Joseph Salvador

Story

My father Giuseppe married Itala, my mother, in the Friuli region of Northern Italy, after returning from the front. My father was born the illigitimate son, to my paternal grandmother Amalia. He was conceived whilst my grandmother cared for her sister’s alcoholic husband dying of throat cancer. My mothers’ mother Maria, allowed her to keep the baby but banished her from the town of San Vito to avoid the stigma and gossip amongst the townsfolk. Amalia travelled to Milan, functionally illiterate, a single mother, housed her newborn in a Mussolini run state orphanage and supported herself as a domestic and nanny, chosing to raise 2 privileged young daughters of wealthy gynaecologists.

When my father returned to his home town in Friulo post WWII, he met my mother, my maternal grandmother Maria’s daughter was also my paternal grandmother’s sister. My father and my mother were advised of their close kinship when they began courting. My brother and I were the product of an incredible incestuous relationship which led them to live and work in Milan, ostracised by my mother’s family. My generous mothers dowry, however, helped establish their first grocery store in the city of Milan, followed by a larger more modern store in Corso Buenos Ayres, Milan’s main avenue.

The arrival of US supermarkets in Milan in the mid 1950’s spelled the end of smaller boutiques and my father was forced to close his doors, locked out, the lease being cancelled on the grocery store premises by the local council when he refused to liquidate stock and move out, voicing his concerns to the press that the influx of US corporates were destroying the fabric of Italian society and its marketplace.

Bankrupt and without income and a home, my brother and I were returned to my mother’s family to be looked after by relatives while my mother and father and my father’s mother Amalia, living in a ”monolocale” a small one bedroom apartment in Milan, made ends meet and sold our furniture and effects whilst my father worked as a chocolate and confectionery merchandiser.

A client of my father’s grocery store advised him that Canadfian and Australian governents were eagerly seeking and assisting skilled people with payment to migrate. Giuseppe quickly went to the immigration office, conferred with my mother as to their preferred destination and opted for Australia, citing too cold a climate in Canada.

My father had learned to speak both English and French fluently whilst fighting alongside US and French allies during his WWII campaigns in North Africa, so either Quebec or Sydney would have been suitable destinations for our new home. My brother and I were quickly packed with one suitcase each and my aunts, uncles and cousins delivered us to the port in Genova for embarkation in February 1961. The ship was the Conte Grande, its last such voyage before being scrapped, having ferried migrants between the 2 hemispheres since the war’s end. We endured and enjoyed 30 days at sea, a cruise where we visited Naples and Messina in Sicily for the first time on stop-overs collecting more departing migrants,

A highlight of our journey was the slow crossing and the refuelling in the Suez Canal with the shimmering Geiza Pyramids in the distance. We shopped by way of buckets on pulleys with the merchants below at the ship’s bow, selling everything from leather camel foot stools to green bunches of huge green skinned ripe bananas and, to my mother’s great delight, wonderful white Egyptian cotton underwear for the whole family. The traders spoke poorly translated Italian and sold men’s and women’s underpants, spruiking to the buyers on board ”magle per culi”, ”sweaters for bums”.

My brother was severely reprimanded and punished with a cabin curfew having gone missing on board for an entire day. He had covered each and every deck collecting cigarette buts to help my father save money for his cigarettes. I witnessed a young man run into a thick plate glass door on one of the ship’s decks. The young fellow died from the injury sustained whilst picking tobacco in the hot Myrtleford fields in Victoria. His young grief stricken wife was reapatriated.

We set foot on Fremantle wharf, a refuelling and supply stop on our way to Melbourne and Bonegilla in Victoria. The wharf was stockpiled with row upon row of fat sweet lanolin smelling bales of merino fleece. To this day, the memory of my brother and I playing hide and seek between the maze of wool bales, is so strong it has encouraged my collection of old interesting, hand forged bale hooks which proudly line hanging from a picture rail in my 1941 cottage living room in Canberra.

Bonegilla was a frightening place to arrive in late February.

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