This blog is based on a previous one posted on this website in August 2019.
The feature photo shows a first holy communion class at St Mary’s Franklin Street, Adelaide c 1940. Maria Rosa Tormena is first on the left in the front row. Photo provided by Maria Rosa Tormena.
It is 98 years since an Italian priest, Father Vincenzo De Francesco, visited Adelaide in August 1927 to provide pastoral care to the Italians living there. He was based in Melbourne for 14 years, from 1920 to 1934. His role was to care for the spiritual life of Italians in Victoria. However, in 1927 he travelled to Adelaide, Port Pirie and Broken Hill by train to minister to Italian communities – he was away for 30 days.
In correspondence to his superiors in Italy, he wrote about his brief trip to Adelaide: “After lunch, I head out in search of Italians. It’s not difficult here, as they all live in the same part of town.” (De Francesco, ed. & translated Aniello Iannuzzi, 2010: 34)
The Italians mainly lived in boarding houses in the western part of the city of Adelaide. When he visited Port Adelaide where there were some Italians, he met a 90-year-old man who had arrived in Australia when he was a child. Father De Francesco was surprised to learn that the man had never been to confession.
In 1924, Father De Francesco had been told that there were only about 50 Italians in Adelaide. In 1927 there were 300 including some families.
One of those families was the Marchioro family – Francesco and Margherita and their two young daughters, Mary and Lina, who lived in a boarding house in Hindley Street in the western part of the City of Adelaide. The priest was concerned that some Italian children were not baptised, and the Church was not recognised as a part of family life. However, he did acknowledge that most of the Italians were men and were working in the country areas or in mines and that it would have been difficult for them to attend Church.
At the time, in Port Pirie there were about 200 Italians and in Broken Hill, Fr De Francesco found about 300 Italians.
Italians in Adelaide between the wars
The Italian Catholics in Adelaide usually attended Saint Patrick’s Church in Grote Street in the city. Weddings, baptisms and funerals were conducted from the church which was located in the west of the city where large numbers of Italians were accommodated in boarding houses. Many of the Italian children went to school at St Mary’s Franklin Street adjacent to St Patrick’s. In the part of the city where the Italians lived, a Veneto family, the Rossettos, owned a grocery, and another Veneto family, the Mattiazzos, had a butcher shop.
The Catholic church in Australia
The way that Italians practised their faith in Australia was different from their experience in their villages in Italy.
The parish priest in the village was a very powerful authority and exercised his power in many ways – donating parts of crops to the Church, giving advice about suitable marriage partners and voting in elections. In Adelaide, some Veneto market gardener families attended Sunday Mass while in others, the women and children fulfilled the obligation. However, the full community attended religious rites of passage such as baptisms, first holy communions, confirmations and weddings and enjoyed the celebratory occasions that also marked close connections between families.
The role of the Church
Respect for the authority of the clergy was a fundamental element of the religious, social and cultural framework of the comune in villages in Italy.[1]
Angelina Marchioro who left Italy in 1937 remembered the influence of the local priest in Monte di Malo, “Everybody go to church … the priest knew all the families in the little town … they were very strict in the town, the priests,” (Angelina Marchioro nee Marchioro, OH 12/1, 13 March 1984, 5, 7).
The experience of interacting with Catholic priests in Australia was different. In the interwar years, Italians in Australia had to overcome obstacles like language and other cultural differences in the Catholic Church. Irish clergy had dominated Australian parishes and the training of priests since the 19th century. In 1939, the Archdiocese of Adelaide covered extensive suburban areas ,and two thirds of sixty-five diocesan priests were Irish born.[2]
Italians were not fully accepted as a cultural group in the Catholic Church in Adelaide until after the Second World War.[3] In 1946 the Archbishop of Adelaide, Matthew Beovich, the son of a European father, began to address the needs of Italians and appointed an Italian priest to minister to the Italian community in South Australia. Between 1946 and 1949, Father Paul Zolin brought the Catholic Church to the Italian community. He made pastoral visits, offered translating and interpreting services and arranged for a scholarship to support the post-compulsory schooling of boys.
Experience of the Church after World War II
After the Second World War with the increased numbers of Italians, some Sunday Masses were conducted by Italian priests in the Flinders Park church, the closest parish to the Lockleys area. Silvano Ballestrin remembered that the Irish Australian priest supported a distinctive Italian social event, la cuccagna, in the ground of the church in 1952.[4]
Photo annotated and supplied by Silvano Ballestrin.
The families adapted a Veneto tradition and organised a procession of decorated horse-drawn carts which led from the market gardeners’ houses to the church grounds accompanied by a boy playing his piano accordion. Teams of men climbed a greasy pole competing for a trophy. Veneto men from a suburb on the eastern side of Adelaide who were accompanied by their Italian parish priest also competed.
Some second-generation narrators remembered that in the late 1950s, when the Italian population was larger, the same parish offered young women and men opportunities to participate in sport and social programs.
A church was built on Grange Road, Seaton in 1954 within walking distance to the market gardeners in the ‘Lockleys’ area, as part of another parish. In 1961, the first Italian priests, the Scalabrini fathers, were invited by the Archbishop “to come to Adelaide to take charge of a proposed new parish of Gleneagles.” http://www.scalabrini.asn.au/content/parishes
The proximity of the church, which is now in the suburb of Seaton, reflected the location of the church in the heart of villages in the Veneto region.
Madeleine Regan
7 September 2025
[1] Huber, Rina, “From Pasta to Pavlova: A Compariative Study of Italian Settlers in Sydney and Griffith,” (UQ Press, 1977, pp 26-27.)
[2] Josephine Laffin, Matthew Beovich: A Biography. (Wakefield Press, 2008), 105.
[3] O’Connor, No Need to be Afraid: Italian Settlers in South Australia between 1839 and the Second World War, (Wakefield Press, 1996, 131.)
[4] See Silvano Ballestrin, “Parties and Festivals,” Veneto Market Gardeners 1927 Website Blog, 12 July 2020 https://venetimarketgardeners1927.net/?s=Parties+and+Festivals