THEY came at the peak of Italian mass migration, and late last week Franco Smargiassi and sister Anna Martinazzo returned to Fremantle to celebrate where they took their first steps on Australian soil 70 years ago.
Ms Martinazzo says she was just nine years old when she arrived at Victoria Quay with her mother Consiglia and three siblings in April 1952, but didn’t get much of a chance to form an impression of her new home.
“I had been seasick the whole way,” she says.
“I think I had to be carried off the boat, I was so weak, and to this day I have a bit of anxiety about going on a boat, just in case I get it again.”
But her older brother has vivid memories of both the voyage and the town where he would be reunited with his father Giuseppe and eldest brother Cesario, who’d sailed a couple of years earlier to escape the grinding poverty of post-war Italy.
• Consiglia Vinciguerra arrived in WA with four children to join her husband Giuseppi in forging a new life with many other Italian migrants who went on to shape their adopted home’s culture.
“We came through the Suez Canal and we stopped at Port Said,” Mr Smargiassi said.
“Port Said was important, because I was 11 and three-quarters years old, and I’d never eaten a banana in my life.”
His only other chance to try the exotic fruit had been in the town square markets of his hometown Vasto, but a single piece would have taken all his pocket money and deprived him of his one weekly treat – a trip to the local cinema.
Mr Smargiassi says times were tough in Italy and the family new hunger well – they survived on just 100 grams of meat a week, a few vegetables from a relative who owned a market and the occasional fish when his brother would help out on the docks.
But the tough times had made Italians good workers, and in Australia they were forging new careers and even industries, such as the fishing boats that operated out of Fremantle.
• They could have been us: Franco Smargiassi and Anna Martinazzo at Victoria Quay, 70 years to the day when they first stepped onto Australian soil.
Consiglia and the four children joined Giuseppi who was renting a house in North Perth and working for the Doust building company, but a friend told him the rates of pay were better in country towns and the family moved to Pingelly.
His quality of his first home restoration caught the eye of the local newspaper and soon Giuseppi was in hot demand, and even bought a block of land with the aim of building an investment home.
But Ms Martinazzo says her father overcame the scarcity of building materials and laboured for two years on the house, but they struck a problem when it came time to sell.
“He had moulds and he made the cement bricks, and the house is still standing very strongly.
“An on the floor, he put terrazzo tiles, which is what you did in Italy.
“When it came to selling it, no one would buy it because of the terrazzo – this stuff on the floor.”
So the family made the decision to stay in Pingelly and for nearly 20 years Giuseppi was kept in permanent work.
They lived across the road from the local school, and Ms Martinazzo is proud that she and Mr Smargiassi’s names still grace the school as head boy and head girl of their final years – an impressive effort given they arrived in the country without a word of English.
Diaspora
Ms Martinazzo says nowadays she appreciates the opportunity to grow up in a country town, but back in her teens it seemed pretty boring and she jumped at the chance to move into the city, where she scored a job with a solicitor’s office that was looking for someone who spoke Italian to help service the growing diaspora.
She stayed until she met her husband Gaetano who established a crane business which still operates today.
Mr Smargiassi says his brother-in-law and father were a great example of the Italian influence on Perth.
“You’ve come across the saying Veni, Vidi, Vici which became ‘we came, we saw we conquered’, and the Italians here were a bit different; ‘we came, we saw, we concreted’,” he laughs.
There’s no doubting Perth would be a far different place without its Italian influences, and Ms Martinazzo says it’s a better place for it.
“What I personally like is that it’s a welcoming place, not only just to the Italians, but so many other culture that have come here,” she says.
“In my mind the mixture works well and that makes for an interesting place, rather than the boring place that it used to be … meat and three veg.
“Now you can eat food from everyone and it’s become much more interesting.”
But Mr Smargiassi fears that globalising is robbing the city of some of its charm, that the richness of the cultures is being lost.
He says as an example, at the last Census, when asked about languages other than English used at home, the only option was to tick the one for Italian, but he says the Vasto dialect is distinctly different. A return to Italy a few years ago made him realise how few people remembered the dialect; there are predictions it will be gone by the next generation.
It prompted him to help found Global Chat Radio, which still operates out of Tuart College, as well as the WA Multicultural Association. Ms Martinazzo also volunteers at the City of Stirling’s Day Club where each week elderly Italo-Australians come for a lunch and play.
She says it’s partly in honour of the pioneering Italian migrants, as they were willing to take on whatever job was put before them.
“I admire the migrants for that.”
by STEVE GRANT