Italian or Australian?

Salvatore never really identified with being an Australian. As a teenager he hung around with the Italian boys in Five Dock, a suburb of Sydney where the Italian migrants started to move to. He spent time in the local pool halls and always played a mean game of pool. A lot of his friends drifted into trades such as mechanics as a way to follow the Italian boy’s obsession with cars. Salvatore was different ( although always enjoyed Italian cars) and stayed at school and eventually went to university.

Salvatore and his brother had desperately tried to 'fit in' with the idea of being Australian. The obvious manifestation of being different was the food. They begged their mother, a sensational cook, to buy TV dinners which were frozen prepared dinners wrapped in alfoil with a little section for mashed potato, another for peas and possibly carrots and finally a chop or steak. All this could be easily heated in the oven. It was the frozen version of meat and three veg.

One night sitting down to a mountain of delicious pasta Salvatore told me the story of wanting TV dinners to be the same as his Aussie friends. Savoring the pasta et polpetti  (Pasta and ball meats!), I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Another distinctive difference to every other Italian male I know is that Salvatore couldn’t care less about soccer. However every World Cup he would always take the Italian side.

I learnt from him that Aussies were called “Skips”, after the television personality Skippy the kangaroo. Every migrant child knows the term Skips but unlike the reciprocal “Wog” or “dago” they kept it much more to themselves.

Francesco Ricatti , in his article 'First love and Italian postwar migration' said 


‘The way I looked to others was another surprise. I had never realised that I was classified as different because I didn’t know that blonde hair and blue eyes was seen as normal...As I noticed these differences, and I was hurt, I tried to change myself in order to be accepted. The first thing I learnt was no salami sandwiches for lunch, and instead I wanted to order a meat pie or a vegemite sandwich. I also realised that my mum didn’t use Kraft cheese in my sandwiches but the smelly one. In the classroom situation, when it came time to tell the class ‘news’ I’d find myself changing the stories so that mine wouldn’t sound so different from the others. The day we spent making salami at Zio Rocco’s turned into a family barbecue and watching a soccer game became an afternoon at the footy.’ 

 Being called 'wog' or 'dago' was commonplace in the sixties and seventies and was often the cause of scuffles between boys It was not unusual for scuffles to break out when young Italians were called names such as ‘wog’ or ‘dago’. A group of Italo-Australian boys interviewed in a Brisbane boys’

high school in 1979, made the point that the worst kind of name calling which they could offer back to their Anglo-Australian peers were words such as ‘convict’ or ‘skippy’, did not have the same derogatory value as ‘wog’ and ‘dago’. 


Clearly, the power to define cultural symbols lay in the hands of the Anglo-Australians, even when the majority of boys including the dux of the college, happened to be Italo-Australian. 
On his Italo/Australain identity, Francesco Ricatti further states that that  


‘My Italianess stood out in me as if I were wearing a constant sign. I even started believing the images they [Australians] had of my culture, and if they made fun of it, I’d find myself laughing with them rather than defending myself. To be  accepted, I was agreeing with their comments and ideas about my culture and family: my Grandmother wore black; my parents had an accent; I had garlic breath; I only washed once a week; I had spaghetti for breakfast; my father was a mafia godfather; my Uncle owned a fruitshop...'

Calabrese

We were all gathered for the 50^th anniversary of the Nesci family migrating to Australia. Little did we know then that this was the last time we would hear Salvatore’s humour. He didn’t disappoint and this time wrote an Ode to Nonna (his mother of the equivalent of grandma in English) in Calabrese or Calabrian, the dialect of the region.  The written poem is all the more amusing because Calabrese is thought of as a spoken dialect.

C’era na bell chiamata Ntonuzza

Contadina, durmia cui cucuzza

ma si sposao cu Raffaele

senza luna di mele

ma po dopo disseros nindiimo di ca –che puzza

Dopo tant’ anni lavorando colu mulu

Raffele partio per luaustalia sulu sulu

Ciangendo disse addio alla famiglia

partio cu poco robba in valigia

gridando : Fabrizai vanculo

Che vitaccia ogni girono in Fattoria

e a notte chiamando “dove sei cara mia?”

In quei giorni non cera lalitalia

per portar la gnete in Australia

dop un mese viaggiando con in pesci

finalmenet si riuniro tutti in Nesci

 e oggi siamo qui per dare grazie a Antonuzza mamma mia

Loosely translated it reads as:

There was a beauty called Antonuzza

Peasant, mother and great cook,

But she married Raffaele

Didn’t have a honeymoon

And was told that she had to leave – that stank

After many years working in the mill

Raffaele went to Australia alone, alone

He said goodbye to the family

With very few things in his bags

And said “Fuck you” to Fabrizia

He worked every day in factories

And at night said where are you my darling

Not sure of the next line

To bring them to Australia

After a month of travelling with the fishes

The Nescis were finally reunited

And we’re here thanks to my mother Antonuzza.

                                  Antonuzza and her father and mother on a trip back to Calabria

After years of listening to Calabrese, I came to realise that I could follow part of the conversation with my knowledge of Italian, just by adding ‘oo’ to the end of many words. The “oo” sound is similar to the final sound in the word ‘who’, for example ‘sulu, sulu” is Calabrese for solo, solo or alone, alone.

My first encounter with trying to understand Calabrese was when my father-in-law died. Death is a time when you can really delve into another culture as death rituals are a mirror into the heart of a culture. 

Family and paesani would come around and just sit. All the chairs in the dining room were placed around the walls of the room and people would sit and in turn sigh out another a platitude. “Ahh What canna you do.” “Ahh he had a good life.” “Ahh he’s in a better place.” “Ahh he was a good man.” These were in either Calabrian, Italian or English

Someone would also be telling a story or explaining something in Calabrian and I was able to follow the main idea of the conversation because I would hear a word in English like ‘bathroom” “that’s right”, “high school”. Eventually I started to piece together some of the stories but after the obligatory introduction of platitudes they really started to talk and talk and talk.

All Italians are masters in the art of conversation, particularly those from peasant backgrounds like the paesani from Fabrizia where literacy levels are very low. Theirs was an oral culture and everything was passed on verbally. Everything was spoken. Stories are embellished and detail is important. The truth is often irrelevant. 

When my mother –in-law, Antonuzza, was staying at my brother and sister-in-law’s house in Italy, she was helping in the kitchen. Robyn, my sister-in-law is an excellent cook and her kitchen is her domain. Antonuzza vocalises every action. “Now I’m chopping the onions.” “I’m going to take out the centre of the eggplants.” “You must stir the sauce all the time.” It was driving Robyn mad as the chatter continued all through the preparation for a large family and friends dinner and of course every day while they were in Italy together.

Afterwards we could both imagine Nonna with her sisters all talking and the kitchen about rolling the pasta, baking the bread and stirring the sauce for the pasta. All the learning and information about life was passed on in this great oral tradition. This was their work and life, they didn't have anything else to do such s rush off after dinner to a show or write a blog or go down for a swim after lunch.

Professor Jo lo Bianco, Chair of Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne School of graduate Education at Melbourne University and President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and most importantly,  a Calabrian, claims that Calabrese is a dialect of Italy not of the Italian language. 

This means that the Calabrese dialect is equal in importance to the national language which comes from the area of Tuscany.  He states that the so called dialects of Italian are all direct descendants of proto-Latin, that is  vulgar Latin and that the different influences of each area were all absorbed into the ‘dialect. 

Calabrian has a lot of Greek influence as Calabria was part of Magna Graecia in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. The language also has influences from the Byzantine period which although it was a continuation of the Roman Empire was actually quite Eastern and Spanish. Further he claims that what is commonly called ITALIAN is also a direct descendent of Latin, that is lingua Toscana in bocca romana which is Tuscan as pronounced by Romans. So this thing, which linguists call standard Italian, or Italiano standard is a sister of Calabrian, not its parent.

Description	English: Ancient Greek colonies and their dialect groupings in Southern Italy (Magna Graecia).    NW Greek    Achaean    Doric    Ionian
Date	6 September 2008
Source	Own work Dialect areas according to: Roger D. Woodard (2008), "Greek dialects", in: The Ancient Languages of Europe, ed. Roger D. Woodard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.51. (= partial re-published version of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Ancient Languages, 2004). Positions of cities after various on-wiki sources.
Author	Future Perfect at Sunrise

Ciao paesani

Mention to anyone that your partner is Calabrian and you are confronted with knowing looks and smiles. Mafiosi, revenge and marijuana plantations at Griffith in NSW Australia come to mind. Today on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald was an article about the Italian government wanting the extradition of three Calabrian/ Australians wanted for drug/Mafia related crimes.


There is of course another side to the Calabrian stereotype and that is the hard-working loyal and family loving (when not feuding) Calabrian. My in-laws were the latter and in thone generation went from illiterate peasant farmers with very little, if any, schooling to proudly attending the university graduation of their two sons, Bruno and Salvatore.
Salvatore Nesci, my partner for nearly 30 years died on May 10 2009. He was born in Fabrizia, a small town in the hills of Calabria and migrated to Australia with his family when he was five years old.


I wanted to tell his story as a tribute to all he did for me and our daughter, Raffaela. It is also a thankyou to my brother-in-law, Bruno who pledged that he would look after us on my husband's deathbead. I am forever grateful, if a somewhat difficult person to look after.
The picture for this blog is of Salvatore when he was 2 or 3, dressed as a little Saint Anthony. This, my friends is a good place to start Calabrian Tales.