Category: 2023

In the photo above, Serafina and Attilio De Pieri hold their children, Freddy and Adelina, in a group with a visiting priest, Billy Hughes mica mine, 1945.

In a blog in 2019, I wrote about the Veneto market gardener men who lived and worked on the mica mines in the Northern Territory in the Harts Ranges about 215 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. These men included Angelo and Attilio Piovesan, Gelindo Rossetto and his brothers, Angelo and Beppi.

Women in the mica mine camps

In this blog I focus on the Veneto women who embarked on a dramatic adventure joining their husbands in the remote desert country where the mica mines were located without the comforts of electricity and adequate water and where they lived in makeshift accommodation. One of the earliest Veneto women in the mica mines was Serafina De Pieri who was featured in a 2022 blog. Serafina became well known in the Veneto community in Adelaide because of her significant role on the Social Committee of the Veneto Club in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

 

 

 

 

 

Research about the mica mines*
In 1995, David Hugo wrote a thesis about migrant people who worked on the mica mines at Harts Ranges. His research showed that most of the miners were Italian and many post-war migrants went to the mines attracted by relatives or paesani who had reported the adventure and good income from mining mica.

As part of his research, David Hugo recorded oral history interviews with several women and men who had lived and worked on the mines from the 1930s to the 1950s. His research showed that women played a vital role in the camps often working with men. In their oral history interviews, people had spoken about the close interaction with Aboriginal people who helped with different tasks in the camps and provided their local knowledge about terrain, water and conditions of desert life.

Women’s memories of the mica mines
David Hugo wrote about the perceptions of women who lived on the mines which differed from those of the men. The women he interviewed included: Serafina De Pieri, Teresa Fadelli, Italia Floreani, Antonietta Mamone and Mary Rigoni. He speaks about their accounts:

They tended to present a fuller picture of mica mining as a way of life rather than concentrating on the specifics. They told of the difficulties of raising families and undertaking all housekeeping, at the same time as working alongside their husbands and fathers. They performed such tasks as trimming, cutting and grading the mica; and, in some cases, were expected to even do the work of the men underground. They related moments of sorrow following miscarriages; of having to go back to the mining camps against medical advice; and of the sadness felt when leaving very young children in Alice Springs to be cared for and educated by the Church … it is clear from the transcripts that the women showed humour, courage and strength in dealing with the hardships … Above all, there emanated an inescapable commitment to family, friends,
and to a better life. (p 224)

Serafina De Pieri nee Corletto
The story of Serafina offers an insight into the life of a young woman who arrived in Australia in 1939 as a new bride, aged 20 years old. Her husband, Attilio, had worked in a mica mine for several years before the couple married in Italy and went to live at Harts Ranges.

 

Serafina lived at the mine until 1942 when she and Attilio moved to Adelaide where their first two children, Adelina and Fred were born. The family went back to the mine in 1945 for three years and then they returned to Adelaide. The youngest child, Roberto, was born in 1950.

 

Everyday life of women in the camps
Women prepared the food for their own families and also for single men if they lived in the camps. The diet combined tinned meat and vegetables bought on the visits to Alice Springs every three or four months when the miners sold their mica to the Commonwealth Mica Buyer.  Other food, like pasta and dried fish, came from Italian grocers in Adelaide. Serafina De Pieri recalled that after a bore was sunk at the Billy Hughes mine where she lived with her husband for some time, they were able to grow lettuce, beans, peas, cauliflowers, cabbages and even watermelons. They had to protect the plants from kangaroos and goats. The men ordered large barrels of wine from Patritti Wines in Adelaide and bottled it in the camps.

People in the camps kept herds of goats which were for milk and meat.  Serafina recalled that they experimented with cooking wild life even galahs, “Yeah, we try eating them once, the young one, but it’s not much good.” Serafina also spoke about preparing kangaroo for meals . . . “the tail, we make a beautiful soup. The leg, you make a beautiful chop, or cutlet … with the flour and eggs.”

Post World War II Veneto migrants
In their oral history interviews, a number of people in the Veneto market gardeners’ project spoke about their own experience or about their father’s life and work on the mica mines. The two following descriptions provide images of what it was like to be a woman living in a mining camp in remote desert country.

Armida Mattiazzo arrives in 1952
Armida Biasetto arrived in Australia in 1952, aged 24 years. Soon after she married her fiancé, Augusto Mattiazzo, in Melbourne, they went to live and work at the ‘Last Chance’ mica mine in the Harts Ranges. Augusto had already worked there for some time with other Veneto men.

In 2016 Armida was interviewed by Eleonora Marchioro and recalled her early years  in Australia and the mica mine:

When I arrived in Alice Springs, for me it was a big thing especially the trip to get to Alice Springs, it took eight hours in those times with a plane … we had to stop three or four times. When we arrived in Alice Springs we went to friends and we stayed there for two or three days and then we left with a jeep and went to the [mine] and it took 11 or 12 hours and I arrived and I was in the desert … there was no bitumen roads. They were tracks made by people driving up and down with trucks. I was never desperate, I always liked it but I was young and I had a young husband.

I had a good life there… there was nothing to clean because [laughs] there was dust everywhere… I was the only woman, and at night they used to prepare the yeast for the bread and after in the morning they used to go up to the mine…

And I used to stay down at the camp and I used to get the bread which was baked underground. It used to take an hour and the bread would be ready. At ten in the morning, I used to bring them tea and I used to make little cakes because I knew my husband liked them. I used to bring this for the friends and they came down for lunch at 12.00…  And at night, it was always a party.

I stayed four years but my husband was there for seven years.

(Armida Mattiazzo nee Biasetto, OH 872/112, 1 December 2016, pp 3, 4, 5)

 

 

After a difficult birth in the Alice Springs hospital, Armida’s first baby died. Armida and Augusto’s son, Denny, was born in 1954 before the couple decided to live in Adelaide where their daughter, Adelina, was born in 1956.

 

 

 

Bruna Rossetto nee Battaglia moves to the mica mine
Bruna had arrived in Australia in 1939 and after she married Giuseppe (Beppi) Rossetto in 1943, they had three children, Val, Allan and Denis, and for some time Giuseppe worked in the Spotted Tiger mica mine with his brother, Gelindo Rossetto. In the following extract, Bruna explains that she decided to go and live with Beppi on the mine in about 1951:

I was there living Liverpool Street with my three children, trying to work and go and help a little bit in the factory and I was, I been working all the time, but then after I started to feel lonely for him. I didn’t like the idea just being by myself with the kids there, I wanted to go up in the mine. He didn’t want me to. He said, ‘It’s not a life for you up there with the kids, it’s not a life,’…

 

 

Val was about six years old when she went to the convent in Alice Springs, she was a boarder there, and I took my two boys in the Spotted Tiger Mine … I stay there for two, three years. I cooked for 12 men and had kids to look after.

(Bruna Rossetto nee Battaglia, OH 872/33, 18 December 2014, pp 4-5, 18)

 

The accounts of their lives in the mica mines reflect the strength and resilience of the Veneto women who took on new roles in unfamiliar circumstances in the Australian desert. They created family life without the social supports they might have had in their village in the Veneto region or that they might have found in Adelaide. They lived without the comfort of amenities and managed their daily lives in basic conditions. Indeed, they showed courage and commitment to their new life.

Madeleine Regan
18 June 2023.

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*Thesis, “Mica Mining at Harts Range Central Australia, 1880s – 1960: A Study of Ethnicity and the Impact of Isolation,” by David Frederick Hugo.

You can access the thesis here: https://ris.cdu.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/23680670/Thesis_CDU_6115_Hugo_D.pdf

 

 

Angelo Piovesan continues the story of his family’s early years in Adelaide. He describes the way that the family adapted to home in the suburb known as Findon in 1954.

The photo above shows Mario and Vittoria Piovesan celebrating Mario’s 90th birthday.  Mario and Vittoria are surrounded by their sons and spouses,  grandchildren and their partners, at the Veneto Club, 2004.

1954 – the move to a new home and area
Dad had continued to take on as much work as he could in the early days. This enabled my parents to buy a block of land a kilometre or so further up Grange Road at 1 Richard Street, Flinders Park, now known as Findon.

Building materials such as bricks, concrete and reinforcing bars were still very scarce after WW2 and there was an SA Government limit placed on the size of new homes. Dad managed to get hold of enough materials to build the family home with the help of many fellow Veneti who had already constructed Zia Rosalia’s house – completed in 1952.

Our new home was largely completed just before the 1954 earthquake which left a permanent crack in the front passage wall. We moved from Kidman Park in July 1954, when I was 4½yrs old.  It took some years to complete details such as painting, flooring and paving but it was a big improvement on, and more comfortable than the old baracca at Kidman Park!

Our backyard abundance
We were lucky to have a big backyard which was like most other Veneto families. The garden soon filled with fruit trees, vines, several chook pens with egg laying hens and chickens for our meat supply. The roosters provided many a roast lunch or dinner and Mum castrated some into caponi or capons – which were boiled for broth and eating. Mum became so good at this that she was in great demand by other Veneto families wanting to do the same with their large rooster flocks! We also had rabbits raised for eating and a very large vegetable patch.

Our abundant supply of fresh fruit ranged from plums, early and late Elberta peaches, early and late apricots, figs, oranges, mandarins and lemons. Peaches and apricots in particular were shared with our new neighbours and lasted all year round, thanks to Mum’s preserving skills by utilising an ever-increasing number of Vacola jars.

 

As with all families in those days, home improvements gradually developed as hard-earned savings permitted. A large new double garage was built, including a cellar which Renz and I dug with pick and shovel when we were 12 and 13 years old in incredibly hard clay soil. This was followed by an expansive new concrete driveway and a sleepout to accommodate the arrival of young Johnny in 1964, plus a rear verandah.

 

 

The transition from Frogmore Road
The move to Flinders Park forced us all out of our comfort zone – but particularly for both Mum and Dad once again. We had moved away from the support of the close-knit Italian community at Kidman Park and the interpreting skills of my cousins. I could not speak English when I started school in 1955 at St Joseph’s on Captain Cook Avenue, Flinders Park and spent the first few months sitting very quietly and taking it all in!  There were other Veneto children in my class – including Silvano Ballestrin, Ray Tonellato and Adrian Tonellato, Robert Berno, Silvano Favero, Jimmy Martini, Guido Feltrin and Robert Riebiolge.

I was lucky to have my cousin Edda there. She had other Veneto classmates from Frogmore Road – Sandra Santin, Linda Tonellato, Noemi Zalunardo, Teresina Zampin and Delfina Ballestrin.

My father’s social life
During the early years, Dad regularly worked six days a week and often seven days but he made sure he kept either Friday or Saturday nights free for playing cards. On his occasional Sunday off, Dad would play either borella or bocce and have a drink with friends at one of the lanes at the homes of Leandro Bortoletto, the Santin’s or Romano Dametto – all three were close to where we had originally lived.

Dad loved playing cards on either Friday or Saturday nights in private homes on a rotating roster. These were very noisy affairs particularly if there were two tables playing with eight or more players present. There was much yelling and table thumping – later topped off with supper of home-made salami and cheese around midnight, followed by coffees with Grappa. These sessions went into the early hours of the morning. You never slept well on those nights and you’d dread getting up for breakfast the next morning because the smell of cigarette smoke was strong even before you opened the kitchen door!

 

Amongst the attendees on those nights were long-standing friends from the Kidman Park and Lockleys market gardening families – Albert and Luigi Tonellato, Vittorio Marchioro, Angelo Innocente, and Narcisio Ballestrin. In 1974 all this was replaced by the opening of the Veneto Club where they enjoyed playing cards on Wednesday and Friday nights, as well as bocce tournaments and more card games on Sundays!

 

My parents’ first return visit to Italy
It was not until mid-1973 that Dad and Mum took their first ever holiday and went overseas for three months – 23 years after arriving in Australia. Until this trip back to Italy to visit family, both Mum and Dad had harboured the idea of one day returning to Italy. However, with both sets of parents deceased and, after discovering that their home towns and the country had changed so much during their absence, they were very happy to return to Adelaide. Then they finally decided to become Australian citizens.

After their overseas break, Dad started to cut back his workload on weekends and enjoyed life a lot more. He loved bocce with a passion and was very competitive. He represented the Veneto Club and his State in club and interstate bocce competitions. His trophies filled the top of the kitchen cupboard.

The Veneto Club opens in Adelaide

The formal opening of the Veneto Club on 24th May 1974 was the culmination of a dream for all Veneti in Adelaide and particularly for those from the Western suburbs who had initiated the spark for its formation. It gave the men folk somewhere to meet and also gave their long-neglected women partners their own venue in which to meet socially on a more regular basis and in greater numbers. Prior to this, their social interactions were largely confined to home visits, chance meetings whilst shopping, chats after Mass on Sundays, the odd church function and occasional weddings.

 

The members of the Women’s Committee were extremely important to the early success of the Veneto Club. The women’s generous contributions made it possible for the Club to cater for the income-producing Saturday evening private functions, Sunday evening meals and dance evenings for members and their partners.

The network of Veneto market gardener families
When I look back on my early childhood days, I fondly remember the strong sense of community amongst those early market gardening families and their relatives. Our family like others, followed in their footsteps during that post WW2 wave of migration.

I remember the families getting together to help each other out during times of need with all the labour-intensive activities, be that cutting seed potatoes for planting, assisting with weeding and banking potatoes during winter, digging / hand collecting potatoes – before excavators were introduced from the mid-60s. People also had to bag potatoes and load the bags onto trucks before bins were introduced.

I remember spending days during my school holidays visiting my Tonellato godparents on Findon Road and helping to pick tomatoes, cucumbers and beans in the glasshouses. I recall going to poultry farms to collect chicken manure for the glasshouses and a few early morning visits to the East End Market.

The working lives of migrants
Working alongside our elders (both male and female) certainly taught us at a very young age about hard work. It also gave us an appreciation of the very long hours they all worked and how much harder all that work was before the introduction of mechanisation when digging was done by pitch forks or horse-drawn ploughs.

I have the utmost respect for all those early contadino (peasant farmer) families who worked the land in Italy, the likes of my parents’ generation and those before them. As youngsters they harvested wheat crops using a scythe. They carried and stored wheat and corn harvests into their granaries by hand. They suffered deprivations during their war experiences before some migrated to Australia. Those experiences stood them all in good stead for their later work in their chosen new land and their strong work ethic quickly earned them the respect of their neighbouring Australian families. Some families had had similar experiences in the generations before them, just as subsequent waves of migrants from other countries have done recently.

Doing a hard day’s work and knowing that you had helped to feed a nation must have given them all a great sense of satisfaction in their retirement!

 

Angelo Piovesan
4 June 2023.

Photos not attributed were supplied by Angelo and Renzo Piovesan.

This blog, written by Angelo Piovesan, is the first of two parts that outline the history of his family’s migration from the Veneto to Adelaide after the Second W0rld War.

Having followed the Veneto Market Gardeners blog very closely for years and having read the many other family stories, I am very conscious that nearly everyone of them comes with a common background story. They are usually about a family fleeing poverty and hunger in Italy and finishing up in a baracca (or shed) for a home when they arrived here in South Australia.

I hope my family’s story provides a slightly different view to your stories and helps revive some more of your own family’s precious memories of migration.

My father’s family
My father Mario was born in Ponzano Veneto on 9/06/1914, a small town approx. 5 kms N/NW from the centre of Treviso, which itself is approximately 30 km N of Venice.

Dad was the youngest of six surviving children and four out of the five males emigrated – three to Adelaide (Angelo in 1927, Attilio in 1937 and Mario eventually in 1950 – all to the Findon / Kidman Park area) and the other, zio Leone, eventually to Caracas in Venezuela in 1949. The eldest son, Beppi, who married in 1927 was the only one to remain in the old family home, raising his own family of five children and looked after his parents. Nonno died on the morning of 5^th August 1934, just after zia Rosalia had left their home for Adelaide to reunite with Angelo after their proxy wedding! Dad’s sister Amelia lived at home until she married in April 1947 but died unexpectedly in July 1951, leaving zio Beppi and his family to raise her young children aged one and three years old.

My mother’s family
My mother, Vittoria Teso, was born a few kilometres away on the outskirts of San Pelaio (sometimes spelt Pelagio) on 31/07/1922.  She was the third eldest of six surviving children (5 girls and a boy) from ten full term pregnancies.  Her mother died the day before Mum’s 11^th birthday and less than a week after giving birth to her last child (also named Angelo) – who went on to live for only 11 months. The three eldest girls, including Mum, helped raise the four younger children, but very soon there were only three remaining. Mum was the only one in her family to emigrate.

My father’s life 1929 – 1946
When Dad was about 15 years old, he and zio Leone had left home to work in a carrozzeria (a car repair shop) in Milan. After Dad had later completed his Italian compulsory Military Service at the end of 1935, both zio Leone (with his young family) and Dad had gone to Ethiopia in 1935 and 1936 respectively to find work. There, Dad was eventually required to re-enlist in the army with the outbreak of fighting in the Second World War in Africa.  He was then taken as a prisoner of war (PoW) by the English in 1941. Zio Leone and family, on the other hand, were taken as civilian PoWs and sent to separate camps. Aunty and her young children were repatriated to Italy some 12 months later on a vessel arranged by the Red Cross.

Whilst a PoW in Africa, Dad’s experience with machinery enabled him to volunteer and be assigned for about two and a half years to a prisoner working group with about 5 wheat heading machines, under the command of a Maltese Lieutenant. Their job was to tour the length and breadth of Ethiopia and Kenya reaping/stripping wheat because their menfolk were all off fighting the war with the English.

Dad then volunteered to be sent to London to work in the British Naval warehouses along the Thames for the remainder of WW2. The boat trip to England lasted approx. 40 days around the Horn of Africa. They were in such poor health when they arrived in London, that they were fed and rested for nearly a month before being put to work on the wharves. As prisoners of war in England, they were very well cared for and often had days off on weekends to go to watch the soccer! The soldier PoWs were returned to Africa after the end of WW2 and Dad was eventually discharged from the Italian army there on 29/04/1946.

My parents meet and marry
My parents met after my Dad returned to Italy. He obviously impressed her and thus began a very brief courtship before the lack of regular work in the area forced Dad to move once again – this time to Belgium. He went with his eldest nephew Sante (13 years younger) to work in a Steel Foundry with many other Italians in the small town of Tubize – approx. 30 km from Brussels.

Whilst in Belgium, Dad kept writing to Mum and they were eventually married by proxy in September 1948. Mum joined Dad in Belgium where they lived and worked for over a year and Mum became fluent in French, thanks to lessons from the landlady.

Migrating to Australia
Although they applied to migrate to Australia and Argentina, their Australian application was the first to be approved and they returned to Ponzano to complete their travel documents. They boarded the Sebastiano Caboto in Genova on 28/12/49, bound for Australia in 3^rd class with segregated men’s and women’s quarters below deck. Mum was eight months pregnant and spent most of the trip below deck, suffering from sea-sickness!

After disembarking in Melbourne on 29/01/1950, zio Attilio met them and they flew to Parafield Aerodrome – as Adelaide Airport did not exist then.

Despite being in the middle of summer, Mum wore an overcoat on the flight to disguise the fact that she was nine months pregnant. The three of them were picked up from Parafield by truck and taken to Kidman Park. Zio Attilio had previously purchased a small fibro-clad transportable home or a baracca for them. It was located on Eugenio ‘Marena’ Zalunardo’s land on Grange Road. I was born on 2/02/1950 a few days after my parents arrived and was named after my zio Angelo, who had died in March 1949. Mum gave birth to me in Quambi Hospital on South Terrace (now St Andrews Hospital) where she was very fortunate to find a doctor who spoke French!

Early years in Adelaide
Mum remembered the sweltering +40°C heat and having to fan me so I could sleep, living in what seemed to be furnace. She looked out onto a barren paddock and thinking to herself, “What have I done?”  She had come from a beautiful three-storey, solid, stone home to this!

After several months, the baracca was shifted from Marena’s land to zio Attilio’s own land, West of Frogmore Rd on what is now 19 Hoskin Ave, Kidman Park. It was placed right next to the Western boundary with zia Rosalia Piovesan’s land which was on Frogmore Road. In those days, the balance of the land around us was not used for growing vegetables but for cattle grazing.

There was no plumbing connected to the house, apart from the rainwater tank supply, and the waste water from the house kitchen sink ran out into a bucket under the kitchen window, from which the cattle drank. The primitive bathing and copper / laundry facilities were located in a shed next to the house. The shed also housed a work bench and at times the large box in which the young chickens were raised.

When the cattle rubbed their backs on the corners of the house, they would shake the poor house so much that Mum feared it would fall off its timber support posts about a foot off the ground.  There was an approx. 1m x 1m slab of concrete outside the front door and the land around the house was all covered in three-cornered jacks, so when Mum wanted to confine me to the house – she would simply take my shoes away!

When zio Attilio walked down from his house on Frogmore Rd to work his land and saw me standing outside the front door, he would say: to mare vaccha te ha porta via le scarpe da novo!  (“Your cow of a mother has taken your shoes away again!”)  I remember him as a fluent user of coarse language and he taught me to swear at a very young age!

Mum had to walk up the track to Frogmore Road some 200 metres away to place the billy can for the milk vendor’s delivery by horse and cart, and then again to collect it – dodging the snakes on her way! Mum told us that when they cleared the bushes along the track, there were so many snakes that climbed over the bulldozer and the driver was forced to abandon his vehicle!

 

As a four-year old, I remember walking across our chook yard and my foot fell into a rat’s burrow, and a rat which seemed about 6-8 inches long jumped out and ran across the chook yard!

 

Connections with other Veneto families
Our nearest neighbours were the Schievenin family who lived in another house next to ours on zio Attilio’s land. The Piovesan and Santin families lived no more than 200m away, whilst the Tonellato families lived a bit further up Frogmore Road. We lived there for just over four years during which time very strong bonds were formed with the Tonellato and the Santin families – who already had established long standing friendships with zia Rosalia and zio Attilio’s families. These strong bonds also extended to the many other Italian families scattered around the area on Frogmore, Valetta, River Road (now Findon) and Grange Road – including the Rebuli, Zalunardo and Ballestrin families – all of whom were from the province of Treviso in the Veneto region.

Behind the Santin’s house on Frogmore Road was the bowling / bocce alley where Dad and friends often played bocce there on a Sunday afternoon.

Their other option was to play borella just across the paddock at Leandro Bortoletto’s home (see below).

Changes 
Zio Attilio bought a small parcel of land after he sold his original land holding which had been substantial. He sold it to the SA Housing Trust just before we arrived in 1950. The homes built there on Grange Road became some of the earliest SA Housing Trust homes to be constructed in the Western suburbs at Kidman Park. At that stage was right on the fringe of the metropolitan area.

This land sale and the resultant housing expansion would eventually put enormous pressure on some of the remaining market gardeners to relocate their operations to Bolivar from 1959.

When the Schievenin family departed, zio Attilio’s house was rented by Leandro and Maria Bortoletto and their young family. Leandro had  worked with zio Attilio in his Mica mine in central Australia. Leandro added a borella lane to his place where I earned some pocket money as a youngster on Sunday afternoons – returning the balls to the bowlers and re-setting the three pins!  I had to hide behind a shelter whilst they were throwing/ tossing their wooden balls (which would hit the pins on the full!), to make sure a stray ball did not hit me on the head and kill me!

Leandro Bortoletto later became one of a small group of Veneti responsible for coming up with the idea of forming our Veneto Club in the early 1970s.

 

Angelo Piovesan
21 May 2023

All photos except for the images of the bocce group and the Bortoletto group were provided by Angelo.