Author: Madeleine Regan

When people ask why the group of 11 Veneto market gardener families settled on land in the 1930s in the area they used to call Lockleys on the northern side of the River Torrens, I’ve concluded that there were four main reasons.

1. Their origins as contadini or peasant farmers in the Veneto region motivated them to live and work on their own land. They had all come from contadino families and were used to small-scale farming and knew how to cultivate the land
2. The group recognised that it was possible and profitable to lease land in South Australia during the 1930s and the majority of the first-generation market gardeners bought their land after the war when regulations were eased
3. The family work team including husband, wife and children reduced the costs of setting up the market gardens
4. The contadino tradition of living in a close settlement explains the formation of an enduring community that shared the same occupation in a paese similar to a village.

It took several years before the first generation of men could settle in Adelaide because of the difficult economic conditions during the Depression. They had to find casual work wherever they could find it – in rural South Australia or Victoria and some worked on mica mines in the Northern Territory. It was only possible to settle with their wives and children once they had a guaranteed income.

The men found land that was available to lease probably through word of mouth and the contacts made through the boarding houses in the west end of Adelaide where they stayed in the first years. I am not sure who was the first to lease land but the group gradually established themselves during the 1930s. If you’re reading this, and know when your parents or grandparents settled on their land, please contact me.

The properties were within a radius of about three kilometres, an easy bike ride or walk. The men worked hard and those who were married brought their wives and children from Italy. Some married by proxy and others married in Adelaide. By the beginning of the war in 1939, all the men who had arrived between 1926 and 1928 were married and working market gardens in the Lockleys area.

In 1935, eight years after Secondo Tonellato had arrived, his wife Elisabetta and five children joined him. the third son, Lino, was 9 years old.  In his interview he reflected on his father’s early days as a market gardener at Lockleys and then refers to the context of the Veneto region which he recalled from childhood and where his father and others in the first-generation of veneti had worked as contadini …

The whole area was all market garden, you know. Well, I suppose they had to get a living somewhere … When they come here they couldn’t understand much, speak much English, didn’t know what to do, so they had to start off something because over there, they only had little gardens too, and where we come from [in the Veneto region] they used to plant once a year because you’d get the snow that high, every year, I still remember the snow there … he heard from other people, see he knew some other people that came here. He knew how warm, that you never get snow here unless you go to the mountain.

(Lino Tonellato interviewed by Madeleine Regan, 16 July 2010, JD Somerville Collection, State Library of South Australia, OH 872/10, 14).

Lino, who was eighty-four years when interviewed for this project, remembers the land in the province of Treviso in the Veneto region and his focus on climate reflects his cultivator’s knowledge of seasons. He connects ideas about land use and agricultural practices in the Veneto with the experience of the first generation and their efforts to gain a livelihood in family market gardens at Lockleys. Lino captures the narrative of the Veneto market gardeners; the initiative to preserve the contadino heritage of working the land and the adaptations and changes required to establish commercial market gardens in Australia. Through his perspective as a 1.5-generation son, Lino communicates a feeling of nostalgia for the Veneto region.

The compact area in which they lived and worked provided physical and social security and a sense of separation from the Anglo Australian world. Market gardens were divided by thick hedges of boxthorns, pine trees or bamboos along tracks which extended away from made roads.

Accommodation on the landholdings varied from an early tent dwelling to a repurposed cow shed to iron and wooden shacks that could be dismantled and moved easily, to a large old colonial villa first acquired by Gino Berno during the war. In 1930 Adele (Lina) Bordin arrived to join her husband, Gelindo Rossetto and found that she was to live in primitive conditions in a tent, “a hovel – bare and empty – with no gas, no firewood, no electricity and no floor,” (Rossetto, La Pioggia nelle Scarpe, p. 68).

 

Ownership of land was a definite step towards permanent settlement and the formation of identity in Australia. The path to ownership was not simple or quick but the Veneto group successfully negotiated the means to work the land, and with the assistance of the family labour unit reached the goal of becoming self-employed market gardeners in the 1930s, and landowners by the mid-1950s.

 

Madeleine Regan
19 June 2021

 

In this blog I focus on the story of one of the first men in the extended Veneto market gardener group to arrive in Adelaide. The following information has been gathered through oral history interviews recorded with relatives and documents in the National Archives of Australia and Trove.

It is 96 years since Domenico Rossetto disembarked Port Adelaide on 7^th June 1926. Domenico was born in 1896, one of nine children born to a poor family in a small village, Bigolino, in the province of Treviso in the Veneto region.

Domenico had served in the First World War as member of the Alpini, a specialised mountain warfare infantry corps in the Italian Army. In 1924 he married Carmela Buffon and their first child, Anna, was born in February 1926 not long before Domenico migrated to Australia.

Arrival and work on Yorke Peninsula
Domenico was the first of eight adult children to leave Bigolino hoping for a better way of life in Australia. In his first years, he worked as a labourer at Cape Spencer on Yorke Peninsula in a gypsum mine for the Peninsula Plaster Company which employed 80 men in 1927. For more information about the mine see:

https://www.southaustralianhistory.com.au/inneston.htm

The year following his arrival, Domenico nominated three of his brothers, Gelindo, Adeodato and Angelo, and his brother-in-law, Brunone Rebuli as new migrants. They registered their intended residence and employment with Domenico at Cape Spencer or Inneston as it was known from 1927.

The first generation of the veneti who arrived in the 1920s endured the uncertainties of employment and accommodation and many were isolated during their early years in Australia. Nevertheless, they survived and found work even in remote areas during the Depression. At first, most Veneto market gardeners became wage labourers which was a different model of work from the custom in the Veneto region where they had been primarily part of a family household and economy. The men took various types of short-term employment building rural roads, labouring on farms or working for market gardeners in a relationship familiar to the veneti who had worked for padroni or bosses in the Veneto region.

Making a life in Adelaide
In 1929, Domenico was joined by Carmela and Anna and by 1930 he had become the owner of a grocery shop.

The grocery was in Hindley Street in the western part of the city where many Italians made their home after arrival and it stocked continental food and delivered goods to all suburbs. The deliveries connected Italian migrants in different communities in the suburbs.

 

 

Giocondo Caon who was interviewed with his brother, Primo, for an Adelaide City Council oral history project in 1996, recalled that the Rossetto grocery shop was very important in the Italian community:

Italians would come from everywhere to get their Italian product from there … They had things like borlotti beans and they were the first with pasta and so on.

https://d31atr86jnqrq2.cloudfront.net/docs/oral-history-primo-caon-giocondo-caon.pdf?mtime=20190606112637&focal=none   (page 29)

Arrest and internment 1940
Domenico and Carmela with their children, Anna and Modesto, lived in the building where the grocery was located at 266 Hindley Street and became well known in the Italian community of Adelaide.

Challenges for Italian people began when Australia joined the war effort and compounded when Italy declared war against the allies in June 1940. In late 1939, an Italian man in a routine police interview for his naturalisation application, identified Domenico and other Italians who lived in the city as Fascists. A dossier  was compiled several months before Italy joined the war in 1940 by the Attorney General’s Department because Domenico was suspected of being a Fascist. Ironically, he and seven other members of his anti-Fascist family had emigrated because of their opposition to Mussolini.

 

The suspicion of being a Fascist sympathiser was not confirmed and Domenico was released after three months under restrictions which were in place until 1944. His internment served as a warning to others in the Italian community and was remembered clearly by his nephews who were interviewed for the project.

 

 

 

In his interview Johnny Tormena remembered details of his uncle’s experience in his interview. He hesitates before he uses the term, “Fascist sympathisers” to describe  people who used to meet in his uncle’s building:

And we found out afterwards that he was interned purely because there were — Fascist sympathisers that used to have meetings and because Uncle had a big house and a big storeroom, they used to ask him, can they use the storeroom to have the meeting … But because of that, they thought that he was a sympathiser which he wasn’t because the reason of him coming to Australia was to get away from Fascism because they were quite against it, the four brothers were against it … I remember the day, the first day that there, in the newspapers that Italy entered the War and the police … went around picking all these people up and interned them down at Keswick [Army barracks],
and Uncle Domenico was one of them.

(Johnny Tormena, OH 872/18, 6 July 2012, 36).

 

Domenico Rossetto’s legacy
Domenico died at the age of 49 years in 1946.

Carmela carried on running the grocery shop in the city with her daughter and son, nieces and nephews, and friends. The Rossetto grocery established by Domenico was a very successful business and well patronised by Italians for many years after the war.
Carmela died in 1970.

Domenico was a successful migrant in South Australia despite the hardships of beginning his life alone in a rural area at a time of economic difficulties in Australia and his experience of the war years when Italians were ostracised. He earned a reputation in the Italian community for being a skilled and competent businessman.

 

Madeleine Regan – with thanks to Christine Rebellato nee Mattiazzo
5 June 2022

In this blog, guest writer, Aida Innocente recalls a visit to Italy with her parents in 1964 when she was nearly nine years of age. Aida has a very strong, detailed memory of the time spent with her relatives in Caselle di Altivole and travel in Italy.

In February 1964 I took a memorable trip with my mother and father. After months of planning and preparing we set sail on the ‘Galileo Galilei’ for Italy. I was almost nine.

I had not really thought about what the trip would be like. My imagination could never have matched my real-life experiences!

Everything about the boat trip was colourful, exotic and to my child’s eye, wondrous. The gardens in Singapore with screeching monkeys; the bazaar in Bombay (now Mumbai) and its low display platforms of vivid bolts of fabric; the perfectly square buildings in Aden; the oh so narrow Suez Canal. And finally, the rows of big, boxed bambole (dolls) on the dock in Messina – my first glimpse of Italy.

The day we docked in Genova we had lunch in the port cafeteria. It was in a big, glassed thirties-style portside building. We ate cotoletta alla Milanese and insalata (schnitzel and salad). Dad bought me an aranciata (orangeade) in the sweetest, smallest bottle I had ever seen. It was a San Pellegrino aranciata.

We took the train to Castelfranco Veneto where my grandfather was waiting for us. He had organised a car and driver as he rode a bike for day-to-day transport.

We arrived at Via Canesella in Caselle towards dusk. My father’s home was an old, run-down eighteenth-century country house. The courtyard was full of people. I could see a little Madonna above one of the wooden doors that opened to the courtyard. The Madonna was lit by a tiny, dim light – the only glow in the courtyard.

I stood alone. My parents were joyfully welcomed by this sea of people. A woman approached me and asked me if I knew who she was.  She was my grandmother, Teresa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via Canesella was full of young children. Behind my grandmother’s house lived Fernanda Fogal who became my best friend. I spent afternoons with the Canesella children roaming the fields filled with violets. Via Canesella was a dirt road and a stream ran alongside it. My grandmother still washed her clothes in the fosso (stream/drain), like so many other women. I jumped across the fosso incessantly. Behind the fosso I remember tall cherry trees.

My grandparents’ house had a granary, wooden stairs and inter-connecting bedrooms. Only the ground floor was occupied in 1964.  All the rural houses had a stable. Ours had one cow and a donkey – a prized possession. One evening he escaped and I can still see my grandmother chasing after him waving a pitchfork! She eventually caught up with him on the main road. At night we would sometimes sit in the stable with neighbours who had come in fiò (visiting). Sometimes we played tombola (bingo). The stable was the centre of socialising in contadini (farmers’) homes. We also bathed in the stable in a big round wooden bowl, like a half-barrel. There was no bathroom. The toilet was outside, next to the pigsty.

We visited families with gifts from Australia. We visited my godmother (santola) Maria Rizzardo’s family in Monfumo. (Santola Maria’s sister was an ex-girlfriend of my dad’s! She had migrated to Venezuela.) Santola’s house in Monfumo was in the idyllic Montello hills about 15 kms from Caselle. They even had a small private chapel. I was entranced.

One afternoon we attended a religious ceremony in a church near Caselle. Supposedly a young girl was exorcised. My grandmother said the girl had spat out forks! I was terrified.

Before Easter I went with my grandmother to make focacce (traditional sweet bread for Easter) in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Caselle. The farmhouse had a wood-fired oven.  Women gathered with their ingredients to make a batch. We took home about 12 focacce that we stored in the larder.

My grandparents would breed silkworms each year as a source of income. The year we went to Italy my dad gave them the equivalent of their expected income so they did not have to do this work.   My grandparents secured a small number of silkworms for me to look after. I fed them with mulberry leaves and then one day we took the silk cocoons to the silk merchant who paid me for my crop.

Together with other families from Australia – Luigi, Italia and Luciana Tonellato, Frank, Ina and Michael Marin, Nico Zampin, Adelaide and Amedeo Valentini, and new lifelong friends we had met on the ship, Giorgio and Norma Smania and their two little boys (Giorgio was from Ciano) – we toured Italy in a car convoy. We went to Lake Como, Trieste, Milano, Rimini. In Rome we attended Palm Sunday Mass in St Peters celebrated by Pope Paul VI.  We were lucky to be standing near the Baldacchino, under the dome of the basilica. At one stage rose petals fell profusely from the dome. Petals blessed by the Pope!  A petal landed on the shoulder of the man next to me. He gave it to me.

One Sunday, it was time to leave Caselle. The courtyard was again filled with family and friends. I shook hands with my new friends. And kissed them goodbye.

This time my father had organised a car and driver and together with another family we drove to Genova. I cried almost the entire way. Nothing could abate my great distress and sorrow. Until the driver taught me a popular song. He managed to distract me.

 

 

 

 

At night, on the ship from my top bunk I looked out over the endless ocean that was distancing me more and more from Italy. On these nights distress and sadness overwhelmed me again. I had fallen in love.

Aida Innocente
May 22, 2022