Transcript of interview
We used to live in Rome, and we had a pretty decent life in Rome, but we decided to come to Australia, and the ship was full of Italian migrants. When I say ‘Italian’, this was the first time that I met Sicilians and Calabrians, which represent about 90 per cent of the immigrants from Italy, and I’d never seen people like that before, anywhere. These are the people who came from impoverished regions of Italy, you know, villages and places like that. Some of them could not even speak Italian, you know. To me, they were just like a novelty, you know. They kept to themselves, and they kept talking in their dialect and things like that. They used to play cards, and you could hear different stories, you know, people who had been here before, telling stories about how much money they were going to make, and all this sort of stuff. Personally, as a 14-year-old, to me it was just a big adventure. Mum was keen to see my sister again because that is the main reason why we migrated to Australia, to be reunited with my sister, who had come to Australia a few months before. Dad was having fun, yeah. Dad had been a sailor during the War, and he used to joke with us because we felt sea sick and he used to go down the dining room hall, I remember, and eat away, while we were sick in the cabin, yeah. Anyway, I think it was a couple of weeks later, we crossed the Indian Ocean and it was in the morning and the ship just slowed down, very very slow. I don’t know. I think it was some sandbanks to negotiate the Fremantle Harbour. And it was a very very clear day, very blue skies. And it struck me to see this land line, very very low on the horizon that was all red and sandy. And a couple of hours later we were into Fremantle. It’s just colours that were totally different from the Mediterranean Sea, you know, where it’s more harsh contrasts of blues and rock and stuff like that. It was a totally different morphology. And we went ashore. We visited the place. It was very nice actually. And three days later we docked in Melbourne, where the majority of the Italian immigrants left, yeah, and a couple of days later, we arrived in Sydney.
