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Migration and place: Italian memories of North Queensland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2014

Francesco Ricatti
Francesco Ricatti*
Affiliation:
[email protected]
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Extract

Letizia de Rosa's father first arrived in Melbourne in the late 1940s as a ‘runaway’, disembarking from a ship where he was working as a bartender. According to Letizia, the working conditions on the ship were exploitative and his father's decision to leave the ship was an act of protest and perhaps even activism. Soon he found himself in a country whose language he could not speak, alone and worried about being found by the authorities:

He went and sat at the Melbourne station on the steps there and cried . . . he cried because was the loneliest moment . . . that was the loneliest moment of his life; he said he cried because he didn't know what direction he was going to go and how he would be welcome because he knew he was a run-away and really he was not welcome at all.

He decided to move to Queensland, initially to a very small town in the countryside where he hoped to avoid being found by the authorities. However, the only jobs available for him there were very hard, with terrible conditions, such as cutting cane in the rain. Finally he settled in Cairns because the day he arrived there ‘it was a sunny day . . . and Cairns was absolutely beautiful’.

Type
Articles
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Migration , December 2014 , pp. 177 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2014 

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References

Endnotes

1 Letizia de Rosa, ‘My father's journey’, http://waybackin.com.au/project/my-fathers-journey. This interview is available online as part of The Way Back In project (hereafter TWBI). For more information on the project and its curators, see http://waybackin.com.au.

2 Massey, D., Place, space and gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

3 See, for instance, Hage, Ghassan, ‘At home in the entrails of the west: Multiculturalism, ethnic food and migrant home-building’, in Grace, Helenet al. (eds), Home/world: space, community and marginality in Sydney's West (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Massey, D. ‘Imagining globalization: power-geometries of time-space’, in Brah, A., Hickman, M. and Mac an Ghaill, M. (eds), Global futures: Migration, environment and globalization (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999)Google Scholar; Tomlison, J., Globalization and culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Ahmed, S.et al. (eds), Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration (Oxford: Berg, 2003)Google Scholar.

4 Dahinden, J., ‘The dynamics of migrants’ transnational formations: Between mobility and locality’, in Baubock, R. and Faist, T. (eds), Diaspora and transnationalism: Concepts, theories, and methods (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), p. 52Google Scholar.

5 Jacobs, K., Experience and representation: Contemporary perspectives on migration in Australia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), p. 21Google Scholar.

6 The project was supported by the University of the Sunshine Coast.

7 See, for instance, Conradson, D. and Latham, A., ‘Transnational urbanism: Attending to everyday practices and mobilities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 (2) (2005), 227–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Featherstone, D., Phillips, R. and Waters, J., ‘Introduction: Spatialities of transnational networks’, Global Networks 7 (4) (2007), 383–391CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Noble, G. and Poynting, S., ‘White lines: The intercultural politics of everyday movement in social spaces’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 31 (5) (2010), 489–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, M. P., ‘Transnational urbanism revisited’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 (2) (2005), 235–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Ricatti, F., ‘Speranza e Sacrificio: memories, oral histories and myths about migration’, Spunti e ricerche, 25 (2009), 91–113Google Scholar; Ricatti, F., ‘Elodia and Franca: Oral histories of migration and hope’, History Australia 7 (2), 33.1–33.23Google Scholar. See also Ricatti, F., Embodying migrants: Italians in postwar Australia (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The use of this term has been originally theorised in the fundamental work of the Italian ethnographer, anthropologist and historian Ernesto De Martino, and has recently been applied to the Italian Australian context by the author of this article (Embodying migrants, pp. 221–3) as well as by Ilaria Vanni. See in particular Vanni, I., ‘Oggetti Spaesati, unhomely belongings: Objects, migration and cultural apocalypses’, Cultural Studies Review 19 (2) (2013), 150–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 G. Backhaus and J. Murungi, ‘Editors’ note to Niebisch, A. “Symbolic space: memory, narrative, writing”’, in Backhaus, G. and Murungi, J. (eds), Symbolic landscapes (New York: Springer, 2009), p. 323CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Douglass, W. A., From Italy to Ingham: Italians in North Queensland (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

12 See Dewhirst, C., Kennedy, C. and Ricatti, F. (eds), ‘150 years of Italians in Queensland’, Spunti e Ricerche, 24 (2009)Google Scholar.

13 This is confirmed in many interviews, but also by the historical documents considered by Douglas. He notes, for instance, how in the 1950s, ‘a whole new contingent of immigrants was required each year, since few would return to cane cutting after finding alternative employment’ (From Italy to Ingham, p. 277).

14 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, p. 274.

15 Luigina Torre, interview with author, 16 September 2009. Francesco Ricatti's collection (hereafter FRC).

16 Gino Lionello, interview with author, 11 June 2009, FRC.

17 Lionello, interview with author, 11 June 2009.

18 Tarcisio Vanzetto, interview with author, 21 July 2009, FRC.

19 Luigina Torre.

20 Ida Colletti, interview with author, 10 February 2010, FRC.

21 Elodia di Luzio, interview with author, 29 June 2009, FRC.

22 ‘Elodia and Franca’.

23 Salvatore Cerasa, interview with author, 21 April 2010, FRC.

24 Luigina Torre.

25 Ida Colletti.

26 Luigina Torre.

27 Luigina Torre.

28 Bruno Paoletto, interview with author, 28 June 2010, FRC.

29 Gina Codotto, ‘My mother's struggle’, TWBI, http://waybackin.com.au/project/my-mothers-struggle.

30 Luigina Torre.

31 Bruno Paoletto.

32 From Italy to Ingham, pp. 187–93.

33 Mary Messina, ‘Difficult times for my mother’, TWBI, http://waybackin.com.au/project/difficult-messina.

34 Ricatti, ‘Speranza e sacrificio’.

35 Messina, ‘Difficult times for my mother’.

36 Ermes Schincariol, ‘My first impression of the farms around Dimbulah’, TWBI, http://waybackin.com.au/project/memory-ermes.

37 Mary Quagliata, ‘Sicilian harvest’, TWBI, http://waybackin.com.au/project/sicilian-harvest.

38 For a recent example, see Portelli, A., ‘America and the underground: The beginning of history and the making of identities in a Roman periphery’, History Australia 7 (2) (2010), 29.1–29.15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.