Nunzio and Maria Caruso

Story

Nunzio Caruso arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia in 1951. He saw it as an escape to a better life than could be provided in the small town of Sinagra in the Sicilian hillside, west of Messina. He left behind a wife Maria, and three children, Vincenzo, Angelina and Salvatore. After a brief return to Sicily in 1953 a fourth child, Nunziatina, was born the following year. When the whole family finally migrated to join Nunzio in 1962, we hardly knew the man whom we would call ‘dad\’.

Nunzio was not highly educated in the formal sense, but was intelligent and ‘street smart\’ with a high degree of independence, as evidenced by the fact that within two years of arriving in Australia, with no knowledge of English, he became a self employed contractor, actually employing other workers.

Dad\’s skills as a stonemason and builder meant that we moved into a solid brick and tile home in Morley, a new outer Perth suburb with few migrants, but boasting an American style shopping complex with a Boans department store as the main attraction and the very popular Wirrina drive-in cinema next door.

In those early years we thought ourselves very lucky because, as our house was on the high side of the street, from our dining room window we could see the full screen of the drive-in. Many a hot summer night was spent watching Elvis movies, Gidget or Annette Funicello in Bikini Beach. The lack of sound or music didn\’t deter us Ð we fantasised that one day we would try and extend one of the speaker cords all the way up to our house Ð then we could have free movies forever! It wasn\’t long before we had two more additions to the family, John, born in 1963 and Robert, in 1965.

The house sat on heavy sandstone foundations that housed a garage and a cellar for the big vat of fermenting wine that dad got from Luisini wines at Wanneroo. There was still plenty of room for his Zephyr ute that we all piled into Ð most of us perched on tool boxes in the back Ð when we reluctantly went off with him to work on his building sites. My brother John remembers those days:

No school holidays for us Ð it was up at dawn for a day\’s work. We would carry bricks, get tools, dig holes and hold the surveying level to shouts of ‘up a bit’, ‘down a bit’ and ‘hold it’. We graduated to building scaffolds and making ‘mud’ (cement), all of this before I was fifteen. Even though I hated going I now thank my dad for all the skills he taught me on the job.

Feeding and clothing a large family on a limited budget required creative solutions as John continues:

I remember thinking how poor we must have been. Mum would make all our clothes from cheap material that she had bought ‘on special’ from ‘wool-a-woods’ (Woolworths). I bet that no other kid at school was wearing a shirt with matching undies (except my younger brother, of course!).

According to Salvatore, another brother, some school expenses were seen as more worthy than others

My father\’s traditional view of education placed no value in physical education or excursions. Consequently, whenever there was a sporting or other event which required monetary contribution from parents for children to attend, it was impossible to extract any money from him for me to go. However, there was a notable exception when I asked for bus fare of two shillings to go on a school excursion to wave at the Queen on her visit to Perth in 1964. I happily waved at the Queen as she passed by. My father was a great admirer of Prime Minister Menzies and of Her Majesty, and was to his death a loyal citizen and monarchist Ð the irony is that today he probably would never have passed one of those new citizenship tests that governments require.

Life as a large migrant family in an Anglo-Australian community brought with it the complexities of dealing with cross-cultural relationships, misunderstandings and often tensions both inside the family & in the neighbourhood.

John fought his battles in the schoolyard:

My memories of childhood, as the son of Italian migrants, are not all happy ones. Growing up in the early 1970s, in the Anglo-Saxon dominated Perth suburb of Morley, I recall being teased, picked on and bashed by the ‘Aussie’ locals for being Italian. Even though I was Australian born I could not shake off my Italian ‘tag’. Shouts of greasy ding, dago, wog, and garlic muncher greeted me every morning upon my arrival at school.

At home, Nunzio as an old fashioned southern Italian man never let go of his view that Australian morals were loose and girls in particular needed to be shielded from the free wheeling late 1960s and 70s lifestyle that was very appealing to a bunch of teenagers, desperate to assimilate and not really used to an authoritarian father figure. Fights were fought, doors were slammed.

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