I rarely come out as a writer. It’s too fraught. Someone in the room has a friend of a friend who’s an author and whose novel was published by a BIIIIIIG PUBLISHER and it’s a runaway bestseller making a motza. When pushed for details, like a title or nome-de-plume, they’re usually thin. Or there’s someone who’s always wanted to write as there’s so much about their life that’s so individual and interesting it would be as easy as shelling peas. Or another who magnanimously says, “I’d love to read your work.”
Well…capitalism will afford you the opportunity. Just buy it. We rock momentarily at an impasse. Oh …I see. I’m meant to give you one.
One person said, “Why do you do it if you don’t make any money?”
Unanswerable question. By then the cocktail conversation has hopefully pressed on, and I can slip back in the closet.
So, one evening I’d gone to a neighbour’s house for a pre-dinner sherry. Tongue loosened, I let my secret slip. WTAF! Why did I say that? The hostess swelled, and I thought, here it comes. But she said something unexpected, “Boy, have I got a story for you.”
She rushed off to the reaches of the house and returned with a quarto white folder. Tucked into the front leaf was an oval sepia photo, a stern, tall man in a Savonarola chair, a younger woman in snow voile standing at his side, a flowing white corsage between them. Her parents.
“Take it,” she said. “Read it.”
Without my glasses and after a couple of glasses, I flicked through a variety of photocopied documents, hand-written letters in Italian, official government documents, applications for Australian citizenship naturalization and a host of statutory declarations.
“They were innocent,” she said. I looked up at her. She was insistent. “They didn’t do anything.”
I looked at the folder. Could I? Should I? In a few weeks,I was going to Tasmania and could read it. She’d whet my appetite.
So what did I find? It wasn’t what I’d first expected – a rickety draft of a manuscript of her parents’ lives. In fact, at first, it was nothing, the first few documents of Australian naturalization. There were some police records, dated 1946, about the return of personal artifacts seized from her father at some point. I read but soon realised the documents were stretching back in time. And there was no easy connection between them, gaps, events unrecorded or perhaps lost documents. I turned it all over to the end and decided to read backwards. And the story, like a well-tempered piece of jazz, unfolded, the absent notes more interesting than the played.
Her parents were Italian Australian sugarcane farmers. At the time of Australian Federation in 1901, the newly minted Australian Government passed a brutal law, The White Australia Policy, restricting immigration to mainly white citizens, to avoid the “problems” encountered in the United States with African American slavery. As early as the 1860s, the Kanak people had been brought to the cane fields from the nearby South Sea islands to establish and work the Queensland cane fields. These islanders were indentured by many means, but the recruitment process was generally called “blackbirding,” where they were at best coerced, at worst taken against their will, from their islands which gives you a rough idea of the conditions under which they were transported. Although never sanctioned slavery, reports exist of these people being traded “like cattle.”
After the passing of The White Australia Policy, the Kanak and by now their descendants were just as forcibly returned to their island “homes,” leaving a vacuum of labour. In the build-up to this change, an Italian businessman, Chaiffredo Venerano Fraire, proposed a scheme to bring Italian workers to the fields, the first arriving as early as 1891. After all, the Italians were “almost white” and adapted to working in the heat, ignoring the fact many came from the cooler Veneto regions of the north.
These first forays of Italian workers met with considerable opposition from local British Australians and their trade unions. In 1907, The Bulletin described the Italians as bucolic, dull-witted, primitive and impoverished. In the early part of the twentieth century, especially after WWI, northern Italy was destroyed, with no clear light to lead them forward. So many Italians took up these offers and travelled to the other side of the world to work.
The Italians worked extremely hard, communally, sharing labour and equipment, and soon bought land, crossing the great divide to landowners. Of course, most thought they would return to Italy with a small fortune after a few good seasons of cane cutting. But things fall apart; hearts are lost and won, marriages made, children born, and soon the migrants’ paths to easy return are slippery.
At the least, this folder of documents dealing with the lives of these people in the lead up to WWII demanded more investigation.
I found newspapers of the time, The Cairns Post, and indeed they corroborated some of the folder’s information. These stories had happened. But the thing I found most disturbing was in some newspaper articles if I replaced Catholic with Muslim, Italian with Iraqi or Iranian or Syrian, I was reading a contemporary article about the current influx of refugees and immigrants into Australia. Nothing has changed. The newcomer, these “new chums” are still being accused of taking jobs, threatening the social order, bludging, bleeding all the good from the land and sending it back to their countries. And they are never praised, as these Italians should have been, of furthering the strength of their new home and forming a new nation’s ligature and backbone.
In June 1940, Mussolini entered WWII. Most of the Italian men on the Australian cane fields were arrested as enemy aliens and imprisoned in concentration camps, far, far away from their homes, business and families, in the states of Victoria and South Australia.
The “guilt” of these Italians is the centre of the debate – did or didn’t they have fascist sympathies? And if they did have sympathies, how did they act on them? But what is clear is their sentence far outstripped any crime. And what is also clear is that past grudges from the British Australians, resentments over the level of the Italian’s success, came to play a significant role in the accusations levelled against the Italians.
And I’d been given a folder containing documents of interrogations, seized letters and wild accusations.
My neighbour’s folder had won me. This was now the three years’ traffic of my page, finally Sweet Bitter Cane. I guess the moral of my tale is I should tell more people I write, that I seek to be an author. But I don’t suppose I will. I can cope with being a writer in the virtual, in the real world it runs amok. But people have many, many stormy tales to tell, of lies and truths, sweet and bitter, and lust and love.
G. S. Johnston, February 25, 2019
