Veneto market gardeners 1927

In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Veneto market gardeners would never have imagined the possibility of roller skating from Lockleys to St James Park!

In the image above, Albert Tonellato skates over the Keele Bridge, c 1945. Courtesy, Mary Tonellato.

Before the river widening works commenced in 1935 the Torrens River in the St. James Park/Lockleys was a relatively deep channel with steep sides. The river regularly flooded in winter and was reduced to disconnected pools most summers.  It represented a significant barrier between communities north and south of the river.

In the period following World War 1 broad acre farming in the area began to decline, land was subdivided and leased or sold. Better access across the river was required as the population increased and foot, bike and horse travel was being replaced by motor vehicles.

There was a wooden bridge on Tapley’s Hill Road from the 1880’s and a stone arch bridge was built on Holbrook’s Road in 1867 (Hardy, M, History of Woodville South Australia, 1875-1960, Part 2).

Attempts to get a bridge over the River Torrens
In 1911 residents in St James Park and Lockleys petitioned Woodville City Council to build a bridge and with assistance of the State Government, a simple wooden bridge was constructed at Frogmore Road/Torrens Ave in 1924 but this was subsequently removed during the river clearing and widening which commenced in 1935.

Further east nearer River Road (now Findon Road) rudimentary pedestrian access was provided by Mr Ballantyne in the form of a large plank 12 – 18 inches wide (300 – 450mm) which had to be removed whenever the river flooded. The Ballantyne family owned land on River Road abutting the Torrens.

Memories – before the Keele Bridge

In her interview, Barbara Haynes nee Ballantyne recalled:

I was only a baby. I think our mum was – used to carry me. I think dad carried the pusher and Rae (Barbara’s brother) across the plank so that mum could walk down to Henley Beach Road.

…Dad had some olive trees and we used … to climb them and looked down and it seemed to be all bicycles, like men going to Holden’s factory or something like that.

OH 872/23, 1 September, 2021, pp 19-20).

Frankie Ballestrin recalled in his interview (OH 872/7, 12 December 2008, p 17):

 

… Before that [my] parents were telling me, there was a board going across the river and when the water was real high, they used to crawl across there, they had to crawl on all fours, you know, hands and knees, to get across the river, even when it was almost touching the bottom of the board.

 

 

 

Lina Rismondo (nee Marchioro) recalled going with her parents from the city to work at their market garden in Frogmore Road:

Well, a tram went to Torrens Road, Torrens Avenue, Henley Beach Road, and weused to walk from Henley Beach Road down to Frogmore Road and we had to cross the river. A narrow plank (laughs).  Across the Torrens and then when it was floating on top of the water we’d have to go back to Henley Beach Road and come around Rowell’s Road and…

(Lina Rismondo nee Marchioro, OH 872/9, 9 June 2010, p 4).

 

The community calls for a bridge
The Adelaide newspaper, ‘The Advertiser,’ Tuesday 9^th April 1935, reported the necessity for a bridge:

“The need for a bridge or other means for crossing the Torrens River in the vicinity of St. James’s Park was suggested to the Woodville Council last night bv Mr. E.J. Keele, who said that there was danger to children and others in crossing by means of an aqueduct at Rowell’s Road.”

The clearing and widening of the river in the western suburbs commenced in 1935 and was completed in 1938.  Around the same time construction commenced on a new bridge connecting River Road and Rowell’s Road.

Opening of the bridge – 12 June 1937*

The new bridge was officially opened by Minister for Local Government, Mr Blesing and Miss Adelaide Keele on 12^thJune 1937 and named Keele Bridge in honour of E J Keele who had been a significant land owner in the district.  At that time, it was a two-lane bridge.

The bridge was widened to its current four-lane configuration in 1967. In a recent conversation  Mirjana Marchioro mentioned that her husband, Romano (Ray) Marchioro, worked on the bridge as a young carpenter at that time.

Until relatively recently, plaques mounted on the north western corner of the bridge commemorated the initial construction in 1937 and the widening in 1967, unfortunately these have been removed or stolen.

The life of the Keele Bridge 

In recent years, significant consolidation work has been required to stabilise the river bank to the east and west of the Keele Bridge.

The Linear Park initiative commenced in the early 1980s included further rework to the shape of the river valley and significant planting of indigenous trees and shrubs as well as play spaces and BBQ areas.  The Linear Park these days attracts huge numbers of walkers, cyclists and others – most would be oblivious to the wonderful history of life along the river.

*On the 12th June, it was 88 years since the Keele bridge was opened.

Alex Bennett
15 June 2025

I began my oral history project in 2007 and recorded first interviews in 2008. I began the project because Johnny Marchioro gave me lots of information about the community of Veneto market gardeners who settled in Lockleys in the 1930s. After I interviewed Bruno Piovesan, Mary and Albert Tonellato and Frankie Ballestrin. I was interested to learn about the group of Veneto market gardeners and how they lived and worked at Lockleys. Since 2008 I have gathered 65 interviews, including some recorded in the Veneto region. The recordings are held in the State Library of South Australia – and you can listen to most of them on this website.

As many of you know, I have written a book about the Veneto market gardeners in Lockleys. It has finally been published by Australian National University (ANU) Press.

The title is “’I buy this piece of ground of here’: An Italian market-gardener community in Adelaide 1920s – 1970s.”

The words were spoken by Vittorio Marchioro who had arrived from Malo in 1927. He was interviewed with his wife, Angelina, in the 1980s and Vittorio proudly stated that he had been able to buy the land and that he had security and a settled life in Lockleys as a market gardener.

The cover

On the cover are Costantina and Giovanni Santin in front of their truck and the house they lived in with their three sons and a daughter. Giovanni was the eldest of the Veneto men who arrived in the 1920s. Costantina and Lui, Vito, Romildo and Virginia joined him in 1935.

The photo on the cover of the book was taken in the mid 1940s on Valetta Road where the family sub-leased land from the Berno brothers. In 1950 the Santins, including Lui and his wife Rosina Tonellato and Vito and his wife, Anna Mattiazzo, moved to Frogmore Road in 1950 where the family had bought land with an old house.

What’s the book about?

‘I buy this piece of ground here’ is a group biography that examines the lives and work of Veneto families whose members first arrived in Australia in the 1920s. They formed a new community and identity as market gardeners in what was then the outer suburbs in the west of Adelaide.

The book investigates the settlement of the group of Veneti in a period of Australian migration history that is often overlooked in favour of post-World War II studies of mass migration and multiculturalism.

Nine chapters

In each of the nine chapters, there are excerpts from the oral history interviews. These extracts give fascinating information about the experience of different families and help build the history of the Veneto community of market gardeners.

 Chapter one: Building a group biography – the focus is on the formation of the community of Veneto market gardeners, how I approached the study and used oral history interviews to record the memories of the sons and daughters of the first generation and other relatives.

Chapter two: Beginnings in Adelaide – explores the challenges that the first generation experienced before they could lease land at ‘Lockleys’, the marriages and settling down to achieve ‘sistemazione’ with family.

Chapter three: Attachment to land – examines the contadino (peasant farmer) motivation to work the land and how this translated to Lockleys where they became land owners.

Chapter four: Family life and labour – outlines the involvement of the whole family in the work on the market gardeners” husbands, wives and children.

Chapter five: Life within the community – focuses on how the Veneto market gardener families supported each other and built a strong community or a paese, the role of the Catholic Church in the lives of families.

Chapter six: Community in times of crisis – describes the challenges of the war years, the experience of being ‘enemy aliens’ and the difficulties that Italian people faced in Australia after Italy joined with Germany.

Chapter seven: Pathways – 1.5 and second generation – provides details about the employment choices the men and women who had either arrived as children with their parents or who were born in Australia – and differences in the two younger generations.

Chapter eight: Transforming the paese- spells out the changes as families sold their market gardens; ageing of the first generation and the arrival of post Second World Veneti.

Chapter nine: Continuity of the paese – explains how members of the second and third generations have maintained their identity as part of the Veneto market gardener community, the website and connections with relatives in the Veneto region.

Thanks to the people interviewed

I am grateful to all the people who gave their time to be interviewed and who told the stories of their parents and grandparents’ migration and settlement. I am also thankful to the families who have given permission for me to use the beautiful photos that are used in the book. We are fortunate that it was possible to document the history of the Veneto market gardener community at Lockleys from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Book launch

I have organised a book launch for 19th July at Mater Christi hall, Seaton – you’ll see the details on the invitation.  Books will not be sold at the launch.

How to access the book – online

The book will not be available in bookshops. It has been published by ANU Press as an e-book. It can be downloaded for free and read on a computer or a tablet. You can click on this link to download the book: http://doi.org/10.22459/IBPGH.2025

When you open the page, you’ll see that there are various formats you can select to download the document. One option with the pdf format is to download each chapter.

If you download the book, you’ll find sound files that you can access at the beginning of each chapter. The sound files are brief extracts from oral history interviews that I have recorded with sons and daughters of the first generation of market gardeners or the next generation or other relatives. The brief sound files introduce the themes of the chapters. I wanted to include sound files in the online version of the book so that people who read the book would get the idea that oral history was a vital part of my writing the history of the Veneto market gardener community.

Purchasing the book

Scanning the QR code on the flyer provided by ANU Press will entitle purchasers to a 20% discount. (If you hold your phone close enough to the code, you will activate it.) Orders will be delivered within two weeks.

Please contact me if you would like to have your own flyer with the QR code.

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Madeleine Regan
1 June 2025

In this blog Amanda writes Part 2 of her memories
of her Nonna, Lina Rossetto nee Bordin.

The image above was taken in Adelaide in 1993.

Spending time with Nonna

We grandkids spent lots of time with Nonna in Kent Town – we loved being with her.

I took every opportunity to go and stay with her. She taught me about love of family, language, food and culture. She encouraged my love of all things Veneto. She told me stories, taught me to speak our dialetto (dialect), took me to visit all our parenti (relatives), took me to the Italian and Veneto clubs whenever she could and shared her love of music and dancing.  She taught me how to keep my head high during hard times, and to always show kindness to others.

Together, we would go and visit all the Rossetto, Tormena, Rebuli and Bernardi families, the Frogmore Road families, the Marchioros, the Lucchesi and from her side of the family – the Cavuoto, Rech, Montin, Pedron families, and special friends the Buratto and Mazzocato families.

We’d often go to parties and weddings together. She was a joy to be with.

She was a prolific correspondent to the Bigolino, Biadene and Tarbes (France) families and was the glue that kept the second and third generations connected to our culture.  She would get me to always write due righe (a few lines) at the bottom of her letters to our families back in the Veneto and in France. Nonna had her own nickname in the family – Zia Cartolina (Aunty of the postcard) – earned because she was a prolific letter writer and postcard-sender.

Meeting relatives in the Veneto

In 1972 at the age of 12, I went overseas for the first time with my dad, Aldo, and met them all. We stayed in the house that is still in the Rossetto family on Via Erizzo, Bigolino – the house where Nonno and all his siblings were born and grew up.

At that stage in 1972, only Nonno’s brother Zio Neno (Eugenio) and wife Zia Severina were living there and their children Erasmo, Renzo and Tino with their families.

 I loved being with them – Nonna had fostered the connection and I have continued to build on it ever since. We also visited Nonna’s side of the family in Biadene, Montebelluna and France, and the connections remain strong there too.

I have been back to Italy four times since – in 2000, 2010, 2015 and 2019. Each time I visit, someone would talk about the letters Nonna used to write; some had drawers and boxes full of them that went way back. What history and stories they hold!

With global technology changes and through social media, I’m able to stay in touch with our Veneto and French families – and I do. I was taught by the best of communicators.  I often think that Nonna would have relished being able to facetime or video call on WhatsApp with her cousins and their families. She was inspirational in her ability to keep in touch from such a distance, without the internet or Wifi!

 

The significant elder

Clearly, Nonna was a significant elder in our family but she also spread that love and joie de vivre among numerous families in the broader Australian Veneto community. To quote my Zia Marietta (Silvano’s wife when writing about Nonna), “Close ties with relatives and friends and richness of living together in harmony are the lynchpins of existence for her.”  Nonna‘s home was a haven of welcome and her living room always alive with the laughter of children and friends. She was free with her love, food and advice – and we relished in it.

She regularly visited her sisters, in-laws, nieces and nephews and their families and they loved having her around as much as her immediate family.

At the soccer each week there was no more devoted a supporter. She was an ardent Juventus follower and the players knew her well and treated her like a queen. They loved nothing more than to gather in her home after matches. In her later years she was also a massive AFL Crows fan! Unfortunately, she died just before they won their first grand final in 1997.

 

Nonna was a goddess of domestic life and her cooking was sublime. In her later life she would be found each Sunday at the Veneto Club dancing with the best. She was the best Nonna and we, her grandchildren could do no wrong. We always felt secure in her love.

 

Nonna was my mentor, an inspirational storyteller and communicator, and the glue to our families (Rossetto & Bordin) maintaining connection through the generations since she arrived in Australia in 1930. She was the strongest women I have ever known and had one of hardest lives imaginable. Yet she gave so much to so many with real love, sincerity and joy.

My love and admiration for Nonna is endless!

Amanda Rossetto
18 May 2025

All photos provided by Amanda.

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*Nonna’s daughter-in-law, Marietta Rossetto, published a book compiling the memories of nonna. It was called La pioggia nelle scarpe: Aneddoti di una protagonista or Rain in these shoes: Anecdotal memories of Adelina Rossetto. It was launched in Adelaide in 1993.

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SAVE THE DATE…

The launch of my book, ‘I buy this piece of ground here’: An Italian market gardener community in Adelaide, 1920s – 1970s, will be held on Saturday 19th July, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, at the Mater Christi Catholic parish hall, Grange Road, Seaton.

I will send out electronic invitations in the next couple of weeks. The invitations will include information about  how to purchase books from the publisher, Australian National University Press.

Madeleine Regan