Imagine arriving in Adelaide as a young Italian man in 1927! The Depression was beginning and it was difficult to find employment across Australia at the time. The population in South Australia was less than 600,00 and was made up mostly of British people. Only about 1,600 Italians lived in South Australia in 1927, although a large number arrived because The United States of America had restricted the immigration of Italians. But there was widespread prejudice against Italians in Australia at this time. Even the Premier of South Australia advised the Parliament that the state wanted “pure white northern Europeans” rather than Italians. (O’Connor, p 96) [1]
The image in the feature photo shows the cover and a page from Isidoro Ballestrin’s passport issued in Italy in May 1927. It is a photo of the original held
in the National Archives of Australia in Canberra.
NAA: A435,1947/4/2012.
September 1927
On 20 September 1927 three young Italian men disembarked in Port Adelaide. They did not speak English, had very little money in their pockets, no promise of a job or prospects but they were “full of hope.”[2] They had left their families in Valla’ close to the village of Riese in the province of Treviso in the Veneto region. The family, like many others in the region lived in a large household of three generations. Frank Ballestrin, son of Isidoro, remembered his parents talking about 40 members of the extended family living in one house. Poverty was a daily life without much food and prospects for young men and women were limited in a subsistence existence.
The voyage to Australia
The three men, Antonio Ballestrin, 25 years, and his brother, Isidoro, aged 23 years arrived per the ship ‘Regina d’Italia’ with their cousin, Giuseppe Ballestrin aged 17 years.
We don’t know about their long voyage between Genova and its first port of call in Australia at Fremantle and then, Adelaide and other Australian ports. Fortunately, we can get an idea of the difficult experience through an account written by a Veneto man who had travelled to Melbourne in a sister ship, the ‘Re d’Italia’ in the same year.[3]
The voyage was very, very bad: the food was awful and I was sick the whole time. As everything was rationed for the long arduous journey, we were fed a lot of soup but hardly any pasta, which was awful, and as the ship was loaded with heavy cargo there were almost no individual cabins and my sleeping quarters comprised a very large room of thirty people or more… the seas were very rough and sometimes you couldn’t even eat because the Re d’Italia rocked so much… We were at sea for about fifty days. (De Bolfo, pp 34-35)
Arrival in Adelaide
When migrants arrived in 1927, they had to give the name of a guarantor who could provide access to accommodation and employment for two years because the Government did not want to take responsibility for the new arrivals. The Ballestrins had named Orazio Bonin, who had arrived in Adelaide two years before, as their main guarantor. Orazio had come from Poggiana near Riese and maybe he had had a connection with the Ballestrins from Valla’, also a village in the municipality of Riese. Orazio Bonin would have been a boarder at 213 Currie Street, a boarding house in the west end of the City of Adelaide. He would not have set up the Ballestrins with employment because work was hard to find.
Other Veneti who became market gardeners in the area arrived they called Lockleys in Adelaide in 1927.[4] Six men gave the same address as 213 Currie Street in the City of Adelaide, but they named different guarantors who were living in the boarding house. Others gave the name of Raymond Balestrin from Spineda, also near Valla’ and was the proprietor of the boarding house at 215 Currie Street for a time.
Early working days
Isidoro Ballestrin
The Ballestrins did not stay for long at the accommodation because they needed to find work. It is likely that they would not have been able to pay board without being paid wages.
When Frank Ballestrin, son of Isidoro, was interviewed for the oral history project in 2008 and 2009, he was able to provide some details about his father’s early weeks in Adelaide:
In the beginning there wasn’t any work at all. They lingered around the city there and picked up small jobs, whatever was available. And I know that at Christmas time at one stage they didn’t have any money for Christmas, so the Government made them sweep the streets and gave them a few dollars just to be able to celebrate Christmas with their friends… My father, Isidoro, went up north, up at Finke, up that area, sinking wells and building fences for the farmers, and actually the [Italian] chappie that he went with – I don’t know who he was – but he hung himself. And Dad panicked and he got lost, no water, [and a group of Aboriginal people] gradually got him back to life again because he was almost gone. And then he come down here and I don’t know what he did after that. I don’t know what he picked up after that. But I know he kept saying about that, it was really horrendous. (OH 872/7)
[Finke is about 1,400 kms north-west of Adelaide]
Antonio Ballestrin
Antonio worked as a labourer near Adelaide before he and his wife, Romilda, leased 4 acres for their market garden on Grange Road, Findon in 1936. When he applied for naturalisation in 1939, he was described as “a hard-working , sober man … respected as a gardener.”
Giuseppe Ballestrin
Giuseppe Ballestrin, at 17 years old, spent some time in different jobs after arrival. His daughter, Norma Camozzato, remembered one of his first jobs in the Adelaide Hills:
I remember him saying how he worked in various places here. But I always remember him saying how he’d have a loaf and fill it up with cherries. They had so many cherries, they were cherry picking up in the hills. And he had so many cherries, [laughs] he probably had diarrhoea…
They were young and they were hungry. (OH 872/37)
The significance of marriage
After seven years, the three Ballestrin men had work – Isidoro and Giuseppe on a market garden at Virginia about 35 kms north of Adelaide, and Antonio elsewhere. They returned to Valla’ with the hope of marrying and raising families in Adelaide. Within eight months, all three men married – Antonio to Romilda Minato, Isidoro to Maria Gina Andreazza and Giuseppe married Cesira Tieppo, all of whom lived close to Valla.’ The three married couples returned to Adelaide and by the 1940s they had all leased land for market gardens in the general Lockleys area.
The Ballestrin family grows in Adelaide
By the 1940s other members of the Ballestrin family had carried their hope to Adelaide through migration. In 1939, the youngest daughter, Luigia had arrived with her mother. In 1944, Luigia married Eugenio Zalunardo, one of the Veneto market gardeners, and it is possible to see the growth of the Ballestrin extended family in the wedding photo below. Three younger members of the family had migrated to Adelaide by 1939 and surprisingly, their mother Santa Guidolin, aged 65 years, had also made the decision, leaving 4 adult children in Valla.’
All first-generation members of the Ballestrins, apart from Antonio and Romilda, who did not have children, raised families in Adelaide between the 1930s and 1950s.
99 years and five generations
There are now five generations in the extended Ballestrin family in Adelaide. The first generation were contadini or people who worked the land to cultivate vegetables and only one in the second generation, Frank, worked until retirement in market gardens. Others in the second generation were the first to work outside the family while the third and fourth generations have taken different roles in information technology, hairdressing, architecture, trades, furniture manufacturing and design, construction, and office work, to name just a few.
Frank reflected on his father’s decision to migrate to Australia 99 years ago and his hope for a better future:
It was the best thing he did. He must have suffered over there in Italy because he never wanted to return to live or have a holiday. 99 years ago, my father would never have imagined that his family could have progressed with education and employment – and have a better standard of living here in Australia than what it was in Italy at that time.
Madeleine Regan with assistance from Frank Ballestrin
13 September 2026
[1] O’Connor, Desmond, No need to be afraid: Italian settlers in South Australia between 1839 and the Second World War, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1996.
[2] Lina Rismondo nee Marchioro used these words to describe the attitude of her parents, Francesco and Margherita Marchioro who had arrived in Adelaide with their small daughter in 1926. Lina said that new young Veneto migrants, like her parents, began their new life in Australia with hope.
[3] This account is taken from the book, De Bolfo, Tony, In Search of Kings: What became of the Passengers of the Re d’Italia, HarperCollins Publishers, Sydney, 2002.
[4] Altogether 18 Veneto men and one woman arrived in Adelaide between 1926 and 1928 and became market gardeners in the Lockleys area. Apart from the three Ballestrins, there were Alberto and Pietro Berno and their cousin, Gino Berno; Francesco and Margherita (and baby Mary) Marchioro; Vittorio Marchioro; Angelo Piovesan; Brunone Rebuli; Giovanni Santin; Secondo Tonellato; Eugenio Zalunardo and Silvano Zampin.