Veneto market gardeners 1927

Anna Santin nee Mattiazzo died on Saturday 26^th October 2024. Anna was 97 years old and the last of the second generation in the Santin families who worked market gardens on Frogmore Road in the area the Veneti called, ‘Lockleys.’  The following information comes from two oral history interviews that Anna recorded in 2013 for the Veneto market gardeners’ project.

The photo above is a family portrait, Vito, Anna and Dean Santin, late 1960s.
Photo supplied by Christine Rebellato nee Mattiazzo.

The Mattiazzo family
Anna was born on 11^th July 1927 in Bigolino, a small village in the province of Treviso.

Anna’s father, Emilio, migrated to Australia in 1928. Anna arrived in Australia in 1936 with her mother, Livia Vettoretti, and her sister Augusta who was 11 years old. Anna was 9 years old. Two more children, Rita and David, were born in Australia.

 

 

Throughout her life, Anna maintained a strong relationship with her two sisters Gusta (Augusta) and Rita, and her brother David.

 

 

 

Anna’s father was a butcher in the west end of the City, and was well known in the Veneto community in Adelaide. The shop was in a large building with upstairs accommodation where Livia had made space for boarders.

 

 

Memories of the war
Anna was 12 years old when the war began. The situation became challenging for Italians in Australia when Italy allied itself with Germany in 1940. Anna remembered the sense of fear that was part of everyday life:

You were always frightened because they interned a few people around, and Dad was always frightened they were going to pick him up, but he was never questioned or anything, so we just lived it out till the end of the War, it was the same thing… always somebody around to be frightened of, calling ‘dirty dago’ and all that, though my Dad never had any trouble with anybody. (OH 872/24, 3 April, 2013, p 8)

 Early working life
After Anna went to school for a few years, her first job was at a factory next door to her parents’ house. It was called Harmony where she packed custard and jelly packets. She worked there until about 1947 when she took a job at Holdens at Woodville. As a machinist, she sewed the upholstery for the interior of the first car that came off the line in 1948. Anna said:

 

I was just lucky I suppose. I was on the machine, on the floor where all the machines were, and I was just lucky I think they’d pick me out to build, to sew the first Holden. (OH 872/24, 3 April, 2013, p 4).

 

 

Meeting the Santin family and marriage
Sometimes Anna delivered the meat for her father and this included cycling to the Lockleys area and she got to know some of the market gardener families like the Santins.

There were three sons and a daughter in the Santin family who had a large market garden that they leased from the Berno family on Valetta Road in the mid to late 1940s. All the family was involved in growing vegetables.

Anna went out with Vito, the second Santin son, for five years before they  married in 1949 when she was 22 years old. In the interview when Anna was asked if she had a honeymoon, she laughed at the very idea of a market gardener having time off for a honeymoon – Got married on the Saturday, on the Monday I went to cut celery (OH 872/24, 3 April 2013, p 14).

When they first married, Anna and Vito had a bedroom in the big old house that all the Santins shared with the Berno family.

 In 1950, Dean was born and two years later in 1952, the Santins bought land on Frogmore Road and the whole extended family moved there. The large old house on the property was divided in half and Anna, Vito and Dean lived in one half. Romildo, Vito’s younger brother, and his wife, Clara and family shared the other half with Vito’s parents, Giovanni and Costantina Santin.

 Working the market garden
Anna worked in the Santin market garden with her husband and two brothers-in-law and alongside her two sisters-in-law, Rosina and Clara, for about 40 years. They grew celery, cauliflowers, cabbages, carrots, potatoes and artichokes – and they also had glasshouses where they cultivated tomatoes, cucumbers and beans.  She reflected on her experience of working the market garden:

Oh well, you just picked it up. They gave you a knife in your hand, and go down with your backside up and cut celery… We all, the six of us, all, three brothers and three sisters-in-law, all worked the garden. Seven days a week. Celery, you used to have to cut it on a Saturday and [pack it] Sunday for the market on the Monday. Oh yeah, it was pretty busy doing all different things. (OH 872/24, 3 April, p 16, 17).

Anna’s parents-in-law helped out and her mother-in-law, Costantina, cooked lunch for the families and looked after the young children in each of the families as they arrived.

Family connections
In her interview, Anna remembered visiting her own parents once a week:
I used to go and see Mum and Dad while they were still on Currie Street. I used to go up every Friday … we had a motorbike, and we used to sit Dean on the tank in front. [Laughs] You couldn’t do that nowadays.

Anna enjoyed the closeness of family and she had a strong bond with her sister-in-law, Virginia who married Oscar Mattiazzo. They had been bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. Virginia chose Anna to be godmother to her first-born daughter, Christine, and confirmation sponsor to her second-born daughter, Helen.

Anna loved her nieces and nephews and their families and she delighted in her grandchildren and her two great-granddaughters.

As land was being developed in the western suburbs, and market gardens were sold, the Santins bought a property at Bolivar about 30 kilometres from Lockleys and the family transferred their market garden there. It meant a longer working day but there were benefits because the property was larger and different crops were added.

At both Kidman Park and Bolivar, the Santins experienced challenges when the respective Councils wanted to acquire their land for developments.

Moving into a new home

In 1972, the three families excised house blocks and built their own houses. Anna recalled the thrill of having her own home:

I think it was everybody’s dream those days to buy, to build a house that you liked. I remember we never took any of the old furniture from the old house, we bought everything new, so I was in my glory! (OH 872/24, 3 April, p 32).

Trip to Italy
Anna remembered a six-month trip to Italy in 1968 and she enjoyed the experience of spending time with her relatives in Bigolino with Vito and her mother who accompanied them on her first visit to Italy after more than 30 years. Anna also met the large group of Vito’s relations in Caselle di Altivole. It was the only visit she made to Italy.

 Identity
Although Anna spent 88 years of her life in Australia, she felt a strong affinity with Italy. In her interview she said, your Italian heritage is always on your mind. I think when you get older you think more … back to your Italian heritage in what you do, not the Australian … I’m an Italian. OH 872/24, 3 April, p 36).

 

 

 

Changes in the Santin family
Vito died in 2011 aged 88 years. Anna and Vito’s son, Dean died in 2019 when he was 68 years. When I interviewed Anna in 2013, she stated that she was “the only one left of the old generation of the Santins.” Anna reflected that she had had a good life and she quietly accepted many of life’s challenges. Anna felt the loss of Vito and Dean deeply. At 97, when taken to hospital, Anna was in command. She wanted to return to her home at St Hilarion to die in peace, to be reunited with her loved ones – and this she did.

Anna is survived by her daughter-in-law, Desma, her three grandchildren, Aaron, Matthew and Sarah, her great-grandchildren, Lyla and Amelia.

Family was everything to Anna.

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Madeleine Regan and Christine Rebellato nee Mattiazzo
3 November 2024

 

 

 

In the second of the blogs about photos in the lives of the Veneto market gardener families, I’ve adapted an earlier one to share some images taken in Adelaide after the first generation of Veneto market gardeners arrived from the Veneto region in the 1920s and 1930s. Families have kindly given permission to use the photos  that have become part of the archive of images that tell the story of the market gardeners in Flinders Park and Kidman Park on this website.

A studio family portrait – c 1927/1928
The oldest photo taken in Adelaide that I’ve seen is the portrait of the Marchioro family which was taken in late 1927/early 1928. (This is the feature photo above)  Margherita and Francesco had arrived in 1926 with Mary who was a baby at the time. Lina, who is perched on the arm of the chair between her parents, was born in a boarding house in Hindley Street in the west end of the City of Adelaide in March 1927.

The family portrait is formal – the parents are dressed handsomely and their daughters are clothed in fresh white dresses – adults and children look directly at the camera with serious expressions. The backdrop suggests an idealised scenario and perhaps this is the positive image that Francesco and Margherita wanted to communicate as the photo was probably taken to send back to their families in Malo and Monte di Malo. However, the reality for the family was very different. In Lina’s interview she remembered that her parents had moved several times in the first years in the search for cheaper accommodation because it was difficult to earn an adequate income in the Depression years. The third daughter, Connie, was born in 1938.

A different family portrait – c 1931
In the second photo, Lina nee Bordin and Gelindo Rossetto are pictured with their eldest son Romeo who died when he was seven years old. The photo was taken around 1931 at Lockleys on the southern side of the River Torrens where Gelindo and Lina had a market garden. Lina had arrived from Italy the year before and started a very different life in primitive conditions on Gelindo’s market garden on the south side of the River Torrens at Lockleys.

Lina  looks stern and focuses straight at the camera as Gelindo feeds Romeo. We, the viewers, get the context of the land, the old gums, the bamboo on the right, growing along the river. It communicates an image of a pioneer family. It’s a portrait but not the formal kind taken in a studio. It is as if Gelindo has stopped work and joined Lina and Romeo for the photograph. Perhaps the photo was processed to send to  the families in the province of Treviso to show life on the land in Adelaide.

The power of the Box Brownie camera

In her interviews recorded in 2010 and 2011, Lina Rismondo nee Marchioro recalled that her father gave her a Brownie Box camera for her 12^th birthday in 1939. “I think my Dad spoilt me, really. He used to love buying me things.”  (Oral History interview OH 872/9, 9 June 2010, p 33) The Box Brownie or Brownie Junior Camera was the camera used by young people in Australia from the 1930s.[1] It had been marketed as a simple camera that could be handled by children and adolescents.

Fortunately for us, Lina used her camera to capture the lives of the Veneto market gardener families in the area they called ‘Lockleys’  in the 1940s.

Lina was a young girl when her parents, Francesco and Margherita Marchioro, moved to Frogmore Road where Margherita worked a market garden with her brother-in-law, Vittorio. Before the Second World War Lina and her family had transferred their home and farm to Pierson Street Lockleys.

Lina took photos of her extended family and the Veneto community. One photo shows her mother and aunt, Angelina Marchioro, picking onions on Frogmore Road, a reminder that women also worked the land. Lina’s collection of photos gives an insight into the everyday lives of the market gardener families, relationships in families and events like childrens’ birthday parties and gatherings of groups in the community.

Links between families – 1940s

Lina took this photo of Maria and Egidio Ballestrin with Angelina and Johnny Marchioro on Frogmore Road sometime in 1941.

Maria and Angelina are standing in front of a chook run and behind them in the background is the Marchioro market garden and the corrugated iron house is just visible in the top right.

The two women holding their first-born children look content and proud standing in the context of a fairly harsh environment.

Jimmy and his mother had arrived in Fremantle in June 1940 expecting to join Narcisio, Maria’s husband and Jimmy’s father who had been in Adelaide with his brothers since 1938. Jimmy explains in his interview that when they arrived in Perth, the passengers on the ship, the Remo, were considered ‘prisoners-of-war’ because Italy had entered the war against the Allies. The passengers could not continue their journey for about three weeks until the Australian Government approved the ship’s movements. The Ballestrins and the Marchioros became dear friends, and Jimmy and Johnny maintained a life-long friendship until Johnny’s death in 2023.

Working life, 1950s – and a photo returns to Adelaide
This image features Carmela Rossetto nee Buffon in her shop in the west end of Hindley Street. It was taken in the 1950s and she had sent it to relatives in Bigolino perhaps to show them that she was an accomplished business woman and her life in Adelaide as a widow and mother was prosperous.

Carmela and her older child, Anna, had arrived in Adelaide in 1929, joining her husband, Domenico Rossetto who had migrated in 1926. They ran the grocery shop in Hindley Street from sometime in the 1930s. In 1946 when Domenico died, Carmela applied successfully to purchase the property that included the shop and residence.

In the photo, Carmela looks the very image of the proprietor, shelves fully stocked with goods and she is ready to serve at the cash register. We can imagine that her family in Bigolino would have been pleased that she was a successful business woman.

 

In an interesting twist, the photo found its way back to Adelaide in the last few years. When Vicki Mattiazzo, the daughter of Oscar Mattiazzo, (the nephew of Carmela Rossetto) visited Italy, relatives in Bigolino gave it back to the family. The photo has been added to the Mattiazzo/Buffon archives.

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There are many other photos in the archive on the Veneto market gardeners’ website that illustrate the new lives that the first generation established in Adelaide. The few that are represented in this blog convey the experience of family life as migrants that contrasted with the way that their relatives lived in large households in small villages in the Veneto region.

Madeleine Regan – and thanks to Christine Rebellato nee Mattiazzo
20 October 2024

[1] State Library of South Australia Digital Collections, Brownie Junior Camera – https://digital.collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/nodes/view/7708

 

 

This blog is about photos in the lives of the Veneto market gardener families and it is adapted from a blog that had been posted on
the Veneti market gardeners website in 2021. The photos of people were taken in Italy before the first generation migrated  – more than 9 decades ago. 

The family in the feature photo is the Rossetto family – parents and nine children who lived in Bigolino. More detail is provided below.

When was the last time you took a photo? If you’re like me, it could have been very recently. Yesterday  I took some photos of the back garden on my iPhone. I could look at the image straight away, edit it by cropping and share it with others via a text or other media and I could delete ones that I did not like or were not in focus. Taking photos is a very casual activity now because of advances in technology.

In the lives of the Veneto market gardeners, photos held a different value. They were precious because photos were not often taken if families did not own a camera.  They were expensive to develop or purchase from a studio photographer.

I’ve been fortunate that the people I’ve interviewed for the project have given me permission to use photos that are now on the website. When you look at the galleries on the family webpages you’ll see photos that communicate stories for families. They capture a moment at a particular time, in a particular place and hold a memory for the future. The photos include images of individuals, family groups and events such as weddings and baptisms. There are not many that capture working life because photos were taken to show occasions that were socially important and told the stories of changes in families. Working life was probably not seen as an important focus whereas events like weddings, parties to celebrate other rituals like baptisms, confirmations and significant birthdays and anniversaries – and these were often occasions to remember and share with relatives.

Before the ease of taking snaps with smart phone cameras, photos were extremely important because migrant families could see how their absent members celebrated events. Photos of the veneti were sent from one side to the other side of the world.

The following photos convey images and stories of family members before they left the Veneto region. They were all taken before the Second World War. They are significant because they are images of a generation of people who have died – those who made the decision to migrate and begin a new life in Adelaide.

A photo from Bigolino – about 1918/19
I’m very interested in the early photos that were taken for family records. For example, the photo of the Rossetto family is the feature photo of this blog. It was taken about 1918/19 and depicts Elena Vettorello and Modesto Rossetto and their nine children against the family house at Bigolino. The two eldest sons are dressed in the uniform of the Alpino soldiers which is evidence of their service during World War I.

Perhaps the portrait was taken to mark the safe return of sons from the First World War. We do not know who took the photo. It has become a lasting record of a large family before the children married and before eight of the nine began emigrating to Adelaide. In 1926, Domenico, second from the left in the back row, was the first to migrate to Australia leaving his wife Carmela and daughter, Anna who arrived in Adelaide in 1929.

A farewell photo – 1938
The youngest Rossetto son, Giuseppe, (Beppi) aged about five migrated in 1938 and the following photo was taken on the day he left Bigolino inside the large family household. He is in the middle of the back row dressed in a suitcoat and tie.

The photo shows three generations of the Rossetto family and the remaining children, their spouses and children. Beppi is photographed with his parents and other siblings, nieces and nephews including Johnny and Maria Rosa Tormena. Surely this photo was an attempt to record the departure of Beppi, the youngest member of the Rossetto family.

A keepsake photo – before a family reunion in Adelaide
A family photo that has particular emotional significance as a keepsake is the portrait of Elvio, Norina and Vito Rebuli taken after their father, Bruno,

left for Australia in 1927. In the photo, the three children under five years old, are photographed in an outside location and behind them it is possible to see a row of pot plants and then a group of people who has gathered near an old building. It is likely that it was snapped in the late 1920s.

It would have been taken by a professional photographer who converted the photo to a postcard that Nana Rebuli nee Rossetto posted to her husband to an address on Kangaroo Island where Bruno Rebuli worked for a farmer for some time before the family was reunited in 1931.

Another family photo before departing Italy

The photo of members of Giovanni Santin’s family was taken in Italy before his wife, Constantina and their four children, Luigi, Vito, Romildo and Virginia  joined him in Adelaide in 1935. It was eight years after he had migrated to Adelaide. Giovanni’s first wife, Maria Tesseri had died young and their daughter, Angelina is included in the photo.  In 1947, Angelina also migrated to Australia with three children a few years after her husband Pietro Compostella. It was a studio portrait to send to Giovanni in Jervois where he lived and worked for several years – a memento of the absent family.

 

Photo of a proxy marriage – 1930

The large group photo was taken at the proxy marriage of Lina Bordin and Gelindo Rossetto in 1930. Gelindo’s father stood in for his son at the wedding. Lina is seated in the front row, fourth from the left, between her father-in-law who is pointing at Lina, and her mother-in-law. She wears a fur around her shoulders. The guests who are members of the Bordin and Rossetto families are well dressed and have been assembled outside a house where the photo was taken by a professional photographer. Lina lived with her parents-in-law for five months before she sailed to Adelaide to begin her married life with Gelindo. The photo would have been sent to Gelindo – as a memento of his marriage by proxy.

Passport photos – taken in Italy 97 years ago
Photo identification was important documentation for migrants in passports. It has been possible to locate some passports in the papers held at the National Archives of Australia. The passport photos were formal and often taken shortly before the migrants left their families.

The two photos of passports below are examples of the documents that migrants had to produce for migration. Both men had migrated in 1927 – Isidoro in September, and Pedro Berno in the first week of October. That was exactly 97 years ago!

Isidoro had arrived from Riese  with his brother, Antonio and 17 year-old cousin, Giuseppe.

Pietro Berno had also left Riese with his cousin Gino and joined Pietro’s brothers, Fedele and Alberto in Adelaide.

It must have been a difficult situation when the first generation of Veneto market gardeners applied for naturalisation after living in Australia for some years. They had to hand over their Italian passports.  The contadini who had separated from their family in the Veneto must have valued their passports as a material and symbolic link to Italy. Giving up their Italian nationality to become British subjects must have caused some reservations as they swore allegiance to King George VI.

 

Photographs taken of forebears taken many decades ago are valuable reminders of the circumstances of migrant families and their separation from loved ones. We can more deeply appreciate the challenges of migration in the snapshots of members of the Veneto families.

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Madeleine Regan
6 October 2024