Migration can fragment families and the separation can be challenging when there are important events like weddings and funerals and these experiences cannot be shared because of distance. In the Veneto market gardener family and friends’ community, there are many examples of the ways that family members maintain connections and continuity to relatives in the Veneto region.
The image above is the passport of Vittorio (Pietro) Berno from 1927
when he migrated from Italy to Adelaide. NAA:435, 1946/4/510.
In the book, “I buy this piece of ground here,” there are several stories of continuity and the ways that people keep in contact with relatives and friends in Italy. There is also a different example of the connection that Remo Berno, who lives in Riese Pio X, maintains with relatives and friends whom he grew up with in Adelaide – another kind of connection.
Love of all things from our culture
Amanda Rossetto spoke at a gathering for the Veneto market gardener families and friends in October 2022 and provided the context for her attachment to her grandmother who had arrived as a new bride in 1930. Amanda spoke about the cultural context of her family and described herself as a 3rd-generation Australian Italian “who feels very connected to my Veneto culture and heritage.”
She spoke about her nonna, Lina Rossetto nee Bordin who taught Amanda about family history, love of family, food and culture. “She encouraged my love of all things from our culture.”
(Lina’s 90th birthday) Photo supplied by Amanda.
When she was 12, Amanda had visited Italy with her father, Aldo, and stayed with her Rossetto relatives in the ancestral home in Bigolino. Even now she keeps in contact:
I have been over [to Italy] 4 more times since as an adult – in 2000, 2010, 2015, 2019… With technology changes, social media, the internet, Facebook and Instagram, I’m able to stay in touch with them easily – and we do… We probably communicate once a week in one way or another.
Recognising Veneto traditions
In his interview, Louis Ballestrin spoke about the ways that Veneto heritage has been passed on to the second and third generations in Australia. Louis was born in 1950 in Adelaide, the son of first-generation Veneto market gardeners. When he was 13 years old, Louis had visited Italy with his parents and sister and stayed with relatives for nine months . He gained an understanding of the network of his paternal and maternal families in the province of Treviso. Louis married Janette, an Anglo Australian woman who died when their three children were adolescents.
Louis and Janette’s children formed a close relationship with their Veneto grandparents who had lived in Hartley Road in the market garden area. Through this attachment they observed the customs in a Veneto Australian household and their grandparents’ rituals: growing vegetables in the back garden, keeping chickens, and making salami and wine.
Louis has spent time in Italy twice with his second wife, Fay. His children joined them on the visits. In response to a question about his identity, Louis said that he appreciates his heritage which he has sensed strongly when he stayed in the Veneto region.
A sense of returning home
In another example of the continuity of connections between families in the Veneto region, Elena Rebuli, granddaughter of Brunone and Giovanna Rebuli, first-generation Veneto market gardeners, wrote a blog about her parents’ experience of a transnational family.
She outlined her father’s experience of migrating as a child and his marriage on a return visit to the Veneto region after thirty years in Australia. Elena communicates a sense of belonging to the Veneto region through her grandparents and parents – and particularly her mother who left her family there when she married in 1962.
Elena lived in Italy for one year with her family when she was a child and was close to relatives in Caerano San Marco where her mother came from. She stated in her blog in 2019:
… I have been fortunate to return twice as an adult and have always maintained a strong connection with Italy. I have always felt like I was returning home when I was there.[1]
A home in Australia
In his interview recorded in Italy in 2017, Remo Berno spoke of his connections to the Veneto market gardener community and the paese at Lockleys. He had been born in Adelaide in 1953 but returned to his parents’ village in the Veneto region when they remigrated in the late 1960s.
He returned to Adelaide and lived with his godparents for two years to complete his secondary education and formed lifelong connections with relatives and friends independently of his parents. He has made five visits to Adelaide as an adult. Today he has an affection for Australia even to the extent of feeling it as his “home”:
I obviously understand that we are Italian. Our origin is Italian. When you live here [Italy] you understand your roots, how you were part of this community but at the same time, I would feel absolutely comfortable living there [Australia]. As soon as I get to Australia, it’s home, you know.
(Remo Berno, OH 872/46, 27 June 2017, 43).
Keeping connections alive
Today, the links within the Veneto market gardener stretch across three generations in Australia and in the Veneto region. While there is physical separation between families, it is possible to keep the connections alive in a more immediate way than it was for the first generation of Veneto market gardeners whose letters took weeks to get to Italy. Later in the 1960s, there were opportunities for reunion when market gardener families started to travel to Italy by ship and stayed for several months with relatives. Children born in Australia got to know their grandparents and aunts and uncles and gained a feeling of what everyday life was like in the Veneto region.
Today the forms of communication in migrant families separated by distance have been revolutionised by technology. Contact between relatives is meaningful and immediate through WhatsApp and social media. Face-to-face communication through technology has enabled interactions that could not have been imagined by the first generation of market gardeners from the Veneto region.
Madeleine Regan
10 August 2025
[1]Elena Rebuli, “Returning home,” Veneti market gardeners’ website (blog), 10 June 2019, https://venetimarketgardeners1927.net/returning-home/
Ciao Madeleine,
It was very nice reading your latest article about the connections that remain between Australia and Italy with these different examples. They obviously come naturally as they stem from the same roots that were based in Veneto.
I must ask you to kindly send me the photo of my father’s passport. The ID photo of Dad, who was then only just 18 y.o. (thus for that time considered under age), really struck me for many reasons. I don’t recollect seeing it before. Dad had just turned 18 when he acquired the passport. I can imagine the feelings of excitement mixed uncertainty he must have felt as a young man, to embrace his future far away from home in a unknown land. It is interesting to note that the passport was issued (probably) exclusively for travel to Australia and was valid for only one year.
Thank you once again Madeleine for your tireless, silent exploration of many facts that are very, very significant for many, many of us. Had you not have done all of this magnificent work, it would have unfortunately been, for a very large part of it, lost and forgotten about. Now all we have to do is a click.
Un grande abbraccio.
Remo