite her husband still being regarded as ‘a strong Fascist sympathiser’.

*

By the end of 1943, Italy had exited the war and all the Ballini men were released and allowed to return home, except for Oreste. He had poured oil on the fire. First there was his fascist hip, his belligerent attitude when he was questioned in Townsville, and then his rash decision to revoke his naturalisation. His many appeals to be released had failed. As the war in the Pacific was dragging on it was possible he would be interned in the Loveday camp until after the conflict was entirely over, confined with the dwindling number of enemy aliens still there, most of them genuine Nazi and fascist sympathisers. Nonno’s file contains no information about his final successful appeal, except for a single-page document that is untitled and dated 21 February 1944, five days before his release from Loveday. The document reads like a tribunal’s opinion and ends with the words ‘release pending’. The unknown author manages to deftly describe both my Nonno’s temperament and the true nature of his predicament:

Internee is young, inclined to be quick tempered and no doubt felt

thoroughly fed up after making three applications for appeals to be continually knocked back and in a fit of temper asked for naturalisation to be revoked. Internee appears to be full of regret . . . Appears to be rather a good type. Cane cutter and his only desire now is to be released, return to Queensland and be married.

Even when he was released from Loveday, Oreste couldn’t return to Queensland. Instead, he was enrolled in the Civil Aliens Corps and sent to Alice Springs to work. He was there until early October, a period of eight months. I knew there was never going to be any evidence of a bribe in Oreste’s investigation file but there is one document that intrigues me. It is a short message from the deputy director of security for Queensland to the district security office in Cairns: ‘The matter of BALLINI’s return to South Johnstone has been discussed with the C.A.C and it is advised that BALLINI has been granted an indefinite deferment from the Corps on medical grounds.’ His file indicates Nonno returned to South Johnstone on 30 October 1944. Mum tells me he returned without injury or illness and was ready to start cutting cane for his uncle. My grandparents married on 10 December and he looks a picture of health in the photographs. It seems highly unlikely – even impossible – that a bribe could have got my nonno out of Loveday. He was released from the camp because the war was ending. But perhaps someone within the office of the director of security for Queensland could have pulled some strings to have Oreste released from the Corps on ‘medical grounds’. I thought it might be worth ringing around a few experts to gauge their response to the bribe story. I ring Gianfranco Cresciani, who wrote the definitive work on Italians in Australia. He tells me he has never heard of government officials being bribed to release internees and he doubts the claim. I email the academic Ellie Vasta and she too has never heard a story like it. I call the historian Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien, the person most likely to know if bribes of this kind occurred, and she agrees with her colleagues that it is unlikely. There is no reason to believe the story told to my mother,

yet a small part of me does – partly because I want to and partly because I can’t believe Nonna would lie about such a thing. On my trip to Innisfail in 2009, I didn’t ask anyone in the family about the bribe. Mum had assured me all family who had known about it were now dead – Nonna and Nonno, Luigi and Marietta. At that time, I hadn’t read the investigation files and so wasn’t able to ask about Luigi’s politics or Nonno’s alleged fascist ties. At the end of one of our long discussions, I tell Mum I need to go back to Innisfail and ask her to come with me, telling her that I had promised Frank I wouldn’t come back without her. She agrees to come on the trip north and my sister Emily agrees to come along too. We book tickets for a one-week trip in June 2011, our first journey there together since Nonna died. I will be in Innisfail for her birthday weekend, eleven years too late.

15

Dreams and Ghosts

Our flight from Sydney to Cairns is due to leave at 6 am on a Wednesday morning. I decide to sleep at Mum’s place the night before so we can travel the short trip from her house to the airport together. Before leaving home I make a roast chicken dinner for my family and play a few games of Snap with my daughter, Sofia. She wins every hand without me letting her; at three years old she has her father’s reflexes. After dinner, I pack the car, hug my daughter and kiss her father goodbye. The rain falls heavily as I drive along Parramatta Road and Cleveland Street towards my mother’s house. I focus on the task of driving in the wet conditions, pushing aside the kinds of feelings I always experience when I leave my family for any length of time – anxiety, sadness, exhilaration. I am dressed in pyjamas and running shoes, my teeth are brushed and my face is already washed with the aim of going straight to bed when I arrive. Instead Mum and I drink tea and watch bad television like we used to do when I lived with her in the years before marriage and motherhood. I rationalise my late bedtime with the knowledge that a 4.30 am wake-up call is harsh no matter how many hours you have slept beforehand. I am back in my old room with the soft single bed. It was Nonna’s old room before I had it. Now, it is the room my daughter uses when she has sleepovers at her nonna’s. This small space between two bathrooms has witnessed three generations of good and bad dreams, dribbles on pillows, soft snoring, plaintive cries in the dark, 3 am insomnia, and ‘just-to-theend-of-this-chapter’ stints of reading. The thought of this history comforts me as I turn down the clean sheets and slip off my socks and shoes. Before I lie down, I open the white cupboard in the corner of the room where Nonna’s collection of embroidery is now stored. I pull out a few

pieces; some are familiar, others I don’t recall seeing before. The air fills for a moment with the aroma of mothballs and I am back in her room at the nursing home on the day after her funeral. I get into bed and turn off the bedside lamp. As I lie there, the lights in different corners of the house are clicked off, leaving me in near darkness. I drift off to sleep wondering if one of the cats would deign to visit me in the night.

*

We rush to get to the airport on time the next morning to the slowmoving queues to check in our luggage, to have our handbags and coffees Xrayed, and to take our seats on the crowded plane. We glide up through the clouds as the sun just starts to rise. Mum and Emily sit in row five but I have paid for the extra legroom available in seat 1A. It isn’t money well spent. Not only do I have responsibilities in the event of an unlikely emergency but my feet suffer, chilled to the bone by a thin slice of air gushing from the bottom of the door. I want to close my eyes, sore from lack of sleep, but the coffee prevents me. I stare out the window instead and watch the green and brown patchwork quilt of northern New South Wales below me until my view becomes obscured by an endless stretch of cloud cover. In the end I shut the window shade and open my book to read. I am reading another novel set in the thirties in north Queensland. This one is called Burnt Sugar, written by a former war correspondent, F.E. Baume. The novel opens on Blue Martin, a giant, drunken cane cutter from Mackay, who is walking down Babinda Road thoroughly pissed off at having been refused work at five Italian cane farms. ing high cane ready for cutting as thick rain falls on his head, he comes across nine-year-old Mario Zobella. ‘You dirty little dago! Won’t give a decent Australian a job, eh?’ the cutter yells at the boy before he beats him unconscious. Mario’s mother Marta tends to her stricken son, interrupting her care only to prepare spaghetti and boiled beef for the farm’s cutters. A young fascist doctor, Marchesini, examines the boy regularly. Once Mario regains consciousness he tells his mother who attacked him and why. She promptly fires her only Australian

cane cutter, George Harris, and decides never to give another Australian a job on her farm. Mario’s beating creates a militant anti-Australian attitude in Marta. She tries to turn her son against his new country but, despite being a target of racial violence, he remains openhearted. He loves the multicultural feel of his hometown, the fictional Eulaville, where Italians, Greeks, Maltese, Chinese and Irish live and work together despite occasional eruptions of animosity. While his mother’s hatred of Australia and Australians deepens, Mario at age twelve dreams of changing his name to ‘Williams’, and becoming a mailman and ‘an Australian hero’. As the attendants walk through the cabin offering coffee and tea, I reach the part where Mario’s mentor, his teacher Mr Green, lectures a classroom of Leongs, Soljaks and Ranzettis about their future as great citizens of a racially tolerant nation:

The kanakas, under their indentured labour, left this portion of the State in 1912. The law did this. You foreigners . . . who outnumber the Australians in this little school and do about twenty per cent of all the work in the sugar country, work too hard for these political easy-goers. Therefore you are to be persecuted. Some of you are likely to be great citizens; some should never have left Italy. But, so long as you work in Australia you should have the same social rights as other men, and I love you while you don’t whine about your ostracism . . . A lot of you will make better Australians than those I see in Innisfail and at Tully and Ingham and Babinda and Eulaville. You are going to have many days and weeks and years of misery with your British brethren. Take it all quietly. Don’t let it break your hearts.

I am pulled from Mario’s story by the hostess asking me if I have any rubbish. We are beginning our descent. Still nothing can be seen through the cloud cover yet I notice it has changed from a gauzy sheet to thick and voluptuous mountains and valleys of white. I hope the humidity on the ground will thaw out my feet rapidly. As we sink towards the earth I see Cairns just as I it from my last trip: the rainforests and

mountain ranges, a clear and still sea covered with patches of cloud shadow, tin-roofed houses surrounded by mangroves and rivers. We slam into the wet tarmac and the impact of rubber on bitumen knocks the tiredness out of me. As we walk from the gate to the baggage claim I ask my sister when she was last in Cairns. ‘Mum and I came after Larry hit, to see if the houses were okay.’ I had forgotten that we still own property in Innisfail, namely two houses, one in which my grandparents had lived at the end of their life together. The airport is bustling. It is the school holidays and the plane was packed. We have to line up for the toilets, jostle our way through people to get to the conveyer belt when we spy our luggage, and then line up at the car-hire counter. ‘Thank God I organised the hotel in Cairns’, Mum says as we walk towards our red Toyato sedan, ‘or we’d be staying in some dive away from the water’. She has booked us into a three-bedroom apartment on the Esplanade, where we will stay until Emily returns to Sydney on Saturday morning, her trip truncated by a friend’s wedding. After we drop her off at the airport, Mum and I will drive to Innisfail, returning to Sydney on the Tuesday morning. During our stay in Innisfail, Mum has booked two rooms at The Barrier Reef Motel. ‘I wish the Riverside was still open’, Mum tells me. ‘I don’t think they’ll ever recovered from the damage all the cyclones caused. It’s sad, because that place was so clean, I loved it.’ As we wait for our apartment to become available, we have brunch at a cafe near the Cairns Art Gallery and talk about what we want to do while we are in town. I am on a mission to buy a skipping rope and a book about fairies for my daughter and my sister has a journal article to work on. Mum, though, has no plans but to relax. ‘Every time I have come here, it’s been because of some trauma’, she says. A death in the family. A cyclone destroying one of the houses we own in the town. She is looking forward to a trip that has nothing to do with funerals or bad weather or family difficulties of any kind. As we drink our coffees

and wait for our eggs Mum spies a familiar white-haired man in jeans and an Akubra hat, the infamous federal member of parliament, Bob Katter. He strides into the cafe, talking loudly into his phone. Earlier in the month he had launched the Australia Party, an organisation dedicated to his pet issues, such as opposition to a carbon tax and supermarket reform. One of his electorate offices is in Innisfail and he is a major sponsor of the Historical Society’s newsletter. Seeing him is like a warning sign: ‘You are in Katter country now, not the trendy gastro-pubs and espresso bars of Sydney. that.’ The early morning start and the humidity are helping to deepen a morose feeling within Mum. She has been reading a lot of Romantic literature, the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. Mum is a high school English teacher and Romanticism is part of the syllabus for her Year 12 students. ‘It always starts with melancholy and then ends with affirming the impermanence of things, the inevitability of death.’ She wonders whether splashing her feet in the lagoon on the Esplanade might help but we don’t end up going to the lagoon. Instead, we book into our apartment and spend the afternoon reading and resting there. We have hamburgers for dinner and retire early, feeling as tired as if it had been midnight.

*

The next morning I wake up while it is still half dark and go to the balcony to see a grey and windy day approaching. I head out to fetch a coffee and find the air is actually cold. I have packed for the tropical version of winter but my clothes are still lightweight and I have only brought one cardie. Returning to the apartment, I find Mum up and making tea. I turn on my laptop and start to read some of my writing to her, the sections I think are particularly funny or sad. I tell her that her father’s file indicates that he had attended fascist meetings when he lived in Sydney. She doesn’t seem surprised. ‘He would go to any meetings if there were other Italians there’, she explains. ‘He wasn’t very political but going to these meetings gave him

some kind of status, some sense of importance in the world. They were an angry bunch of men and it really suited my father well.’ I tell her Oreste’s former boss ran the Sydney branch of the party; perhaps ing was a way to curry favour with him? She doesn’t know the answer to that question. Mum talks more about her father, the causes of his anger and frustration. ‘Gigi treated my father like a serf. He sponsored him to come over to Australia and so it was a bit like he owned him.’ Because Oreste lived and worked on Luigi’s farms he was fed and looked after but, because he was a relative, his uncle didn’t pay him much for his labour. At the end of so many years working for Luigi, Oreste had only three hundred pounds to show for it, something he deeply resented. She says that in the mid 1930s Oreste left Luigi’s farm to go to Sydney to find other work. He was sick of cutting cane for his uncle and wanted to break away from the family, to see if he could make some of his own money. Nonno’s escape to Sydney did not turn out well. It was the Depression and there was not much work around. Mum says the most reliable job he could find was digging up roads. Mum’s explanation about why Nonno attended the Sydney meetings meshes with what I have read about the allure of fascism. Johann Weiss writes that the Italian fascist movement was ‘more concerned with cultural than political issues’, obsessed with restoring the pride and glory of Italy, of creating an Italian empire. In addition, Gianfranco Cresciani believes that ‘fascism appealed quite successfully to the unsophisticated, scarcely educated migrants who were linguistically and socially insecure and isolated, targets of discrimination and abuse’. Men like my nonno. Nonno’s interest may well have been the result of ‘an ideological confusion’ between patriotism and fascism. It seems to me that he was one of those Italians who fell short of being a committed fascist but hoped for what Mussolini might achieve for Italy. I think about a story I read in an article on internment by Morag Loh. Loh writes about a woman called ‘Silvana’ whose father was interned for displaying a photo of Mussolini in his car window: ‘He thought Mussolini was going to make Italy something, make it a bit famous, give it a name.’ I tell Mum that Oreste’s file indicates that Luigi’s only son Joe, Oreste’s

soccer buddy and best friend, regularly attended fascist meetings in the Innisfail area; there were small branches of the Fascist Party in Babinda, Innisfail and Cairns and in 1929 the Italian Consul held a Black Shirt rally at Babinda that was well attended by Innisfail Italians. ‘Oh yes, I that’, Mum says about Joe. ‘Marietta used to warn him about those meetings. She used to tell him all the time not to go. He ignored her and she got so angry with him about it. She used to say, “If you were a turd I would go and shit you in the forest”.’ Mum laughs at my shocked reaction to her grandmother’s words. ‘It sounds a lot nicer in Italian’, she says. As we talk about the evidence in the investigation files, I share with her the story of how Marietta tried to hide the family camera and was caught by the police sent to the farm to arrest the men. Mum’s face lights up with a salvaged memory. ‘That was Nonna’s camera. Your Nonna. She loved taking photos. She would develop her own photos on the farm. She used to tell me how much she enjoyed watching the images magically appear before her, picking just the right moment to pull them out of the solution so they wouldn’t be under or over exposed.’ Whenever family discussed what happened during the war, Mum tells me Nonna always used to say ‘they took my camera’, the injustice still fresh in her mind years after the event. ‘Nonna was dying to give me a camera for my twenty-first birthday’, Mum says, ‘but I had no interest in photography’. I come across a note I made back in Sydney to ask Mum about Auntie Inez, the third Ballini sister. Inez died well before I was born and was only ever referred to by my mother as ‘Crazy Auntie Inez’. ‘Inez used to have serious grand mal seizures as a result of contracting Spanish influenza in 1919’, Mum tells me. ‘She would have prolonged fits that would last about two to three minutes, after which she went catatonic.’ Inez lived her entire life with her parents, looked after by my nonna, tolerated by my nonno, and feared by their daughter. She had been very pretty in her youth and received numerous proposals from eligible men, yet Marietta refused to allow her afflicted daughter to marry.

‘You see Marietta was seven months pregnant with Dina when she married Gigi’, Mum explains. ‘So there was the shame of having had sex out of wedlock. She always believed Inez’s illness was her fault, that she had been punished by God for her sins.’ I tell her it doesn’t make sense to me, that Marietta thought God had made Inez ill because Dina was conceived in sin. Why not give Dina the seizures instead? ‘You want something like this to make sense?’ Mum responds, laughing. ‘I have a very clear memory of being on the farm’, Mum continues. ‘I must have been about four or five years old – and Auntie Inez had a bad fit. I was sent downstairs while the doctor came and my mother and grandmother helped him subdue her. After a while Nonna Marietta came to find me sitting in the lounge room and she said “Auntie Inez is all right now but you too will have your cross to bear”.’ The old woman had locked eyes with her granddaughter and pointed a long, strong finger at her as she said the words, ‘Ho la mia croce, é te avrai la tua’ – I have my cross to bear and you will have one too. Inez was treated like an invalid most of her life and so as she got older she became eccentric. ‘The way she would her days was to find any bits of cotton or wool that had been twisted or knotted and she would unravel them. She would try and drag me into her room to make me look at her cotton but I was scared of her and I would run away. She used to stare at holy pictures, pictures of the saints, in her room, unraveling her cotton.’ One time Mum had been playing with a hula hoop and the clattering noise the hoop made when it fell to the ground annoyed Inez so much she threw a chair at her niece. Mum got a gash in her head that bled profusely. Inez died of pneumonia she contracted while the family was on Elba for a rare holiday when my mother was twelve years old. Mum says her mad auntie’s constant refrain when she was living in Australia had been ‘voglio morire in Italia’ – let me die in Italy.

*

Later that day, over coffee and biscotti, Mum tells me she is enjoying her time with us in Cairns, despite the strange and bad memories she can’t escape. ‘The thing that makes me saddest is that my mother was never able to be honest with me. It was so hard to get her to open up, to get her to tell me how she felt about things. I wanted to say to her, “I am sorry your parents treated you like a slave, that your husband was awful”. I wanted to tell her I hated my father. But she could never be honest with me and so it was hard to be honest with her.’ I tell Mum that maybe not talking about things was Nonna’s way of coping, given that she thought she was powerless to change anything. This seems to me to be typical of the times, the unwillingness to talk about sadness and darkness, the belief that silence will repair the damage done. My sister tells us that after the Second World War, the Red Cross advised returned prisoners of war not to talk about their experience in the camps and even advised their families that if it came up in conversation, they should change the subject. ‘Least said, soonest mended’, was the theory. I am beginning to understand now why Nonna never spoke much about the war, or her love life before Nonno, or about her marriage. I am beginning to understand too why Nonno never spoke about the internment camp or his relationship with his father.

*

We spend the rest of our time together in Cairns quietly, our individual routines effortlessly diverging one moment and meshing another. I am back in my first family again, thinking only from time to time about the other one waiting for me in Sydney. The tropical world around me makes it easy to feel as if I have gone back in time, as if I am twenty-seven again. The weather remains cool and dreary, the misty clouds hanging low over the mountain like an oddly fitting wig, never moving. We work, read, nap, and watch television. We eat lunch in the apartment and dinner out at a restaurant. Every afternoon, I walk for an hour on my own in the wind and

intermittent drizzle along the Esplanade, past the children playing on the mudflats, the backpackers lounging in the lagoon, towards the pier and the marina, past the expensive hotels and the even more expensive restaurants. I always stop to look at the replica of the Endeavour, which is on a voyage around Australia but now berthed in the harbour alongside the working fishing boats and bobbing pleasure craft. I struggle to imagine what the place was like in Nonna’s day, when she came here for her week-long honeymoon and for a tiny taste of life away from the farm and the family. On the day we are due to drive to Innisfail, I take an early morning walk along the Esplanade. While the mountains still wear their strange, white toupees, the rest of the sky is clear and I hope for a warm and sunny day. There is more birdlife on the mudflats than I have seen on my previous walks. I stop for a moment to watch the white cranes, with their impossibly slender necks, standing in loose groups far from the shore. It strikes me – not for the first time – that the air is devoid of that seaside smell, that salty edge in the wind you get when you walk along Sydney beaches. Standing on the promenade all I can smell is the earth after the rain. As I start walking again, towards Cairns Hospital, a peewee flies so close to my head that its wing tip glances the corner of my ear. The sound of its wing beat, the feather-fan of air thrust downwards, gives me a small shock and, inexplicably, reminds me of a dream I had the night before. I am playing with my daughter in her bedroom. She is wearing the denim dress and striped leggings she used to wear when she was still a toddler, clothes I know she has long since grown too big to wear. Her dream bedroom is the same as the one in our house, but we are back in the apartment my husband and I lived in before she was born. I am in the middle of a collage of moments in time, past and present. My daughter and I are sitting on her polka-dot rug playing with a variety of her favourite toys: Mrs Potato Head, wooden building blocks, a silver music box and some brightly-coloured Maroushka dolls. She pops open the lacquered nest of five dolls and the second largest one is missing. She asks me where it is, but I have no idea. I tell her I must have lost it somehow. My daughter starts to cry large, hot tears of frustration as if I am hiding the doll or have lost it on purpose. I don’t the rest of the dream, and so I don’t how or if I stopped my daughter crying over the missing Maroushka. After breakfast, Mum and I drop my sister at the airport and head towards

Innisfail. There is no warm and sunny day in store for us. The skies have clouded over and it rains on and off as I drive on well-sealed roads through the cane and familiar towns like Babinda and Goondi. Mum and I talk all the way to Innisfail about my sister, my daughter, my husband, about work and school as she sinks down into the car seat beside me, having kicked off her shoes but with her bag still in her lap. I tell Mum about the Maroushka dream, wondering if she has any theories about what it might mean. ‘It could mean all sorts of things’, she says after a pause, ‘but it certainly has something to do with Nonna’. Maybe it is symbolic of the fact that Nonna never got the chance to play with Sofia or to see me happily settled in my role as a mother. Or maybe the dream is about Nonna’s lost opportunity to live her own life on her own . I think it might have something to do with the book itself, now that I am almost at the end of writing it, still searching for the missing pieces to my family’s story. As I drive into Innisfail I think about something I read a few weeks before in an article about Italians in northern Queensland. Lyn Henderson writes that the popular newspaper Smith’s Weekly was fond of attacking towns like Innisfail and Ingham for being ‘hot-beds of low morals’ because of the concentration of Italians living there. Immigrants of ‘the wrong type’, the newspaper called them. In 1930, a high point in xenophobia about Italians in the north, the rag ran the headline: ‘Innisfail – Nightmare City of North Australia. Town of Dreadful Dagoes. Looks Tranquil in its Main Street but Filthy Scum Oozes from its Highways and Byways’. But there is nothing sinister oozing from the Bruce Highway the morning we drive into town, just sheets of water hitting and bouncing off the road. We drive past the drenched racetrack and showgrounds, the enclosure where the men – as future internees – had been held before they were sent to Townsville. Mum says the grounds have changed only slightly since she was a little girl. I try to imagine the men being escorted through the wooden and corrugated iron gates to sleep in makeshift tents near the animal pens and stables. We park just near the Joss House. It is the weekend and the centre of town is quiet, tranquil even. We want to find a place to have a drink before we go to the hotel. Il Fiorentino’s has closed down and so has the cafe Frank and I ate at so many times during my previous visits. We finally find a place on the corner of Edith and Owen streets and order hot chocolates. I am feeling underdressed in my cotton dress and denim jacket. It is a strange sensation

to feel cold in the tropics. ‘It feels so weird to be back here’, Mum says. I thank her for coming with me and say I hope the trip won’t make her feel too sad. ‘I wanted to come with you’, she replies. ‘I need to get rid of some ghosts.’ I tell her a bit about the museum a few blocks up the street and the portraits of the See Poy children. ‘You know one of the boys wanted to marry Nonna? He came to ask Luigi for her hand.’ ‘What did he say?’ I ask. ‘He said he’d ask Nonna but that she would probably say no. She did. She didn’t fancy him. Even if she did it was a lot for an Italian girl to marry a Chinese man in those days.’ We check into our hotel, into the spotlessly clean and modest rooms I from the last trip. The owner introduces herself and recommends her restaurant as the best in town unless we want to play the pokies, in which case the RSL is the better option. We leave our bags unpacked and get into the car to head to the supermarket for breakfast supplies. For reasons I can’t understand, bananas are a dollar more a kilogram in the middle of banana-growing country than they are back in Sydney. I still buy four of them. We have toasted sandwiches for lunch at a cafe around the corner from the supermarket. We contemplate a walk around town and a visit to the museum but the continuous rain drives us back to the hotel for the afternoon. While I settle down to write, Mum calls Frank to let him know we have arrived. They chat for a bit and then agree to meet at 8 pm for dinner. It is a late dinner because Frank wants to take his brother Dino to Mass. Saturday Mass is a weekly ritual for them and it can’t be broken, even for us. I contemplate meeting my uncles at our Lady of Good Counsel but Mum doesn’t want to go so I stay with her. On this, perhaps our last trip to Innisfail, I want us to stick together.

*

The restaurant where we are due to meet Frank is on Fitzgerald Esplanade, overlooking the North Johnstone River, near The Canecutter memorial. The place is relatively new and has fast become a local favourite. Mum asks me if I know where the memorial is and I offer to navigate while she drives – after all my years of writing about Innisfail, I now know the place better than she does. We park the car near the memorial and it looks smaller and more ornate than I it. Has the cutter always had that oddly serene look on his face, as if cane cutting is a calming experience, like yoga? Has he always been naked above the waist? It’s funny the things you ignore or forget. In previous trips, I hadn’t noticed that the local fishermen like to tie their boats at the bank, an easy distance from the Riverside Tavern, Innisfail’s first hotel and best place to drink. Frank is late meeting us as Dino’s wife, Alice, is unwell and Dino is frail and forgetful. It takes Frank longer than he expected to get Dino back into their apartment and to make sure he is settled before he leaves to meet us. Mum and I eat fish and pasta while Frank tells us the family news and intrigue. Maria Ballini has recently died at the age of ninety-three; she had been sharp until her last moments. The rest of the family is well, except for Alice who has been in and out of hospital with chest pains. Dino’s dementia is getting worse and he walks with a cane. It might not be possible for us to visit them but Frank offers to call them to see if they are well enough to receive visitors. Pauline and Rosie know we are in town and would be more than happy for us to drop by for coffee. We talk about seeing Pauline the next day, Nonna’s birthday. I tell Frank that if Nonna had still been alive she would have been one hundred and one years old. ‘I don’t think she would have liked that’, he says. Frank and Mum slip easily into talk about the past while I listen attentively, taking notes with a biro from a hotel I don’t recall ever staying at. I ask Frank about his father Arturo, who died before I was born. My Mum had described him to me as a funny and gentle man, very different in character to his hard-to-please, hard-talking wife Dina.

‘Everyone loved my father’, Frank says. Arturo had been one of the few Ballini men who wasn’t interned. This was remarkable, given the Cairns police considered the entire Ballini family to be a threat. In a note to Northern Command contained in Luigi’s file, a Cairns policeman wrote that ‘there are enough [Ballinis] to cause trouble at an awkward moment, and they carry on as a complete clan, and work together. Recommend that the clique be busted up. I leave the detail of how, and when, to you.’ The allegation that Luigi’s relatives were a dangerous gang of fascists was made by a man called Antonio Vago, who had a grudge against the family because Luigi sold him some land that he couldn’t make work as a farm. Vago went bankrupt and threatened the family that he would hurt them. The police investigated the claim and considered Vago to be an unreliable source. While they recognised Vago’s motives, they nevertheless agreed with his conclusion. Frank always wondered why his father was not interned, but in the end he put it down to the fact that they had tolerant and friendly neighbours. No one thought to make a report about them to the police. His father also served in the Italian navy in the First World War, alongside the British. ‘Still, maybe he was just lucky’, Frank says. ‘In those days all it took is someone telling stories about you and you were interned’. I ask Frank whether he ever heard anything about Nonna paying money to get Nonno out of internment. Mum tells him her story, about the trip to the Cairns hotel, the man in his shirtsleeves and the two hundred pounds in an envelope. ‘My mother wouldn’t lie’, Mum says with a firm voice. Frank agrees; Teresa wasn’t the kind of person who lied about things. ‘I don’t think, if she really had a choice, that your Nonna would have married your Nonno’, Frank says to me as we finish our dinner and order tea. ‘You know when they first got together it made sense. He was a soccer star and she was a beautiful woman. But soon after they started courting he was interned and then he was away for so long. When he got out they were married straight away. If there had been a long engagement, maybe she would have broken it off with him.’

We sit together long after our teas have been drunk and continue to talk about family , living and dead. The waitresses start stacking chairs around us. Mum then pays the bill and we say goodbye to Frank on the pavement outside the cafe with a promise to meet at the hotel at 9.45 am to go to Pauline’s house together.

*

That night I finish reading Burnt Sugar. The grown-up Mario leaves the cane fields as soon as he can, desperate for a new life and new possibilities. He changes his name to ‘Mark Zobler’, which he believes is more fitting for an Australian businessman than Zobella, and takes a job in a general store in the tiny town of Harbutt in western Queensland. His only aim in life is to fit in and make as much money as possible. In his late twenties he relocates to Sydney and with the help of a German businessman starts importing products from Japan to sell in retail outlets. Success follows and one Christmas, he contemplates his status as a great Australian businessman, independent and worth the best part of eight thousand pounds: ‘The dirty little Dago from the cane fields, eh? Well, he said he’d show ’em and he did. An Italian couldn’t be an Australian, eh? He showed them, you bet he did.’ Mario meets and marries Margaret Hunter and they have a child, John. Visiting his wife and newborn son in the hospital, he realises the name Zobella is now dead and his son John Zobler will know nothing of his heritage. Mario frets that his wife might teach his son to be intolerant, to hate Catholics or Jews. What he doesn’t know is that his wife secretly calls their child her ‘ickle Dagobebby’ and praises his ‘booful Dago eyes’. The novel ends with Mario, now thirty, deciding to visit the north on his own. With success established and much of his Italian-ness shed (or at least camouflaged), he is drawn home to Eulaville for reasons he can’t articulate. He visits the local pub and drinks with men who him as a young boy. He takes a walk along the sodden riverbank towards his old house, which is now no longer a homestead but a field recently sold by a Chinese family to an Italian family. He has happiness, comfort, money and

achievements and yet he doesn’t know what he is searching for or why he has come home. Like so many second-generation migrants, he is caught in between an Italian past and an Australian future. I close the book and realise that if Mario had been real, he would have been interned for sure, despite the name change, Australian wife and son, and his fervent desire to be ‘an Australian hero’. I go to bed late, feeling uneasy that we might not get to see Uncle Dino ever again. We might not even be able to see Elsie on this trip either, as Frank told us over dinner that he and Elsie have fallen out and Mum worries about stepping into a still-churning family feud. In the past, coming to Innisfail meant endless coffees and lunches with this auntie and that uncle. Now we might only have the chance to see one or two of the relatives who know us and know the stories. When Frank dies we will have few reasons to come to Innisfail any more.

16

The Left-hand Curve

I wake early on the morning of Nonna’s birthday and go straight to my computer to write a letter:

Dear Nonna, Today is your birthday. If you were alive you would be one hundred and one. As much as I wish you were here I would hate to be visiting you in a hospital where you were in pain, or out of your mind with boredom or simply out of your mind. I am glad you died when you did. Dino said you were calm and clear-headed at the end of your life and I hope that’s true. I tried to get to you in time to see you but I missed you by half a day. I am sorry. I fly in planes now. I am in Innisfail with Mum. We are visiting the relatives. Frank is well and so are Pauline and Elsie. Dino is not well and Alice is having heart problems. Rosie is living in the house you lived in before you went to the nursing home. Over the last ten years I have spent a lot of time reading and researching about what happened to Italians in Australia during the war. I didn’t know Nonno was interned for so long. I never knew they took your father and your brother and that you had to run the farms while they were gone. You never spoke about it and I wished you had. I ire what you did. I am sure you were scared but I bet you enjoyed some of it, the freedom to drive the car and to go into town all dressed up. Talking to Frank and Pauline and Mum and everyone else about you, I feel like I know you a lot better now than when you were alive. I know you loved photography. I know how

talented you were at lace-making and embroidery. I know about all the men who wanted to marry you. And I understand why you married Nonno. I want you to know that I married someone that makes me very happy, someone you never got the chance to meet. We have a daughter, Sofia. She looks like Shirley Temple ( the Shirley Temple statues Nonno used to make in the backyard?). She is healthy and happy. Emily is happy. Mum is happy. We miss you every day. Love, Rebecca *

Frank meets us at the motel and we drive in our car to Pauline’s house. We fields of cane to our right and left. It is cutting season and the cane is high and thick, the feathery tops of the stalks swirling in the constant wind. ‘Isn’t the cane beautiful?’ I say. I can hear Frank laugh to himself in the back seat. ‘You don’t think the cane is beautiful?’ ‘You don’t after you have worked in it’, he replies. As we turn into the long driveway at Pauline’s house, we can see our hostess busy with the garbage bins near the carport. She wears a house dress and sneakers and seems surprised to see a car creeping towards her. ‘Didn’t you tell her we were coming Frank?’ I ask. He had rung Pauline a few days ago to tell her we would be in town but that was all. I feel bad about dropping in unannounced but then again surprise visits are expected in my family. Nonna was always ready to receive visitors with cake and biscotti and even pasta waiting to be served to whoever might come by. Pauline seems unchanged, if only a little thinner than when I last saw her. For a second when I hug her and breathe in her scent it is as if I am embracing Nonna again. Maybe all nonnas smell the same, I think, like face

powder and home cooking. Except for my mother, who smells like French perfume. We sit down at Pauline’s kitchen table and she asks me how the book is going. ‘Have you finished it yet?’ ‘Almost’, I tell her. I have a few more questions to ask people, her in particular. I tell her about Luigi and Oreste’s files, the allegations that the men were involved with fascist organisations in Sydney and north Queensland. ‘Do you know anything about that? Do you recall the men attending any political meetings?’ She tells me she has no memories of anything of that kind. I ask her if she re Nonna going to Cairns at any time on her own. ‘Did Nonna ever pay someone money to get Nonno out of internment?’ ‘I wouldn’t have known about anything like that’, she replies. ‘I was young when the war was on, only sixteen. People didn’t tell me everything.’ Pauline says she had been thinking lately about how she used to sit with Nonna on the verandah of the house in South Johnstone watching the Japanese planes fly overhead. ‘We knew they were Japanese planes because they were yellow and so we would watch them fly over us and think, “wow, look at that!”’ She laughs at the memory of her naive, childish wonder, as if the spectacle of enemy planes in fighting formation was a kind of carnival attraction. ‘We were young. We knew there was a war on but at the same time we had no idea.’ Pauline offers to make us either tea or coffee. I figure tea will be easier for her to make so I ask for tea and so does Mum. I recall Nonna being a dedicated coffee drinker; tea was something you only drank when you were sick. Frank is the only one who asks for coffee, which is no bother to make, Pauline insists. Our host brings out her homemade schiaccia and slice after slice is pushed on us, which we happily accept. As we eat and drink we talk about the war. Frank explains that there were Japanese air raids on Townsville and Mossman in 1942, after which many of the women in the

family were moved to the Atherton Tablelands, away from the coast, in case there were further bombings. Dina and her children and Elide and her children lived on the tablelands for a significant period of time; Frank thinks it was almost two years. He re attending a primary school in the tiny farming and forestry town of Wondecla. ‘We weren’t scared but we were playing it safe’, Frank says. We clear the table to make space for Pauline’s photos. I saw some of her collection during my last visit but others are new to me, like her wedding photo. She had been a bride at the age of eighteen. There was no money for a white gown of lace and tulle and so she had worn a simple grey dress with white embroidery on the lapels, something you might reserve for churches and other people’s weddings. She also wore a simple but elegant white hat, the front of which dipped over her face, partially covering her smooth forehead. ‘I always hated that hat’, Pauline tells me. Both the dress and the hat had not been worth keeping. Tebaldo was in the wedding party and so was Nonna, dressed in a dark jacket and skirt, looking like the mother of the bride. Pauline also has a photo of my grandparents’ wedding, which I haven’t seen in a long time. Scanning the bridal party, the line-up of smiling faces, I can easily identify the typical Ballini features: deep-set dark eyes that have a tendency to become hooded with age; oval faces with high cheekbones; thick hair and thin lips; the prominent nose. My nonno is actually smiling in his wedding photo and looks much younger than his bride. I recognise Nonna’s wedding veil, which I now have folded up and wrapped in tissue paper in a box at home. In the photo I can see it is fastened to her hair by a headband decorated with tiny silk flowers. Elsie is the bridesmaid and Uncle Joe is the best man. Pauline hands my mother a photo of Marietta when she was younger. The old lady’s clothes are modest but there is an ornate brooch pinned to her blouse, a starburst of diamonds she had custom-made in Italy. Despite the formality of the photo and the fact that she is nearly smiling, the old lady is still intimidating. Mum asks Pauline if she can keep the photo. ‘My grandmother was severa but she almost looks human in this photo’, Mum says. ‘I never looked her in the face for more than a few seconds

because I was so scared of her.’ Mum wants the photo so she can stare at her Nonna without flinching, so Pauline agrees to let her keep it. ‘Was it true Marietta never learned to read and write?’ I ask Pauline. ‘That’s right, she was illiterate’, Pauline says. Teresa had tried to teach her mother to sign her name once, but her daughter Maria had made fun of her efforts. Marietta hit Maria in the head with a saucepan and refused any further lessons. She was a wealthy old woman with diamonds who could only sign her name as a cross. Pauline asks us to stay for lunch, saying it would be no bother to whip up some pasta, but we politely refuse. We have intruded enough on her Sunday. Kissing her goodbye at the doorstep, I tell Pauline she looks really well and happy with life. She tells me she feels healthy and is keeping active. She is part of a local committee dedicated to keeping Italian culture alive in Innisfail. They organise three or four dinner dances a year. ‘All the committee are over seventy. We ask for young ones to in but they don’t want to get involved.’

*

After our visit to Pauline, we take a tour around east Innisfail. We trawl slowly along streets that run parallel with the river, full of gorgeous but rundown Queenslanders. Frank navigates, showing us his parents’ old house and Luigi and Marietta’s last house in Innisfail, where Nonna, Nonno and Mum lived with them and Inez so Nonna could cook and care for them all. My mother re playing in the yard of the large brick house and getting her head caught in the metal banister on the staircase leading to the front door. We idle past and the current residents relaxing on the balcony in the Sunday sunshine stare at us with suspicion, as if we might be burglars casing the t. As we drive along each street Frank names all the people who used to live in the different houses. The daughter of one of the Signorini brothers is still alive, he tells us, holed up in a neat, green Queenslander with a well-manicured front yard. We circle back towards the motel, past

more cane fields, and we can see the extinct volcanoes and Mount Bartle Frere, the highest mountain in Queensland, in the distance.

*

I go to my room at the hotel to write up my notes, distracted only by my mother and Frank reminiscing in the room next to me. I can hear their laughter and the occasional phrase in rapid-fire Italian. I stop writing so we can have lunch together, after which Frank leaves us and we return to the hotel to rest until dinner. Before we go into our respective rooms Mum suggests we return to Cairns the next morning, earlier than we had planned. The look on her face tells me she is done with Innisfail. ‘Do you need to stay longer to interview other people?’ she asks. I reason that if Pauline and Frank know nothing about the bribe, nothing about Oreste and Luigi’s alleged fascist links, then no one else would. I suggest we head back before lunch, after we visit Rosie in the morning. ‘Do you want to come to the cemetery with me to visit the family?’ I ask. ‘No way’, she says. As far as she is concerned Nonna isn’t there to visit. As Mum rests I decide to walk around the corner, past the car park and quiet childcare centre, to the cemetery. I now know for certain which way to head to find my grandparents in the Italian enclave behind the crypts. The only other person at the cemetery on a Sunday afternoon is a council worker in his ute loaded with shovels. His lurid shirt is a shock of orange against the backdrop of greens, greys and shades of black. Walking along the spongy grass, I the graves of the Aglis, Corsis, and Signorinis. I notice the graves of many other men and women whose names are now familiar to me, names that have come up in conversation during the past week, that are listed in the investigations files and in the local history books. I pick up a purple silk flower that lies friendless on the pathway between the Irish and the Italian sections, a flyaway from a fake floral wreath on one of the newer graves. As I walk around, I scrunch it in my hands like a stress ball.

Nonna and Nonno’s grave is as I , only Nonno seems to be curving his mouth in a rare hint of a smile. The granite on the top of the grave is now black with mould. As the years it will become so damaged and worn that their names and images will fade and nothing will be left but an ugly rectangle. It seems strange, given everything I now know about their relationship, to see them so close together. In the final years of their life, they lived in separate rooms. Nonna slept in the master bedroom that smelt of face powder and the lavender pouches that hung in her wardrobe. Nonno’s room smelt of unwashed shirts. He lived in that dark and unkempt place like a bachelor, his bed unmade, the blinds always drawn. All around the room there were rusty nails hammered into the wall at different levels, bent at odd angles. I once asked him why they were there. He looked at me incredulously. ‘I need them to hang my shirts up.’ He couldn’t be bothered to use a coathanger or to mount a proper hook, so he would hammer nails in at random, not caring that they ripped the floral wallpaper chosen by Nonna to decorate the walls. He was impatient and impulsive to the last. When they moved to Innisfail, there was not enough space in their new house for hisand-hers bedrooms and so they had to share again. A few nails sprung up around the place, but only in the hall and bathrooms. I try to find Luigi and Marietta’s grave but can’t. I come across other Ballinis, of course. The sun is hot and the moist air foetid with the smell of wet dirt and vegetation. There are no bright flowers, fresh or artificial, on any of the graves, just tatty bouquets and smashed and cracked ceramic blooms. The graves are all blackened, like bruised fruit. I stumble into sodden patches of mud and grass as I leave the cemetery and understand why my mum hadn’t wanted Nonna buried here, why she had wanted the quick, clean exit of a cremation. At that moment I decide that is what I want when I die. I imagine disappearing into a wall of flame and being released into the wind to travel across the cane and down the river, towards the mountains that were once volcanoes, escaping the shroud of the heavy, dark earth.

*

Dino and Alice us for an early dinner that night. Dino barely speaks, lost in his own pleasant fog. It is impossible for us to know whether he realises who we are. There is no point in talking about Nonna. Alice talks about their life, her children and grandchildren, but the conversation is stilted. Frank sits and sips his coffee. We leave early. Afterwards, Mum and I chat in her hotel room at length. I tell her about my trip to the cemetery that afternoon, how I now understand why she hadn’t wanted Nonna to be buried there. ‘Nonna never wanted to live in Innisfail. It was too small for her, too claustrophobic’, she says. In the 1960s they managed to escape Innisfail for a period of time when my grandparents moved to Adelaide with their young daughter and lived there until they were in their seventies. Mum tells me the happiest time in her mother’s life was when we were in Adelaide together, when my sister and I were little. The time is captured in the square photo that lives on the shelf near my desk. ‘Nonno was still working as a builder and so Nonna had her mornings to herself. We would meet twice a week for coffee and talk. Her parents and her sister were dead by then and she was almost free to do what she wanted.’

*

On my final morning in Innisfail, I wake up to heavy rain and dark skies. Bad weather has hung over us during our entire trip. Luckily the forecast for Cairns is for sun with only patches of cloud. No rain and a respectable twenty-two degrees. I am looking forward to walking the streets feeling dry and warm and to enjoying an evening meal in the hotel restaurant. Over breakfast, Mum tells me stories about how when she was a little girl the extended family would go to the nearby Etty Beach for picnics. All Luigi and Marietta’s children, their children and grandchildren would come with chairs, tents and abundant food to eat, play games and swim. Now the Ballini clan was thinning, were dying and their children had left

town. Luigi’s little Elba in the tropics was gone. I ask Mum if this makes her sad and she assures me quickly that it doesn’t. ‘Some things have to end so other things can begin.’

*

As I pay for our breakfast, I see Frank’s ute pull up outside the coffee shop. We drive together in our car in the continuing wet to Rosie’s place. As we arrive outside her house, Rosie is moving her rubbish bins around, just like Pauline had been doing the day before. Mum has forgotten that her auntie’s little flat used to be Nonna’s. ‘It brings back memories, doesn’t it?’ Frank says as he steps through the front door into Rosie’s neat lounge room. ‘Every time I come to visit Rosie, I see your mother first.’ Since my last visit, Rosie’s photos have multiplied. Every corner of the room is crammed with images – of her husband Guilio as an old man and a young man, her wedding photos, her children’s wedding photos, her numerous grandchildren in graduation gowns and her great-grandchildren in school uniforms. A picture of Elba is on the wall near a loudly clicking clock. Mum and I kiss and hug Rosie hello. She is much thinner than when I last saw her and she is walking stiffly with the help of a cane. When we last met, Elsie had dominated the conversation but now Rosie is alone and free to talk. She tells us about her various afflictions and that she has recently been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I can tell she is worn out, tired of being sick and struggling to walk. Watching her travel from the biscuit jar on the kitchen bench to the sink to the table, I can tell every movement is an effort. Her husband died badly as a result of a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Rosie visited him every day in the hospital for four years. She has witnessed how people can thrash and panic as they die badly and she didn’t want to linger too much longer. ‘I would like it all to be over soon’, she tells my mother.

Our visit with Rosie is short, less than an hour, because I realise my mother is getting restless. She says no to a slice of apple pie and resists sitting down at Rosie’s kitchen table. When she does sit down, she ignores her tea and fidgets, turning her hands over in her lap time and again. She speaks in a high, quick voice, not her natural tone or inflection. She wants to leave. We make some plausible excuse, that we need to get back to Cairns to check into the hotel, and Mum makes false promises about returning for another visit soon. We beg Rosie not to follow us to the car, but to wave goodbye to us from her dry lounge room where there is little chance she will slip and fall. We drive back to Frank’s ute parked near the river, across from the coffee shop. The rain hasn’t stopped all morning and he urges us not to get out of the car to say goodbye. Frank is in the back seat and so I turn around and lean across to kiss his cheek and grasp his sinewy hand. He kisses me back and asks if I will send him more photos of my daughter, as the ones on my mobile phone were hard for him to see. Mum wants him to visit us in Sydney but he is non-committal. ‘I’ll think about it.’ He ambles to his ute, unfazed by the wet, not looking back. Mum has been behind the wheel all morning so I offer to drive the hour or so back to Cairns. She refuses. She wants to be the one behind the wheel as we leave. It is important to her to drive away from a place she has escaped, as if her fears and bad memories will be burnt up by exhaust fumes. As we hit the Bruce Highway she thanks me for bringing her back. ‘I was reluctant to come but I am glad I did. I know it sounds like a cliché but I feel free. Nonna isn’t here any more and I can leave it all behind.’ We keep driving on an almost empty road, past the few shops and houses on the outskirts of town until we hit the countryside, that lush, dramatic backdrop of forest and mountain range that intrigued me on my train journey north all those years ago. We soon reach a left-hand curve in our path, a slight rise in the road not steep enough to be called a hill. It is the point where, if you weren’t driving and could look behind you, the way back to Innisfail can’t be seen. After this you cross Harvey Creek and are thirty minutes’ drive from Cairns. Nonna once told my mother that when she

ed this bend in the road, her spirits would lift. She knew then she was on her way to the airport and then on a plane to Sydney to see us. I look over at Mum and see her face relax, her shoulders ease downwards, as we drive together towards the end of the rain.

Epilogue

For the many years that I researched and read about Italians in Australia, I developed a theory that my mother was ashamed of her heritage. Why else would she insist on me being a Huntley rather than a Ballini when I had the chance to change my name? This realisation was slow to develop because while I was growing up Mum would always lecture me about the superiority of everything Italian – food, clothes, architecture, opera, cars – the list was endless. I took this for pride in her heritage, and it was, but I think now there was also something defensive about it. Like she was arguing the case for her people to the editor of Smith’s Weekly. On our last morning in Innisfail, Mum told me my theory just wasn’t true. ‘I was never ashamed of being Italian’, she explained. ‘Just other people seemed to look down on me because of it and I wondered why.’ The shame wasn’t internal. It wasn’t something she carried at the centre of her heart or the pit of her stomach. But, as she was growing up, there were others around her – a college boy at a party, a future mother-in-law, a girl sitting next to her in English History, another high school teacher in the staff room – who considered shame to be appropriate or reasonable. In a special report on Italians in Queensland published in 1934, the Telegraph newspaper concluded that while the public was rightly anxious about the negative impact of these swarthy migrants on the Australian way of life, they could rest assured that ‘in a few decades all traces of the first Italian generations will have vanished’. When I look at my daughter I know the Telegraph is right. Her hair is blonde. Tight caramel curls cover her head. Strangers and friends and family comment on it daily. Her skin is white without the yellow tinge my skin retains, even after months out of the sun. My daughter didn’t inherit her father’s blue eyes but she has his colouring and his features. Her eyes are brown and people say they look like mine but I think they are far lighter. Perhaps they will darken with age. Looking at her sometimes, I find it hard to believe she is my child. She doesn’t look like an Italian girl. She

looks like a girl descended from generations of men and women from the north of England, the places my husband’s family come from. Her blonde hair and white skin remind me that she will never grow up in a house where Italian is spoken easily over a phone or at a kitchen table. She will eat some of the foods I grew up eating and I will teach her to make schiaccia, but being Italian is more about my history than her identity. The Italian–Croat author Predrag Matvejevic writes that ‘to lose is part of our destiny’. In four generations, so much has been lost, so much has changed that it can accurately be described as a transformation. My greatgrandmother, Marietta, couldn’t read or write and signed her name with a cross. Her granddaughter went to university and her great-granddaughter teaches in one. In my Nonna’s day you obeyed the men. Family came first. You married and got on with it. You were conditioned to put up with a lot and not complain. This is no longer the case, which is something I am thankful for every day. But sometimes it feels as if we have traded language and culture for opportunity and freedom. After ten years of reading and wondering about family, identity and history, I question whether this trade was entirely necessary, whether it might have been possible for us to have become Australian without losing everything worth keeping about being Italian. Some things have ended. Other things continue. As a nation, not much has changed about the way we view new migrants, regardless of who they are and where they come from. We complain that they won’t learn English fast enough and that they resist assimilating, creating enclaves in our midst. We question their loyalty to this country and their adherence to our values. We resent it when they work too hard and resent it when they don’t work hard enough. We suspect that they treat their women badly and have brought with them in their tattered suitcases un-Australian activities like gang violence, bombings and knife attacks. We worry that they are zealous in their practice of religion and we are concerned when they set up their own school system. Hope lies only in the capacity for their children to reject the parents’ way of life so they can become Australian and raise Australian kids. In my work as a social researcher I have sat in countless focus groups with people who fret about the impact of new migrants on Australian values and our standard of living. Sometimes in one of these groups someone will say,

‘wouldn’t it be nice if these Muslims behaved like the Italians?’ There is always a reason to give about why this won’t happen. And rarely, if ever, does someone say, it was the same for the Italians once. To lose is part of our destiny but are we destined not to learn from history? At least we are quick to change the targets of our collective animosity. Once, my friend and colleague Dorothy Dudley was conducting a focus group on the optic of Australian identity. In the discussion, two participants – middleaged men from Anglo stock – encapsulated with wit and brevity our national tendency to single out one migrant group to demonise, only to move on to another, stereotypes intact.

Man 1: Australia has a good track record with immigration. The Irish came, we hated them, the Greeks came, we hated them. So basically, whoever comes, you hate them. Man 2: But they get absorbed and they hate the next group. Man 1: And then the next group comes . . . Man 2: I want to see who comes after the Muslims. Man 1: Well, the important thing is that we’re relatively simplistic. We can’t hate multiple groups at once. So the new group arrives and we forget about hating the previous ones and they us in hating the next group.

Every time I read this exchange it makes me smile and wonder – perhaps there will be a time when we have worked through all the nationalities the world has to offer, each of them ing the rigorous citizenship test we put the first generation through, and we will be left with no one to fear.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to: Lucy Cane for her extensive research assistance in the early stages of writing. Vincenti Lamberti for sending me a copy of his wonderful short film about his father, Enemy Alien. John G. Campbell for sending me a copy of his informative documentary about life in the Loveday camps. Mariano Coreno for allowing me to reproduce his moving poem ‘Australia’. Mette Jakobson, Suzanne Boccalatte, Meredith Jones, Moksha Watts, Natasha Cica, Linda Scott, Kelly Doust and James Bradley for and advice. Emily Crawford, Marisa Crawford, Hans van Leeuwen and Sasha Baroni for reading early drafts of the book. My uncles and aunties, especially Frank, Elsie and Pauline. My colleagues at Ipsos, in particular Dorothy Dudley and Aisa Padre. Caroline Alcorso, Gianfranco Cresicani, Ann Genovese, Maria Ballini, Bob Hogg, Ilma O’Brien Martinuzzi, Tony Piccolo, Varuna – The Writers House, and the excellent service provided by The National Archives of Australia. My fabulous agent, Sophie Hamley from Cameron Cresswell. The University of Queensland Press, in particular Alexandra Payne and Joanne Holliman. And finally, to Daniel . . . I might have been able to write this book without you but it would have been much harder.

Further Reading

Claudio Alcorso, The Wind You Say: An Italian in Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1993 Claudio Alcorso, ‘The Internment of Italians During World War II’ in Italians In Australia: Historical and social perspectives, conference papers edited by Gaetano Rando and Michael Arrighi, University of Wollongong, 1994 Claudio Alcorso and Caroline Alcorso, ‘Italians in Australia during World War II’ in Australia’s Italians: Culture and community in a changing society, Allen and Unwin, North Sydney, 1992 F.E. Baume, Burnt Sugar, New Century Press, Sydney, 1938 Joan Beaumont, Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien and Mathew Trinca (eds), Under Suspicion: Citizenship and internment in Australia during the Second World, edited by Joan Beaumont, Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien and Mathew Trinca, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2008 Adele Bentley, Between Two Cultures: An autobiography, Bentley, Roleystone, Western Australia, 1996 Camilla Bettoni, ‘The Italians of North Queensland in a novel by a journalist’, CIRC Papers, No. 41, CIRC, North Fitzroy, 1986 Margaret Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire: Internment in Australia during World War II, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1993 Maria Bianco, ‘From Linen to Embroidered Hessian – Italian Women Migrants in the Mossman District between the Two World Wars’, Lectures on North Queensland History, No. 5, James Cook University, 1996 Delia Birchley, God’s Own Country: The Johnstone Shire story, Boolarong

Publications, Brisbane, 1986 Osvaldo Bonutto, A Migrant’s Story: The struggle and success of an Italian–Australian, 1920s–1960s, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1994 Anthony Cappello, ‘Archbishop Mannix and Italian Relief’ in Enemy Aliens: The internment of Italian migrants in Australia during the Second World War, Connor Publishing, East Melbourne, 2005 Gianfranco Cresciani, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Italians in Australia: 1922–1945, ANU Press, Canberra, 1980 Gianfranco Cresciani, ‘Australia, Italy and Italians 1845–1945’, CIRC Papers, No. 42, CIRC, North Fitzroy, 1986 Gianfranco Cresciani, Italians in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2003 Peter Dalseno, Sugar, Tears and Eyeties, Boolarong Publications, Brisbane, 1994 Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Vintage, London, 1998 Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven, The Vulgar Press, Carlton, 2002 Donald Dignan, ‘The Internment of Italians in Queensland’ in War, Internment and Mass Migration: The Italo-Australian experience 1940– 1990, edited by Richard Bosworth and Romano Ugolini, GEI, Rome, 1992 William A. Douglass, ‘Images and Adages: Anglo–Australian Perceptions of Italians in Queensland’ in War, Internment and Mass Migration: The Italo– Australian experience 1940–1990, edited by Richard Bosworth and Romano Ugolini, GEI, Rome, 1992 William A. Douglass, From Italy to Ingham: Italians in North Queensland, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1995 Cate Elkner, ‘The Internment of Italian-Australians: A Perspective from Melbourne Victoria’ in Enemy Aliens: The internment of Italian migrants

in Australia during the Second World War, Connor Publishing, East Melbourne, 2005 Erica (Mimi) Ferlora, ‘Luigi Ballini’ in Italian Pioneers in the Innisfail District, edited by Ada De Munari Choat, Alf Martinuzzi and Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien, Minerva E&S, Brisbane, 2003 Alan Frost, East Coast Country: A North Queensland Dreaming, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 1996 Dorcas Grimmett, We : The Italian prisoners of war 1944/45, Grimmett and Gossow, Queensland, 2001 Katja Grynberg, ‘Interview with Mick Panetta interned at St Ives, Sydney, from October 1940’, 1993, sound recording held at State Library of New South Wales Jerold Heiss, ‘Sources of Satisfaction and Assimilation among Italian Immigrants’ in Human Relations: Studies towards the integration of the social sciences, vol. 19, no. 2, May 1966 John Hempel, ‘Italians in Queensland: Aspects of Assimilation’ in Quadrant: An Australia quarterly review, spring 1959, no. 12 Lyn Henderson, ‘The Truth in Stereotype? Italians and criminality in North Queensland between the wars’ in Journal of Australian Studies, no. 45, June 1995 Innisfail District Historical Society Journal, vol. 15, 1999 Greer Cavallaro Johnson and Carolyn Baker, Italian–Australian Courtship and Marriage Stories, Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton, 1998 Dorothy Jones, Hurricane Lamps and Blue Umbrellas: A history of the shire of Johnstone to 1973, GK Bolton Printers, Cairns, 1973 Ray Lawler, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Currency Press, Sydney, 1978 Erik S. Lloga, A New Profile of the Italian Community in Australia, Gro-

Set, Melbourne, 1998 Morag Loh, With Courage In Their Cases: The experience of thirty-five Italian immigrant workers and their families in Australia, F.I.L.E.F, Melbourne, 1980 David Malouf, ‘The exotic at home’ in Up North: Myths, threats and enchantment, Griffith Review, spring, 2005 Diane Menghetti, ‘The Internment of Italians in North Queensland’ in Australia, the Australians and the Italian Migration, edited by Gianfranco Cresciani, Franco Angeli, Milano, 1983 Hugh Mackay, Reinventing Australia: The mind and mood of Australia in the 90s, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1993 Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien, ‘Internment in Australia During World War Two: Life histories of citizenship and exclusion’ in Enemy Aliens: The internment of Italian migrants in Australia during the Second World War, Connor Publishing, East Melbourne, 2005 Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien, ‘Ubi bene, ibi patria: The Second World War and citizenship in a country town’ in Under Suspicion: Citizenship and internment in Australia during the Second World War, edited by Joan Beaumont, Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien and Mathew Trinca, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2008 Yuriko Nagata, ‘Naïve patriotism’ in Under Suspicion: Citizenship and internment in Australia during the Second World War, edited by Joan Beaumont, Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien and Mathew Trinca, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2008 Paul Nursey-Bray, ‘Anti-Fascism and Internment: The case of sco Fantin’ in Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 17, 1989 Gerardo Papalia, ‘Peasant Rebels in the Canefields: Italian migrant involvement in the 1934 and 1935 Weil’s disease cane cutters strikes in Queensland’, CIRC Papers, No. 37, CIRC, North Fitzroy, 1985 Roslyn Pesman Cooper, ‘Italian Views of Australia in the First Half of the

Twentieth Century’ in Italians In Australia: Historical and social perspectives, conference papers edited by Gaetano Rando and Michael Arrighi, University of Wollongong, 1993 Ros Pesman and Catherine Kevin, A History of Italian Settlement in New South Wales, New South Wales Heritage Office, 1998; www.heritage.nsw.gov.au/docs/italianhistory.pdf Margaret Pagone, ‘Attitudes to Italians Between the Wars’, conference paper, 1985; www.ohaa.org.au Gaetano Rando, ‘Tales of Internment: The Story of Andrea La Macchia’ in Enemy Aliens: The internment of Italian migrants in Australia during the Second World War, Connor Publishing, East Melbourne, 2005 Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels (eds.), Alien Justice: Wartime internment in Australia and North America, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2000 Joseph Talia, ‘Claudio Alcorso: An Adventurer’s Life’, 2003; http://www.iai.com.au/PapersRecieved.pdf V.G. Venturini, Never Give In: Three Italian anti-fascist exiles in Australia, 1924–1956, Search Foundation, Sydney, 2007 Johann Peter Weiss, It wasn’t really necessary: Internment in Australia with emphasis on the Second World War, Eden Hills, South Australia, 2003

Photographs from author’s family collection Cover photo: Teresa with her daughter Marisa in Florence Part One: Teresa Ballini Part Two: Luigi Ballini Part Three: Oreste Ballini Part Four: Marietta Ballini

First published 2012 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

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Copyright © Rebecca Huntley 2012

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