Reverberations: an Exploration of Memory and Cultural Identity

Reverberations: An exploration of memory and cultural identity

Diane Powell PhD (English and Media) 2008 PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: POWELL

First name: DIANE Other name/s: LESLIE

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: ENGLISH, MEDIA & PERFORMING ARTS Faculty: ARTS & SOCIAL SCIENCES

Title: REVERBERATIONS: AN EXPLORATION OF MEMORY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

This thesis is about the way memory and identity are continually reconstituted and how they shape and impinge upon each other. I use my own experience of growing up in Italian and Anglo Australian cultures as a primary source to examine the changing nature of memory affects and to consider they ways in which events of the past have formed and transformed my cultural identity. I also explore the intermingling of personal and collective memory and how ethnic groups negotiate community identity within national identity formations.

Concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly those of the rhizome, the refrain and territorialisation, are keys to understanding practices associated with memory and identity and I apply them throughout the thesis. Nostalgia and loss are emotions often tangled up with memory and identity and I use the work of Barthes, Stewart and Woodward in discussing these. I use other diverse theories to look at the ways memory is embedded in the body – manifested in gestures, performance and everyday practices – and mediated in rituals, film, photographs, documents and objects.

The style of writing does not adhere to the conventions of academic discourse and diverts intermittently from scholarly argumentation. It assembles disparate memory events – both personal and collective – along with factual information, fragments of biography and autobiography, and reflection and analysis. It is written this way in part to resemble the process of thinking and remembering which is never a smooth, logically flowing stream of intelligence.

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‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

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Date ……………………………………………...... Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my supervisors, Anne Brewster and Gay Hawkins, for their insight, guidance and understanding in the shaping and writing of this thesis.

Their engagement with my project encouraged exploration into fields and ideas that added significantly to my research and writing.

Thanks also to the Schools of English and Media for practical help and the

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for field-work and conference travel assistance to Melbourne and Italy.

Thanks to friends and family who have provided the kind of support that keeps one sane and grounded during the process of undertaking a PhD.

Finally, thanks to my Italian and English ancestors.

Reverberations: an exploration of memory and cultural identity

Abstract

◊◊◊ Diane Powell UNSW z3022333 PhD Thesis Contents

Contents ...... 1 Chapter 1. Introduction...... 4 Method/Genre ...... 5 Memory events...... 9 Memory triggers...... 10 Mediations of memory ...... 14 Identity and recognition ...... 15 Refrains ...... 18 Mourning...... 20 Beginnings and endings ...... 23 Chapter 2. Memory and Identity ...... 27 Memory and psychoanalysis ...... 29 Memory and philosophy ...... 31 Duration ...... 34 Locating memory ...... 36 Memory and the body ...... 38 Memory and the social body ...... 42 Rhizomatic and arborescent memory...... 47 Chapter 3. Echoes ...... 53 The films ...... 54 Acentred perception ...... 57 Newsfront and the spaces between ...... 62 Amarcord and memory traces ...... 67 Amarcord and sense memory...... 75 Auratic gaze ...... 80 Chapter 4. Murmurs ...... 85 A life remembered ...... 86 Shame ...... 89 Ausies, Ities and others ...... 94 Same same but different...... 98 A life in the making ...... 103 A life scandalized ...... 105 The Manhunt ...... 107 2

Of Mediterranean appearance ...... 109 Le Chiacchiere ...... 110 A life archived...... 112 A life forgotten ...... 114 Wedding Dresses ...... 116 Chapter 5. Family Tracings ...... 119 Rift ...... 121 Ausie-Itie ...... 122 Retrieval ...... 124 Pilgrimages and Expeditions...... 125 Visiting Zanè and Piovene, Vicenza, Italia ...... 125 Exploring the archives ...... 129 Expedition 1 ...... 131 Expedition 2 ...... 133 Cyber-traces ...... 136 Visiting Bridport, Dorset, UK ...... 141 Expedition 3 ...... 144 Traces ...... 146 Expedition 4 ...... 147 'And the waste, memory waste' ...... 149 Chapter 6. Remainders ...... 152 Left-behind things ...... 153 Vessels of memory ...... 154 Remains of the dead ...... 157 Musealization ...... 159 Immigration Museums ...... 162 The Immigration Museum, Melbourne ...... 164 Deadly and lively exhibitions ...... 166 New Italy, 'A Living Heritage' ...... 167 Griffith Italian Museum ...... 171 Migration Heritage Centre ...... 173 Museums of the heart ...... 176 Chapter 7. Memento ...... 179 The there-then - Italians in south west Sydney ...... 181 The Exhibition ...... 185

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Memory, recognition and identity...... 188 The Participants ...... 190 Private-Public ...... 192 Loss and continuity ...... 197 Lost spaces-lost times ...... 198 The here-now ...... 201 Shaping a territory...... 201 The milieu of the exhibition ...... 202 The spectator ...... 204 Noeme ...... 205 Chapter 8. Souvenirs ...... 207 Cultural Refrains ...... 209 Maintaining identity ...... 211 Clubs ...... 212 Feste ...... 215 Quotation...... 218 Bodily practices ...... 220 Following generations ...... 222 Wog culture ...... 226 Chapter 9. Alla fine (in conclusion) ...... 232 Nostalgia ...... 233 'Remembering forwards' ...... 234 Refrain...... 235 Australian Italianicity...... 238 Reverberations ...... 240 Conclusion ...... 241

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Chapter 1. Introduction

This thesis explores memory and cultural identity and how they act upon each other in a constant process of reciprocal transformation. Memory and identity are both personal and social, beginning early in human development and perpetually in process. They are contingent upon each other. Relations to other people and social surroundings reside in memory and constitute identity. Memory, in turn, changes according to how a person (an identity) is situated in a particular milieu at a particular instant. It is the complex links between memory and identity that I seek to untangle in this dissertation; how memory and identity shape and reshape each other in this continual spiral.

I use myself as a primary source to examine the changing nature of my own identity, as someone who has grown up in Italian and Anglo-Australian1 cultures.

I consider some of the ways Italian immigrants and later generations of Italian-

Australians negotiate cultural identity, cherishing elements of their ancestral culture as they incorporate themselves into mainstream Australia. Some – particularly first generation Italian immigrants – remain predominantly Italian in their manner and cultural practices. Second and third generations – and those who arrive as children – often move between identities, occupying different cultural spaces depending on circumstances.

1 I use the terms 'Anglo' throughout as 'shorthand' to describe Australians of an English speaking background from the United Kingdom, and from England. I do not like the currently popular suffix 'Celtic' as it describes the roots of many Europeans other than Irish and Scottish. It was primarily the English government that dominated the United Kingdom, its Empire and Colonies, rather than Scots, Welsh and Irish. It was the English government that historically controlled Australia, formed its foundations and continue to dominate its political, social and cultural spheres (and often persecuted the Irish).

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Method/Genre

This is not a sequential account or conventional autobiography. As I move through memories I pause at various junctures to reflect on contemporary cultural issues and make detours to consider ideas about memory, identity and cultural difference. I sometimes digress into a memory that has been triggered while writing, and occasionally wander into reverie, illustrating the unpredictable and undisciplined trajectories of memory.

In the memory events I write about, I am the medium through which the memories flow, as well as the subject of them in many cases. It is in and around me, the writing subject, that the memories are folded and unfolded; each memory coming forth to perceive the world, interpreting events according to time and context. It is not possible to disconnect memory from the self or my present from my past; nor is it possible to establish an unequivocal identity, either for myself, as the remembering person, or for those about whom I write. All that follows is filtered through me, and expresses the world as it relates to me, but my memories and perceptions are likely to resonate with other people who share the same or similar cultural backgrounds.

I originally planned for this dissertation to be a web site or CD ROM with a basic narrative containing hyperlinks to related memories, biographies, stories, theories, comment and analysis. I abandoned this idea as it would have been too time- consuming to acquire the necessary level of technical and creative skills, while also undertaking the research required to write the thesis. As a compromise I have taken the elements planned for a web site and presented them as a fragmented narrative. Although it is fragmented I hope that, like a string of beads, the

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 6

different fragments will form a substantial comprehensive whole when threaded together. Throughout the dissertation I have placed various 'asides': thoughts, memories, illustrative examples that have occurred to me while writing, re- reading and re-writing; these enact a kind of dialogue with myself. They are shown in a different font style to distinguish them from the main discussion – as seen here in an aside musing on methods of writing and apperception.

◊◊◊

In one of Gilles Deleuze's seminars at Vincennes, on 15 April 1980,2 he

discusses the philosophy of Leibniz and the notion of apperception. We

perceive the sea, through the apperception of a wave, as Deleuze summarises:

And Leibniz says: you would not hear the wave if you did not have a

minute unconscious perception of the sound of each drop of water that

slides over and through another, and that makes up the object of minute

perceptions. There is the roaring of all the drops of water and you have

your little zone of clarity you clearly and distinctly grasp one partial

result from this infinity of drops, from this infinity of roaring, and from

it, you make your own little world, your own property (Deleuze, 1980:

12).

My wish is that 'this infinity of drops' may slide over and through each other

to assemble a 'little world' to share with the reader.

◊◊◊

This assemblage is a gleaning of connected but incomplete stories.3 It takes residues of memories that would otherwise go to waste and converts them into a narrative taking the reader in and out of events, lives, and times, and through analysis, speculation and reflection. In Ursula Le Guinn's words, it is a 'carrier

2 generously translated and posted online by Charles J. Stivale http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/romance/romance.html) 3 Thanks to Gay Hawkins and Noel Sanders for bringing to my attention the documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) directed by Agnes Varda.

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bag' narrative: 'the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings'

(LeGuinn, 1989: 169).

The style of writing borrows from a number of different genres and enunciative modes. It gestures towards fictocriticism in that it is fragmented, moves between critical analysis, anecdote and memories and aims 'to produce a textuality of affective events and the rhythm of their insistence' (Brewster, 2005: 201). My style does not adhere to the conventions of academic discourse. As Anne

Brewster writes,

if there is a generic division or opposition which fictocriticism seeks to mediate, it is the demarcation inscribed in academic production of the genres of high art (fiction, poetry, drama) and the essayistic modes which purport to study them (commentary, criticism, analysis, theory) (Brewster, 1966: 29).

I do not write against accepted forms of language or narrative style but my

'strategies of the telling are part of the point of the tale' (Gibbs, 2005: 1 of article).

I write in a way that resembles the process of thinking and remembering, which is never a smooth logically flowing stream of intelligence. Thought and memory are processes without discipline. They jump about making unexpected associations, connections and contradictions. As Henri Bergson notes, 'my memories present themselves in an order which is apparently capricious'. (Bergson, 1991: 145). I have drawn together disparate memory events – both personal and collective – along with factual information, biography and autobiography, reflection and analysis. Like Proust's account of involuntary memory, a smell, taste or sound, even an almost imperceptible momentary ambience, can send you swimming

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 8

through a tangled maze of memories and thoughts.4 Writing this way 'foregrounds the materiality and texture of the language' (Brewster, 1966: 30).

An additional writing aim is to produce an account of the effects (and affects) of migration that avoid the already well-worn tracts about the migrant experience: the leaving of homeland; the confusion and distress of arriving; the struggle to survive in a new country with unfamiliar language and culture; the misery of loneliness and homesickness; the suffering of racism and prejudice; and finally the overcoming of obstacles to achieve success. These accounts of migration are heroic, sometimes tragic, significant and wonderful stories; they have been told by many, from many different countries, and while each individual's experience of migration is different, the dynamic common elements risk losing their potency through repetition and homogenisation as the 'migrant experience'. For similar reasons I did not want to write a theoretical text about migration, multiculturalism and racism that was entirely sociological. My aim is to show some of the many different textures and folds of intercultural lives, to fill out the migration stories we are familiar with in an exploration of the everyday. The migrant story doesn't end with the first generation; it continues to reverberate through the lives of subsequent generations, to affect the wider community, and at times to enter the collective memory the nation. I wonder if the experiences of migration become

'memories' for the second and third generation who bear 'marks' of exile, loss and longing, as has been found with the children and grandchildren of holocaust victims (Bar-On, 1995, Sigal, 1998). Have I absorbed something of my

4 Proust, M. (1989) Remembrance of Things Past, Penguin, London.

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grandparents' memories? Have I taken on their longing for a 'homeland' that doesn't exist?

Memory events

By the term 'memory event', I do not mean a unique occasion or occurrence, but rather the way experiences or episodes coalesce during certain periods or phases of life. These may be events that contribute to or disturb our repertoire of ritual practices and ways of being. They could be episodes that fuse with or intrude upon our sets of beliefs or practices, composing motifs that reverberate in the constitution and reconstitution of our identity. When these phases are recalled or when we find ourselves in a similar set of circumstances, the memory of those past events produce 'meaning-effects' (Colwell, 1997: para 19), affects which are often 'felt before being thought out' (Massumi, 1998: PDF page 5). Memory, as I discuss in more detail in the next chapter, is reconstituted in every act of remembering. Each act of recollection takes place in a different context of time and place and is carried or triggered by different means, filtering and affecting memories in discrete ways. Remembering also takes place within a continually reconstituted identity, so each time we remember, we are a 'different' person.

Therefore, the memory events that reverberate through a life or a society are subject to continual reinterpretation and are affected by the context in which they are being remembered – in telling a story to friends, in response to a trigger (like

Proust's Madeleines), and in writing a dissertation.

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Memory triggers

A smell or sound, an almost imperceptible momentary ambience, can call forth a past event and, in a flash, send you bouncing along a tangled maze of memories.

A memory about one thing can provoke multiple associations, signifying chains linking events, emotions, faces, voices, sounds, music, moving the mind along trajectories, hitting junctures and veering off in different directions (Deleuze and

Guattari, 1987: 7). Following are two memory events triggered for me. They are memories 'inherited' from my parents rather than from direct experience. The first memory was triggered by the 60th anniversary of ending of the War against Japan in 2005 when I recalled my mother telling me about something that happened when I was a baby.

◊◊◊

VJ Day

Around the anniversary of Victory in the Pacific – VP Day (previously known as

Victory against Japan or VJ Day), the media showed old black and white film

footage and photos of people dancing in the streets, and replayed news

reports about the dropping of the first Atom Bomb.

The bomb was dropped from an American B29 Superfortress known as

Enola Gay at 0815 local time. The plane's crew say they saw a column of

smoke rising and intense fires springing up. (BBC Broadcast 6/8/1945)

The announcement by the Prime Minister was also replayed. It was just after

9am on 15 August 1945:

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 11

Fellow Citizens, the war is over. The Japanese Government has accepted

the terms of surrender imposed by the Allied Nations and hostilities will

now cease.5

The country erupted in joyful celebration. I imagine how people must have

felt. An RSL website reports:

This was the signal for a spontaneous outpouring of happiness never

before or since seen in Australia. Martin Place in Sydney, Bourke Street

in Melbourne and the main streets of almost every city and town across

the nation became rallying points. Australians, not normally given to

public displays of emotion, danced in the streets through piles of

shredded paper which rained down from office buildings. Motor traffic

came to a halt and trams inched along main streets with revellers

clinging to the sides and roofs.6

My mother had told that when she had heard the announcement on the

wireless that day she was overwhelmed with emotion and wished she could join

in the celebrations. But she was home alone looking after me, aged 14 months.

She said she had grabbed me and run outside, calling out to the people next

door, 'Mrs Mac, Mrs Mac, are you there? Did you hear? Mrs Mac'. There was

no answer, she then rushed out onto the dusty road looking for other

neighbours but couldn't find a soul with whom to share her joy and

excitement. It was deadly quiet. She stood there with full heart in the empty

morning, with only me to hug and kiss, the humming insects to join in song, and

the breeze in the paspalum to echo her sighs of joy. When she told me this

story it made me incredibly sad. I wanted to cry for the isolation and

loneliness she must have felt at such a time.

5 Prime Minister Ben Chifley announcing the end of the war against Japan, 15 August 1945. [V-P Announcement: Segment No. 179490 in Prime Ministers of Australia: A Compilation of Speeches and Interviews. Screensound Australia, National Screen and Sound Collection, Screensound Title No: 214438] http://www.ww2australia.gov.au/vevp/ 6Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL newsletter, August-September 2004 http://www.chprsl.com.au/subbranch/subbranch-2004-09/9967L_CHPRSL%20SubBranch%20News.pdf [web page no longer available]

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After remembering this I recalled another event many years later. It was

another nation-wide celebration that she missed out on. It was Bi-Centennial

Day, 1988 and I joined the march with Indigenous Australians to Hyde Park,

and watched the fireworks that night from Garden Island. When I told my

mother about it next day, she was upset that I had not invited her to join me

in the city to participate. She had again experienced the excitement second-

hand, this time via television. I now think her disappointment was an emotional

projectile that reverberated for her from all that time ago when she missed

out on dancing in streets on VJ Day 1945.

◊◊◊

A second memory trigger also relates to the Second World War, and occurs annually as the nation commemorates Anzac Day. Anzac mythology is a powerful part of the Australian national psyche, one that has weathered changes in the nation's 'collective mentality' over the years. As Kate Darian-Smith points out, legends like that of Anzac 'change over time and within certain contexts: as the concepts of progress, nationhood and history are reviewed, the experience of war is reinterpreted and ascribed new cultural meanings' (Darian-Smith, 1994b: 138).

◊◊◊

Anzac Day

As for many Australians, for me Anzac Day is contested ground. I am a War

Baby; born before the end of World War II, my early identity was formed

through the early post war years. I experienced my father's lingering ailments

and the nations' recovery from war. Through my childhood and adolescence I

attended Dawn Services and Anzac Day Marches, as a Junior Red Cross

'sister' or as a Girl Guide.7 As I got older I questioned Anzac Day - along with

many of my generation and the Baby Boomers – seeing it as the glorification of

war and militarism. Later as a feminist I supported those who advocated the

7 http://www.redcross.org.au/nsw/aboutus_heritage_firstfiveyears.htm

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commemoration on Anzac Day of all women raped in war. It was a bitter public

conflict for some time but I could only support the feminist position silently,

not openly. Anzac Day was still too 'big' in my psyche; the overwhelming

sadness, the desolation of Anzac Day, perhaps conveyed through my father's

memories, prevented me from speaking out against the Day publicly. It seemed

like it would be a violation of the suffering my father and other diggers had

endured which somehow seemed sacred - blood spilled in our name.

The contestation of this site of national memory has been moderated over

time and generations, so I now feel less torn in my feelings about it. The

jingoistic nationalism and excessive sentimentality displayed through the

media is nauseating but, in spite of that, the sight of those once-larrikin sons

of Australia - those 'who are left grow old' - still brings tears to my eyes. As

do those songs, And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda and I was only

Nineteen, which touch the heart of many Australians, even young rap artists.

Multicultural hip-hop band, The Herd recently recorded a rap version of the

song (originally by Redgum in 1983) which was so popular it was voted No. 18 on

the Triple J 2006 Hottest 100 countdown.8 My identity is inexplicably and

irretrievably bound, in some sense, to the War. It cast its shadow over my

childhood for many years. Anzac Day and its motifs will forever afflict me

with contradictory emotions.

◊◊◊

Memories may be triggered through media reports or commemorative events as the two above, or they can be mediated by one's own thought process, via a family member telling you something about your childhood, in a verbal exchange with others who shared past experiences. They can also be conveyed by the body, which reacts to a recollection through touch, smell, sight and hearing

8 Sydney Morning Herald 18/03/2006

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Mediations of memory

Memories can be mediated by books, magazines, newspapers, film or television.

Fiction and non-fiction, historical drama or documentary may represent the past in ways that differ from our own memory, or they can influence the way we remember it. They may add new insight to a past experience, or even change our own perception of past events. Film can prompt memories not just via the images on screen, but through the narrative and the atmosphere evoked by the characters and the occasions depicted. I discuss the effect two films have had on me in a later chapter. Photographs, which I also discuss in a later chapter, have a different relation to the past: in Barthes' words they show something that 'has indeed existed' (Barthes, 1981a: 82). However, photos also mediate our memory, sometimes to the extent that the photograph can overtake the 'real'. Often it is no longer the actual person or place we remember, only the photograph of it. Other mediations I discuss include archives and official documents; history is mediated in terms of what is saved and what is forever lost, as well as by the language used, the facts recorded and those omitted. In a similar way, memory is mediated by public museums and private collections, in the objects preserved from the past and those that perish. There are also bodily and performative mediations of memory, such as commemorative rituals and practices in which the past is collectively remembered or re-enacted. In addition, many mediate cultural memory through their behaviour, style of dress and forms of speaking.

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Identity and recognition

◊◊◊

My identity is continually in process, transformed by who and what I

encounter. Writing also has a reconstructive effect on identity as a

'technology of the self' (Foucault, 1998). Thus, as I write I am re-moulding

and reconstructing myself (as well as those about whom I write). I am a

different subject with each sentence; each time I read what I have written;

and again each time I rewrite. With every memory I am situated in a different

context and am a different subject. The 'I' that I am is never still. As

Deleuze and Guattari say: 'when something occurs, the self that awaited it is

already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived' (Deleuze and

Guattari, 1987: 198).

◊◊◊

Uncertainties about one's cultural identity and allegiance are shared by many people across the world in this age of global traffic in politics, economies, cultures, and populations. There are many Australians with dual or multiple cultural identities: Indigenous people, to mention one group, constantly juggle both mainstream Australian and their own traditional cultures – which may themselves combine diverse cultures – and in some cases with European, Asian or

Middle-Eastern family backgrounds. Many second and third generation immigrants have parents from one culture (Italian) while they are themselves well integrated into mainstream Australian culture; others have parents from two or more different cultural backgrounds. Identity is no more stable than memory. It is not predetermined or permanent but is an ongoing process through which the self is socially organised. It constantly changes as we travel along the diverse trajectories life takes us. As Stuart Hall points out, the concept of identity is

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 16

'strategic and positional'. He argues against the notion of it being a 'stable core of the self' (Hall, 1996: 3):

[I]dentities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured: never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation (Hall, 1996: 4).

Although we are born into a cultural identity, we are not born with a fully-fledged identity. The sense of our self as a separate unique individual is shaped and reshaped in our relationship to others, to social and cultural assemblages and to the world in general. Its formation begins with our family, developing and being modified through contact – and conflict – with those closest to us and with the wider world of friends, neighbours, community, and nation. Identity is contingent upon these relations and to the events, times and spaces through which we move.

It can be transformed by the people and events we encounter, in what circumstances the encounter takes place, and how it is negotiated.

Identity is produced in relation to difference; we define who we believe ourselves to be through identification with and/or in opposition to the other. We mark out a personal territory within the wider social terrain, choosing among the various subject positions available. William Connolly gives an account of the contingency of identity and its importance in helping 'to recognize and attend to the claims of the other in myself and to the claims of alter-identities' (Connolly, 1991: 119-

120). He also points out that 'to confess a particular identity is also to belong to difference' (Connolly, 1991: xiv), arguing that identity 'requires difference in

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 17

order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty' (Connolly, 1991: 64). This difference has both positive and negative features, as Hall says:

Identity is a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative. It has to go through the eye of the needle of the other before it can construct itself (Hall, 1991: 21).

The positive feature of identity (who we believe we are or what we desire to become) comes about through the negative (what we do not want to be) in a continual process of evaluation. Identities are not only subject to ongoing change, they can be fragmented, multiple and/or blended, and are 'always contradictory, made up out of partial fragments' (Grossberg, 1996: 91). All of us constantly slide between identities and simultaneously embrace a number of identities as we connect with or abandon various social and cultural positions, as our politics and values develop and change.

While identity is constituted through difference, 'sameness' also has a role. The positive choices of one identity over another (the negative) can have powerful effects on our path through life and the way we negotiate social milieus. At the same time as we distinguish ourselves from some others (defining them in the negative), we often seek to positively participate in a community of like-minded people who have behaviours and interests similar to our own. We desire to belong to and be recognised as part of a particular group or groups, sometimes motivated by necessity – in order to function effectively in society – or by the perception that one group has a social advantage. Sometimes we are not sure about which group to belong to, or have difficulty being recognised as belonging to the group

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 18

we desire to be part of. Sometimes the tension between difference and sameness can create significant internal conflict.

When migrants arrive in a new country they are placed in a position of difference but are expected to acquire sameness, to assimilate (from the Latin, assimilare, to make similar to). A desire to become similar to the host culture is necessary in order to become effective cultural and social participants, but success can be hampered if there are substantial differences in mentality and/or appearance. It can be painful for many people. Joseph Pugliese saw assimilation as a 'relentless process' that 'instigates a self-laceration determined by the very divergence of the other from the same' (Pugliese, 1995: 243). My experience of growing up in two cultures was not as distressing as that described by Pugliese, who came from

Calabria in Southern Italy and landed into a quite alien culture in Australia. The two cultures I grew up in were not as different from each other as those Pugliese encountered: my Italian grandparents had already lived in Australia for over 20 years by the time I was born; my mother had been schooled in Australia, and my father was Anglo-Australian. My desire for belonging and recognition shifted from one culture to the other in a complex movement between two sources of identity as I grew up. Nevertheless, in retrieving fragments of my memory I found that many of the 'territorial refrains' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) of Italian identity remained in my 'soul', in my sensibility and in my body..

Refrains

The notion of the refrain as developed by Deleuze and Guattari is pertinent to my understanding the practices associated with maintaining and shifting cultural

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 19

identity. In their chapter 'Of the Refrain', Deleuze and Guattari talk about the marking out of territory through habits of movement, sound, display and behaviour (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Birds and animals do it with song, display or by depositing scent; humans do it through various ritual practices that create refrains. Our routines and rituals form an enveloping milieu to shelter us from disturbing forces: 'milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos' (Deleuze and

Guattari, 1987: 313). The milieus or territories we and others inhabit can converge or separate; they can flow in all directions, slide over and around each other, dissipate, bounce off and connect with other assemblages(Deleuze and Guattari,

1987: 324, 333, 338). The refrain communicates in these territorialising and deterritorialising movements. Individuals, groups, communities and nations have territorial refrains that are performed variously for reassurance; to signal to others to approach or keep their distance; and as a deterrent to the intrusion of threatening forces that might destabilize the group's identity. Territorial refrains are at play in gestures, idiomatic expressions, rituals, habits, everyday routines; in demeanour, the choice of radio and television programs or newspapers, and in the ways we engage or don't engage with others. We learn our refrains within various milieus of family, peer group, and cultural community, claiming and reclaiming our place in the contested spaces of the social structure. I discuss some of the ways refrains are significant in preserving collective and individual identity in a later chapters about community rituals.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 20

Mourning

This project is also about loss and longing. In the process of retrieving memories

– looking back on my life, reading documents and handling objects that had belonged to my family – grief about the loss of family and their connections to the past resurfaced. My father died 30 years ago as a relatively young man, and in the last decade I lost my Italian aunts and uncles, the family I was closest to. My mother, the last of her generation, died when I was in the early stages of this project. Dad's death left me with a tangle of unresolved grief that did not unravel until many years later. I did not have space to mourn his death in the face of my mother's overwhelming grief and her great need of me, and because I had a two year old child to care for.

◊◊◊

The unresolved grief over my father's death emerged years later with the

absence of my daughter overseas. The feeling when she flew away was one of

bereavement. It was if she had died. This feeling stayed for a long time after

she left. I did not want to remain in this state and sought therapy. One day

after a session, in a flash, I suddenly understood that I was displacing the

unresolved grief at the death of my father onto my daughter. He had adored

her. She was born on the eve of his birthday; she had his 'look' and sandy-red

hair. As long as my daughter was here in my presence it was as if my father

hadn't really gone. When she went, my sense of abandonment was

overpowering and the unspent tears poured out in torrents of mourning. Once

I recognised this I began to resolve the loss of my father and to come to

terms with my daughter's absence. Now I can miss each of them differently,

but without feeling the awful desolation of having been abandoned.

◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 21

My mother's death remains large in my life. The mourning process has been worked through but I am still reminded of her in some way every day, and, in good Italian style, I regularly visit my parents' grave to clean it and leave flowers.

I also still feel residues of loss of my grandparents, Nonna and Nonno, who died in the 1960s. They all remain in my 'heart' and my memory as a warm presence.

Remembering the distant past often brings nostalgia and sadness, and a sense of mourning reverberates through my writing, but not in a negative way. It is an additional affect to explore and think with, to use as a creative and positive energy.

Kathleen Woodward analyses Freud's writing on mourning and melancholia

(Woodward, 1991). Freud argues that mourning is psychic work, a process that eventually comes to an end when we adapt to the reality of the death and loss.

Melancholia, he says, becomes a disease when the process of mourning is not resolved and the bereaved develops a pathological attachment to the lost figure

(Woodward, 1991: 95). Woodward argues that although when loved-ones die our

'lives can be broken by such losses. They can also be impelled forward by them'

(Woodward, 1991: 93). There are circumstances when holding on to grief can have a positive outcome, strengthening one's attachment to life, holding onto the

'meaning' of those who have died, assimilating them into our identity and creating refrains against the intrusion of despair and disorder. Woodward seeks to theorise a 'place' between mourning and melancholy, where people can keep alive the memory of loved-ones and feel the pain associated with their loss without sinking into a pathological state. She finds 'the possibility of sustaining the in-between of mourning and melancholia' in Barthes' Camera Lucida in which he writes of his

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 22

inability to 'transform' his grief over the loss of his mother (Barthes, 1981a,

Woodward, 1991: 97-102). Woodward likens his experience to a process of

'cryptic incorporation',9 a sheltering of the psychic pain of loss inside the body as if in a crypt 'containing what cannot be forgotten' (Woodward, 1991: 99). It is a little vault of love, forever safely contained. We enfold the memory or the pain of loss – the missing – into ourselves, so that it becomes part of us, folded into our identity. It is a way of allowing the lost person to remain in our life, to preserve them and bring them with us into the future without descending into pathologic melancholia.

Woodward remarks that, like Barthes, we have all spent time 'lingering over old photographs of a person after their death' (Woodward, 1991: 98). Another process of preserving the memory of the missing is through story telling. In the early weeks after a loved one dies we continually talk about them to others who share our loss. When we visit the bereaved we listen to their memories and sorrow and offer ourselves as repositories for some of their grief. In eulogies at the funeral we present a narrative of the dead person and the meaning their life had for us. At the wake we chatter and recall episodes of their life and our connections to it. As

Woodward says, narrative 'does indeed seem to be a privileged site for the production and performance of affect'. She notes Kristeva's idea that the text

'combines elaboration (associated with analysis) and catharsis (associated primarily with the expression of affect, not is purgation). It is both expressive and theoretical' (Woodward, 1991: 102).

9 The notion of cryptic incorporation is discussed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in c1986, The Wolf Man’s magic word: a cryptonymy, trans, Nicholas Rand, Foreword by Jacques Derrida, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 23

This dissertation is, in part, an expressive and theoretical narrative of mourning, not just about the death of my parents, but also about the loss of links I had to my

Italian identity through my mother and her family. It also explores the longing I have to reconnect with the Italian part of myself, a part of me that has been a fragile thing in my life. I cannot remember my mother without also remembering my father and his influence which was often unsympathetic, even sometimes hostile, to Italian culture. The two fundamental sources of my identity were very different and sometimes contrary, and as I moved out into the wider world of school and different social milieus, Anglo-Australian became my dominant reference point. The death of my mother closed off what remained of the connection to Italian culture.

Beginnings and endings

The last time I saw my mother alive she was in hospital with a broken hip and sedated with morphine. She was drowsy with a child-like expression on her face, lying like a little girl all cutely tucked up in bed and I felt great love for her. When

I was leaving I hugged and kissed her, told her I loved her and would see her the following day. In her last few years I had not always felt such love for her. She had been in pain and overwhelmed by her ailments. She became a widow when she was aged 52 years. It broke her heart to lose the love of her life. As she grew older she became consumed by her illnesses. To everyone else she was stoic, cheerful and determined to make the best of everything. She said I was the only one that she felt able to complain to about her pain. I became worn out with her burden and sad that my relationship with her was dominated by her constantly expressed agonies. Reading How we became post-human I come across Hayles‘

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 24

notion that when we observe people and situations, we don't simply receive the information flowing to us; 'feedback can also loop through the observers, drawing them in to become part of the system being observed' (Hayles, 1999: 9). As intimate observer of my mother‘s long-term pain and illness, I became caught up in its loop, an unwilling participant in the routines of the negativity that overtook her life. Her identity had become subsumed by her body, which seemed able to transmit only pain. Like Lacan's 'hommelette', she became a creature of sensation where nothing made sense of the sensory chaos of her body. (Lacan, 1979: 197)

Any anguish and ill feeling towards her disappeared that morning when the hospital rang at 7.00am and I tore in panic along the M5 to Liverpool. She was dead when I got there. My daughter and I said our good-byes, caressing her poor little gnarled arthritic fingers and toes. For months afterwards I felt her presence, so powerfully at times it was as if she inhabited me. I am no longer so overwhelmed but still feel her close to me and enjoy her company, and Dad's.

They remain together in that crypt in my being.

In many ways Mum was the genesis of this project. She was the last link of her generation to my Italian heritage. Yet, from this ending emerged a beginning, giving my project a new energy, providing ways for 'elaboration' (analysis) and

'catharsis' or the 'expression of affect' (Woodward, 1991: 102). In the course of writing this narrative I hope to recover and explore both the 'meaning' of my mother and the remnants of the Italian part of me. My father, a 'true blue' Aussie, was also a dominant figure in my life and I grew up with input from both cultures but not strictly belonging to either. I was an only child and was very close to my mother and father, who had me when they were very young. We lived at the outer

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 25

edges of suburban Sydney, which, in 1944 when

I was born, was a sparsely populated semi-rural area of farms, bush and shacks sitting in paspalum-infested paddocks. The area was transformed during the post World War 2 period with the arrival of mobs of immigrant families from all over Europe, and soon after, by huge public housing estates.

My father's family emigrated from Dorset in England before the 1920s and settled on a small farm in Hoxton Park near Liverpool NSW. My father, Les, was the youngest of seven children. My mother's family emigrated from Veneto in Italy in the 1920s, and after a spell in Lithgow, moved to a small farm at Mount Pritchard on the other side of Liverpool from Dad's place. Mum, Madalena (Lena or Tutti), had two older sisters and a younger brother. Mum and Dad met during the war when she was working in a laundry, ironing the shirts of Army officers; she was

18 years old. They met through Dad's eldest sister who was 'forelady' (supervisor) at the laundry; Dad was 20 years old. Mum was engaged to a young Italian man called Angelo at the time but broke it off when she fell in love with my father.

They married in an Anglican church as Dad refused to have anything to do with the Roman Catholic Church. I was christened in an Anglican church, but acquired a knowledge of Catholicism by attending many Italian baptisms, weddings, and funerals. I had a very close relationship with Mum's family and hardly any contact with Dad's family.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 26

There were no other Italian children around my age in the neighbourhood and, up until the time of mass immigration, most of my playmates had British or

Irish family background. Some of them had Spanish or French- sounding family names like Ricardo,

Dubois (we pronounced it Dooboys) Rouvret (Roovray) or Bujac (Boojack), but their families all spoke with broad Aussie accents. The origins of their names were never mentioned and were possibly unknown. In those days nobody seemed to be interested in family history. Perhaps, for many, our fascination with family history grows as we get older and have more time to reflect, and when our grandparents and others who carried family memory die off or fade away. I set out on this project with the desire to record something of the untold story of

Italians in south west Sydney who managed not only to eke out a living against a background of indifference or out-and-out hostility, but to implant themselves firmly in the Australian landscape and thrive like the vegetables many of them cultivated. As I researched this I began wondering about my own family background and what I had inherited from them, a process that was complicated by the affective tangle of my bi-cultural upbringing.

◊◊◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 27

Chapter 2. Memory and Identity

[Memory] doubles the present and the outside and is one with forgetting, since it is endlessly forgotten and reconstituted...Time becomes a subject because it is the folding of the outside and, as such, forces every present into forgetting, but preserves the whole of the past within memory: forgetting is the impossibility of return, and memory is the necessity of renewal (Deleuze, 1999: 107-8).

Memory is inextricably tied to human consciousness and perception, to our very being. It is an endlessly fascinating and unfathomable part of our experience.

More than that, it is experience, it is knowledge, it is us – we cannot be a self without memory. Along with other functions of the brain such as dreaming and thinking, the precise nature of memory has remained elusive and beyond adequate scientific explanation. It is strange that such universal human experiences remain mysteries to us in an era when so many parts of human functioning have been revealed. Of course, science has been able to acquire some knowledge about what memory is and how it functions, for example, when certain parts of the brain are damaged, memory can be lost or distorted. However most explanations remain little more than conjecture, such as, how an experience is embedded into memory, the differences between long-term and short-term memory, how a short-term memory becomes a long-term memory, and the relatively new phenomenon of false memory syndrome.

In its most basic form we use memory in the performance of mechanical tasks that are learned so thoroughly we carry them out almost automatically – speaking, writing, reading, driving a car and riding a bike. The recognition (re-cognition/re-

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 28 knowing) of our mother's face, or our own, is a function of memory – probably one of the earliest memories we acquire – and in cases of dementia or brain damage, even these can be forgotten. We can also intentionally memorise things like poetry, parts in a play, telephone numbers, times-tables, and speeches. This has been called the art of memory and is a practice of learning by association that goes at least as far back as the ancient Greeks (Tofts, 1997, Yates, 1996). Then there is the kind of memory somewhere between habit-memory and intentional memorising: observation of things we do or encounter during our everyday actions that we can often recall later without having intentionally remembered seeing or doing them at the time. This kind of memory often lets us down; when we forget where we put the car keys or our glasses, or when we are asked as a witness to report what took place and describe the appearance of those involved.

The word ‗recall‘ implies a voluntary action by the individual, but sometimes memories – of the lost, the loved, the hated, a past embarrassment or joy – can creep up on us in a moment of 'involuntary memory' (Proust, 1989). There are some things we forget, and others we wish to forget, that linger no matter what we do. Some memories lurk deep in our being, infiltrating every receptor, hiding behind every brain cell, ready to ambush our thoughts at any moment, 'out of the blue' when we least expect it – 'the kind of memories that turn your bones to glass'.10 The mind can rationalise and balance the impact of a past event, but the affect of a particular memory can make us smile, cry, or want to just curl up and die. It is sometimes as if the body itself remembers. A memory can hurt physically, make me ache, swoon or throw up, or make my heart 'sink'. For

10 From song, Cold Blooded Old Times, Smog, written by Bill Callahan, on original Soundtrack High Fidelity, Hollywood Records.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 29 amputees, the body continues to feel pain or itching in the 'phantom' of a missing limb; as real as if the limb was still there. Similarly, the spectre of a person or event that is no longer present can be experienced as part of oneself; a virtual presence (or absence) that permeates the body and psyche. It is these phantom memories that seem forever with us – in us, in spirit, mind and flesh, and ever present in our actions and reactions – that I am interested in unravelling.

After sifting through various theories of memory I turned to philosophy, finding it offered the most useful insights into the experience of memory and its significance in perception, being and identity. Because memory begins at the time of an individual's entry into language, culture and the symbolic I made a detour into psychoanalysis before exploring philosophy.

Memory and psychoanalysis

Although identity is not the same as subjectivity, one must be a subject to have an identity. Stuart Hall provides a detailed account of the complex problems and unresolved questions of identity – of the 'endlessly performative self' – and subjectivity (Hall, 1996: 1, 11). He argues that it is not enough to elaborate on

'how individuals are summoned into place in the discursive structures. It has always, also, required an account of how subjects are constituted' (Hall, 1996:

13). He sees a need for 'the suturing of the psychic and the discursive' to resolve the 'tangled and unconcluded argument' about question of identity.(Hall, 1996:

16).

Freudian theories show that key processes in the formation of the subject are laid down in the unconscious early in life. Memories from this period may be repressed but leave traces that can have effects on our behaviour. Freud argued

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 30 that when memories are too traumatic for the conscious mind to cope with, they are hidden away in the unconscious. Freud likens the process of the mind's perceptual apparatus to the 'mystic writing pad'; when the celluloid film cover is lifted, anything written on it is erased from the cover, but impressions remain on the wax tablet beneath the celluloid film. The celluloid sheet is like the conscious mind which receives the perception and is continually 'wiped clean', while the wax layer is like the unconscious where memory is permanently imprinted (Freud,

1999c: 228, 230). Memories inscribed in the unconscious do not disappear for ever but can return as traces; manifest in dreams, through parapraxes (Freudian slips), jokes, puns, and forgetting, or they can emerge as pathological, neurotic or psychotic behaviour. Such traces of memory can affect our perception; the choices we make through life; who and what we attach ourselves to and recoil from; our unexplained, 'intuitive' likes and dislikes (Freud, 1961, Freud, 1999a,

Freud, 1999b).

For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language and is determined by language; it is through the acquisition of language that the subject is constituted

(Lacan, 1979: 149). This happens during the 'mirror phase' of a child's development when the child sees its reflection and imagines itself as the image it sees. The (mis) identification with the other in the reflected image sets up desire and the process of entry into culture, language and the symbolic order (Lacan,

1979). It is also during this phase that memory begins, at least in a rudimentary way: recognition, even a misrecognition implies that the image remains in the mind – in memory. The child begins to recognise people or things, remembering a

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 31 person or object that was here but has gone, as in Freud's baby game of fort-da.11

Psychoanalytic models underpin the role of memory in the formation of the self, the experience of being, and one's relationships to others, beginning the process of identification.

Memory and philosophy

Philosophy provides evocative concepts and insights into the significance of memory in every aspect of our being; in particular the work of Henri Bergson

(Bergson, 1991), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), and Brian Massumi (Massumi, 2002). Linked across three generations, they explore the bonds between the human and material worlds and the roles of perception, memory and affect. They enable new ways of thinking about the relations between nature, the individual, the social and the cultural and in so doing shed light on the nature of identity. Our earliest perceptions take place within family and cultural milieus, where identity is set in motion, where the unconscious is formed, and where memories we rely on to interpret and take action in the world begin. Bergson and Deleuze argue that perception relies on memory, calling up what has been laid down in the past to interpret the present.

As Bergson says, 'there is no perception which is not full of memories' (Bergson,

1991: 33).

Bergson‘s analysis of the role of memory in perception of the material world shows how crucial memory is to our development as social beings. He argues that memory is ‗the intersection of mind and matter‘, bringing together the physical and mental world, the body and the 'soul' (Bergson, 1991: 13). According to

11 Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Standard Edition, Vol. 18, pp. 14-15)

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 32

Bergson, the sensory-motor processes – involving sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch and the nervous system – convey information about the material world (the

'image'12), but it is memory that comes forward to create perception. For Bergson, past experiences remain latent or dormant until stimulated to become active through this sensori-motor process in perception (Bergson, 1991: 133-141). When our senses receive information (a visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory or aural

'image'), memory is prompted to recall something that relates to it from our previous experience. We adjust ourselves, he says, a bit like focussing a camera, and prepare ourselves to receive the memory (Bergson, 1991: 134).

In this perception of an 'image', Bergson argues, we select only those elements that are needed to act in the present. We isolate features that are necessary for us to function in that time and space, and allow qualities that are not currently relevant to pass us by. A recollection is not activated 'without adapting it to the requirements of the present' (Bergson, 1991: 36-38, 138-139, Deleuze, 1988: 58).

Bergson writes that memories emerging in perception,

descend from the heights of pure [latent] memory down to the precise point where action is taking place. In other words, it is from the present that the appeal to which memory responds comes, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life (Bergson, 1991: 153).

It is this relationship between perception and memory that interests me because the two are inextricably linked in a continuum with identity formation and

12 Bergson has a complex explanation of 'image'. He defines it as something that exists in itself, not constructed by culture or in the mind, a material object; "pictorial...a self-existing image…more than that which the idealist calls a representation...less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed halfway between the 'thing' and the 'representation'." Bergson, H. (1991) Matter and Memory, Zone Books, New York.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 33 transformation. Memory is central to perception of the world and of ourselves as objects in it. We are in a constant process of becoming as individuals, each present moment is a flickering between past and future (Bergson, 1991: 138-139).

Perceptions build our knowledge of the world, each perception (what we take in after the 'image' is processed by the sensory-motor system) in turn, becomes memory, available to be called up at a later time. What is perceived, and the memories called forward, are contingent upon present conditions. Perception and identity are 'coloured' by memories formed in the diverse milieus through which we pass. Bergson contends that the past goes into our identity in the present:

our character, always present in all our decisions, is indeed the actual synthesis of all our past states. In this epitomized form our previous psychical life exists for us even more than the external world, of which we never perceive more than a very small part, whereas, on the contrary, we use the whole of our lived experience (Bergson, 1991: 146).

The situations we traverse in life continually reshape our identity, the memories and perceptions laid down in the past can continue to influence, to some degree, the way we see the world and our responses to the situations we encounter.

Individual perception is subjective knowledge of the world. The world as I know it can be different to the world as you know it. Every individual's memory and perception is different, just as every time a past experience is recalled it will vary because the context and circumstances will be different on each occasion of remembering. People who shared a past event may have perceived it differently at the time, depending on their circumstances and their needs at the time, consequently their memories of it may vary significantly from each other. In her

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 34 biography, Poppy, Modjeska remarks on the different ways she and her sisters remembered past family occasions (Modjeska, 1997). My daughter often tells me things that she remembers from when she was a child, which I recall quite differently, or not at all. Perspective is affected by the way each person has assembled her or his being in the world up to that point. It includes all kinds of emotional, psychical and physical experiences. A remark or action that causes one person to laugh may cause another to feel hurt or disgust and this can be influenced by a person's social milieu or cultural identity and affect how it is remembered. People often disagree when recounting the material details of an event they have witnessed together. One person may have been more sensitive to sounds or colours, another to actions and objects; another may remember only their own response to an event. The variations in perception and memory of events are seemingly inexhaustible.

Duration

The 'present' only exists as duration in the movement between past and future. As

Bergson says, '[t]he psychical state, then, that I call "my present," must be both a perception of the immediate past and a determination of the immediate future'

(Bergson, 1991: 138). All perception requires memory and duration: ‗every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future' (Bergson,

1991: 150). A present perception becomes the past instantly. Bergson writes:

however brief we suppose any perception to be, it always occupies a certain duration, and involves, consequently, an effort of memory

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 35

which prolongs, one into another, a plurality of moments (Bergson, 1991: 34).

The present is a continual process, not a point in time, as Massumi writes, the

'past and future resonate in the present. Together' (Massumi, 2002: 200). Massumi develops the concept of the dissolving present which he calls the 'future-past':

A body present is in a dissolve: out of what it is just ceasing to be, into what it will already have become by the time it registers that something has happened...A body does not coincide with its present. It coincides with its potential. The potential is the future-past contemporary with every body's change...Past and future are in direct, topological proximity with each other, operatively joined in a continuity of mutual folding. The present is the crease (Massumi, 2002: 200).

The notion of duration links to the ever-changing nature of identity. Individuals are constantly in duration, never still, moving from past through the present into the future, all the time perceiving, calling forth memories in the present-past, knitting things together to function in the present-future. The folding and unfolding of the person in time is important in explaining the potential of people, and other things, to change. A Massumi says, 'the idea that we live in Euclidean space and in linear time excludes the reality of change' (Massumi, 2002: 201). It is movement itself, or becoming, not the fixed points moved from or to, that is

'qualitatively transforming'. As Massumi points out:

When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition; its own variation. The range of variations it can be implicated in is not present in any given movement, much less in any position it passes through. In motion, a body is in an

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 36

immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary (Massumi, 2002: 1-4).

Bergson says something similar: 'a being which evolves more or less freely creates something new every moment' (Bergson, 1991: 222-223).

Memory makes the present and the future possible and enables the potential of movement. Duration folds and unfolds memory and perception. Bringing them together is the individual who perceives – the subject. Subjective knowledge of things, according to Bergson, is the contraction of a multiplicity of external moments into a single internal moment via memory (Bergson, 1991: 34). There are so many variables and inputs at any one moment that we can never be unequivocally one thing or another. We are unstable, multi-faceted and fragmented beings, continually buffeted by sensory influx and the inexorable impulse of the mind and body to interpret and respond. As Bergson says, the individual me is 'a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act – the seat, in a word, of the sensory-motor phenomena'

(Bergson, 1991: 151, 153).

Locating memory

We imagine our memory to be a kind of storeroom located somewhere inside our brain, packed with incidents (or perceptions) of our past, deposited one by one in some kind of memory bank, a personal library or dusty archive. Bergson tells us this is not the case. In a complex argument, he reasons that since eyes and other senses do not have a place to store real objects, why should we think the brain has one (Bergson, 1991: 128-130). He argues that neither past nor present perceptions are stored in the brain; 'they are not in it; it is the brain that is in them' (Bergson,

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 37

1991: 151). Gilles Deleuze interprets Bergson as saying that memory is 'preserved in itself'. It is difficult to understand the idea of the past surviving in itself because we imagine that the past has ceased to be. Deleuze says we confuse '[b]eing with being-present'. The present is never quite there in itself; 'we must say at every instant that it "was", and of the past, that it "is", that it is eternally, for all time'

(Deleuze, 1988: 54-55). Every present is immediately past; it 'was'. The past certainly been, it happened, so it always 'is'. Memory exists, but is not visible or tangible; we know it through experiencing it. Memory is nowhere and everywhere at once and part of the continual flow of our being; preserved in itself.

The location and functions of memory continues to fascinate humans. In a recent television documentary, it was suggested that the heart also has a memory. Thanks for the Memory on ABC TV 12 April 2007 was a Channel Four 'Mindshock' documentary, which featured people whose personalities and behaviours had changed in significant ways after receiving a transplanted heart. People found themselves eating food they had never enjoyed before, playing sport or music they had previously had no interest in. It all sounded a bit fanciful at first. People's outlook and interests are bound to be changed when they have been close to death and are suddenly given 'new life'. Only some five to ten per cent of heart recipients have such experiences. 13 On the other hand, scientists say that the heart itself does contain memory cells and there is a direct neural communication pathway between the heart and the brain: they function together to remind the heart to pump in response to certain stimuli. Such phenomena must remain speculative, but it seems that there is more to memory that simply an electro-

13 Joe Joseph, 'Getting to the heart of the matter', Times Online, 27 June 2006. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk accessed 19/04/07

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 38 mechanical function in the brain. The brain and the body are connected in millions of ways with multiplicities of impulses and pathways between body and brain by nerves and also chemically (Damasio, 1994: 26) Memory could be located in any or all of these cells, travel along any or all of these pathways, or be part of the chemical make-up of the brain-body. Memory could be preserved in itself through the whole body and brain.

Memory and the body

Memory may be structured through social relations and collective experience, as

Maurice Halbwachs and others have argued (Halbwachs, 1992) (Assmann, 1995)

(Olick and Robbins, 1998), but is also unique to each individual, as discussed above. Our very existence as social human beings is a product of social relations and our memories and perceptions are socially mediated and constructed in that sense. However, perception and memory are also intensely personal. This experiential aspect of memory contributes to our identity and subjectivity in concert with the social and contributes to human diversity and creativity. As

Andreas Huyssen says:

The fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable. Rather than lamenting or ignoring it, this split should be understood as a powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity (Huyssen, 1995: 3).

Psychoanalytic theory also points to the social nature of memory arguing that language is vital to the constitution of subjectivity and the unconscious and therefore to thinking, dreaming, and memory. Certainly we interpret and express memory with language, however, some memories seem to exist outside or beside

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 39 language. It is as if our senses remember before our brains can interpret the perception. It is often difficult to articulate these memories. Language and other expressive forms are the only means we have to 'speak' the inarticulable; we write poetry, create paintings, dance, sing, make music, perform and produce other arts to express these mysteries.

I use language to describe the following memory, but the description falls short of the affect it had on me. It was a tactile memory.

◊◊◊

One night when I got into a freshly made bed with newly laundered sheets I

found myself instantly transported into a bed made by my mother. In a flash –

with the touch of sheets on my flesh - I was back in the realm of childhood. It

was not a particular memory from childhood but the feeling of being a child.

This bodily memory was conveyed not only by the touch of the sheet on my

skin, but also by the substance of the bedding which was tight around me and

had a certain solidity. The bedding had the authority of a mother-made bed,

bound together with the rituals of washing, shaking out the linen, hanging it in

the sun, stretching, folding, spreading, smoothing taut and tucking.

◊◊◊

This memory is social in the sense that my mother taught me to make a bed in her manner, and that there are rituals of laundering and making beds in our culture and so on.

◊◊◊

Who taught her to make a bed properly? It couldn't have been Nonna, I don't

recall ever seeing a properly made bed at her place, just her musty-smelling

jumbled bedcover filled with feathers. It was probably the eldest sister who

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 40

worked in France as a maid. When she returned she instructed Mum and her

sister Nella in all kinds of strict housekeeping disciplines.

◊◊◊

In the instant of slipping between the sheets it was initially my flesh that remembered; the touch of the sheets on the outermost layers of my skin and the way they enveloped me. It registered as a remembered sensation before any mental image was processed to form a memory. Derrida said of writing that it supplements perception before perception even appears to itself' (Derrida, 1978:

224). So it was with this memory, written on my body an instant before it was registered in my brain as a perception that I could 'speak' to myself.

Such experiences are common, particularly with olfactory memory. Peter

Stallybrass recalls an instant when he was overcome, in the course of giving a lecture, by the sudden 'presence' of his dead colleague whose jacket he was wearing. He felt the spectre of his friend through the smell of the jacket: 'Above all he was there in the smell' (Stallybrass, 1999: 28).

I cannot recall Allon White as an idea, but only in the habits through which I inhabit him, through which he inhabits and wears me. I know Allon through the smell of his jacket (Stallybrass, 1999: 42).

The jacket and the wearing of clothes, their styles and so on are socially constructed, but this form of remembering seems more than simply a socially constructed memory; coming via the senses, before it is a memory 'idea'. Like

Stallybrass, and Proust, we have all experienced a memory that is suddenly summoned up by smell or taste (Proust, 1989). Our senses are the frontiers of perception: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. When these instant involuntary

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 41 memories arise it seems like there is a glitch in the function of the sensory-motor system. Instead of the ordered relation between perception and memory that

Bergson formulates, sense and memory seem to bypass an element in the brain so that a memory overtakes us before we 'notice' it; before the reasoning of perception has time to interpret it.

◊◊◊

There is also the 'something else' of memory; a kind of miasma or fog of

mislaid fragments of the past. There memories that can't be put into words:

A gossamer layer of additional flesh and melodic ambience in the mind. Some

memories remain forever phantoms; like those specks that float in your eye

and move as soon as you try to focus on them, some fragments of past life are

always just beyond the grasp.

◊◊◊

One writer who looks at memory and the body is Laura U Marks. In her book The

Skin of the Film, she analyses the way some documentary filmmakers use the senses to convey memory, particularly of trauma, through film (Marks, 2000a).

Another is Brian Massumi who has opened up pathways into new thinking about sensation, passion and affect. In his essay 'The Bleed' for example, Massumi suggests other receptors within the body are involved in perception, not just,

'exteroceptively' through the surface senses of the body, but 'interoceptively' a sensibility of the muscles and ligaments in a process of proprioception:

Proprioception translates the exertions and ease of the body's encounters with objects into a muscular memory of relationality. This is the cumulative memory of skill, habit, posture...the faculty of proprioception operates as a corporeal transformer of tactility into quasi corporeality (Massumi, 2002, 'The Bleed': 58-59).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 42

Deeper than proprioception is 'visceral sensibility' which registers a perception even before the brain has completely processed it; like the experience of my skin propelling me back to childhood an instant before my brain registered the memory as I got into bed, described above. Massumi gives many examples we are familiar with; of feeling a spasm of fear an instant before you hear the screech of brakes and see a car heading to hit you, or feeling your heart stop the instant before you are conscious of a tap on your shoulder (Massumi, 2002: 60).

Our bodies are also social bodies. We exist within social and cultural milieus and often share experiences with others: as soldiers in battle; survivors of cyclones, revellers at the end of a war, or witnesses (on television perhaps) of major traumatic events such as 9/11 or the Indian Ocean tsunami. Such events are often commemorated or re-enacted in ritual and performance by those involved and by following generations.

Memory and the social body

The social and cultural aspects of bodily memory are described by Paul

Connerton in How Societies Remember (Connerton, 1989). Connerton's analysis of collective memory looks at rituals and practices through which group memories are conveyed and sustained. He sees performative practices as a major transmitter of memory in these circumstances through ritual re-enactment, ceremony and bodily practices. The body is not just socially constituted, but

'culturally shaped in its actual practices and behaviour' (Connerton, 1989: 104).

Members of a social group incorporate codes of gestures and movement, repeating them ritually and passing them on to others in the group. The patterns of

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 43 performative commemoration may vary, but certain coded elements persist through generations.

Collective memory is entwined with personal memory; it connects us to our family, group and community, and is perhaps 'the central, medium though which identities are constituted' (Olick and Robbins, 1998: 134). Immigrants have to learn how to juggle dual or multiple collective memories. They bring with them the collective memories of their former home, to which they cling; and are expected to soak up the collective memories of their adopted country, which they need to understand in order to integrate into the new culture. The collective memory of home remains strong and significant because our earliest experiences occur within an intimate familial, communal or social milieu: 'kin communicate to us our first notions about people and things' (Halbwachs, 1992: 61).

Unlike our personal memories, which we 'carry' within us, some collective memories have to be actively maintained or reinforced to continue through generations. This may be done by erecting monuments or memorials, or by creating special occasions to celebrate a past event. Nations do this through holding special holidays like Australia Day. Some ethnic communities organize festivals and many Italian-Australian groups hold religious feste to recall the rituals and traditions of their home village or town. I discuss these in a later chapter. Connerton explains how collective memory can be carried on the body, performing actions that adhere to the past and flow from generation to generation via practices that are formally taught or casually 'picked up' from observing the behaviours of parents and peers (Connerton, 1989: 72-104). They include gestures that are like the territorial refrains mentioned in the last chapter; certain ways of

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 44 talking, walking, and behaving that mark our belonging to or distinction from others.

While collective memories are sustained through ritual commemorations, such as

Anzac Day and Australia Day, it seems collective memory may affect social behaviour in unexpected ways. I recently participated in an event I interpret as a performance of collective memory.

◊◊◊

A collective re-enactment

On 20 February 2007, the Queen Mary 2, the biggest ocean liner in the world,

docked in Sydney at Garden Island. That same afternoon the Queen Elizabeth

2 was also arriving. The media carried reports that the two liners would meet

in Sydney Harbour at sunset and greet each other by tooting their horns.

Thousands of Sydney-siders, myself included, decided to go to the Harbour

foreshores to witness this rare event. Awaiting the arrival of the QE2, I

watched hundreds of small and large water-craft dancing around Queen Mary

2 taking photographs and being photographed in turn by passengers on the

ship. People lolled around in groups on the grass, having picnics and drinking

champagne. They cheered and moved forward as the QE2 came into view;

yelling and applauded the ships as they hooted to each other. The event

caused unprecedented traffic and public transport chaos because authorities

had not anticipated the enormous crowds.

As I walked to the end of Mrs Macquarie's chair with throngs of people an

image came to me of Sydney in its early colonial days with people strolling

down to the water's edge to meet an arriving barque. I had the feeling we

were walking in their footsteps. I stood near where Mrs Macquarie used to

regularly sit to await the return of her husband's ship. European settlers of

Sydney, isolated from the rest of the world, were desperate for supplies, new

faces, letters and news from home. This amazing 2007 convergence of people

from all over Sydney seemed like a re-enactment of collective memory. It was

as if the ghosts of past generations had infected us with a 'tyranny of

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 45

distance' virus and left us with that same longing for links with the rest of

the world.

It doesn't take much to get Sydney-siders to go to the water's edge; we seem

to be compulsively drawn to it. The Harbour is a kind of refrain for us: we

revere the bridge and opera house, adorning them at national celebrations,

walking across and around them; we watch fireworks reflected in the harbour

waters; have picnics on its islands or around its shores; and take the ferry to

Manly for the joy of it.

◊◊◊

Are we haunted by bodies from the past? Nigel Thrift suggests, 'it is true to say that we still understand very little of how the body practices that comprise "us" have come down to and inhabit us, passing into our being, passing our being back and forth between bodies and passing our being on' (Thrift, 2000b: 38, following

N Katherine Hayles, 1999).

Australians remain haunted by the bodies of Indigenous Australians of the past who also congregated around the Sydney foreshores one day in 1788 to greet a ship that devastated their lives and land. I wonder whether the land itself remembers. Thrift's article about the relationship of humans and nature begins with a quote from Serres:

If winds, currents, glaciers, volcanoes, etc., carry subtle messages that are so difficult to read that it takes us absolutely ages trying to decipher them, wouldn‘t it be appropriate to call them intelligent? How would it be if it turned out that we were only the slowest and least intelligent beings in the world? (Serres, 1995: 30, in Thrift, 2000a: 34)

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 46

It seems to me that the terrain of Sydney remembers the Indigenous Australians who walked and lived here and thrived on its bounty. Their story remains embedded in the earth. All land is layered with history and embedded with memory. Structures, people and cultures disintegrate and become synthesised with ashes and dust until centuries later the land may be excavated and its experiences narrated. The Gadigal lived and fished around Wulla Mulla before

European settlement; before they called it Woolloomooloo and built a terminal there for arriving and departing ships. The Woolloomooloo finger wharf also has two collective memories for white people: thousands of soldiers departed from here bound for World War 2; and it was the place of arrival of many immigrant communities to a new land.

◊◊◊ In the 1950s and 1960s crowds of people gathered at docks to meet the

arriving migrant ships. I remember going there a number of times to meet

visitors, relatives, or returning family. Thousands of people would be crushed

up against the wire mesh barriers by the time the ship berthed. All necks

would be craning and peering to try to catch sight of a loved one amongst the

bodies silhouetted along the deck rails. There would be an interminable wait as

the gangway was put in place and customs and immigration officers went on

board to process passengers. Sudden bursts of excitement would break out

each time a person appeared at the top of the gangway and people would push

through the crowd. The passenger would totter down the gangplank dragging

trunks and suitcases and children looking bewildered, searching the sea of

upturned faces below. Suddenly a cry would erupt from the crowd, arms would

be waving, names being yelled and a group would break through and surround

the newly arrived with smiles, tears, touches, caresses and hugs. Onlookers

smiled too; almost as happy as the reunited and anticipating their own

imminent reunion. The crowd would slowly thin as each group departed,

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 47

eventually leaving a stillness in which the shadowy memories of thousands of

arrivals and departures floated.

◊◊◊

Now, as I stand looking at the magnificent harbour and observing the people of

Sydney enjoying its splendour, I see the finger wharf as a mirror of the luxury liner that is berthed adjacent to it; accommodating the rich and powerful. It 'floats' in the harbour, and the people live there in luxury, 'cruising' in a parallel universe no less than the passengers on the Queen Mary and QE2. The collective memories associated with Woolloomooloo are hard to find here among the exclusive restaurants, boutique bars and lavish apartments. This is a kind of 'gated city' which keeps away the descendents of the Indigenous Australians, early settlers and migrant fishermen who live nearby and keep alive the collective memory of

Wulla Mulla, and pacify its ghosts.

Rhizomatic and arborescent memory

Memory is implicated in all aspects of life, without it we would not be human, would not be able to relate to other people, would not have culture or society, and would not have stories to tell: memory makes the world go round. Individually and collectively we are bodies of rhizomes and roots of memories in constants states of potential. The concepts of rhizomatic and arborescent thought, discussed by Deleuze and Guattari can be used to effectively think different forms of memory. There are both rhizomatic and arborescent processes at work in personal, habit, bodily and social memory. They are not opposed or distinct processes and the boundaries between them are not clear: 'there are knots of arborescence in rhizomes and rhizomatic offshoots in roots' (Deleuze and

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 48

Guattari, 1987: 20). It is the same with memory, but personal memory seems to be more rhizomatic and social memory more arborescent.

In their chapter on the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari say that the brain is rhizomatic – 'more a grass than a tree' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 15). The physiology of the brain elements that function in thought and memory appear to be themselves rhizomatic.

◊◊◊

We have some 100 billion brain cells or neurons with multiple tentacles and

sub-tentacles of dendrites waving about, sending and receiving information

from the senses and transmitting it to each other across the synapses; a

rhizomatic mass. The more active the neurons, the more dendrites develop and

the more glial cells grow to nurture and support the neurons. The process is

electro-chemical. The neurons produce electrical charges which travel via

synapses and the stems holding the neurons (axons), to the dendrites of

receiving neurons. (Sprenger, 1999) Neurons are in a constant state of

potential, the process is activated by the body via senses, and its internal

mechanisms.

How Neurons Communicate (Sprenger, 1999)

◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 49

Deleuze and Guattari take up the scientific model of neuron function and apply it to the structure of thought (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). They argue that:

Thought is not arborescent and the brain is not rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called 'dendrites' do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, makes the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system....The same goes for memory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 15).

Deleuze and Guattari describe arborescent thought using the image of a tree and root system. This is a structure based on binary logic, one becoming two and two becoming four, as in tree branches and roots. Arborescent logic is hierarchical and relies on a central organising principle with pre-established channels of transmission (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 15-17). Rhizomatic structures, on the other hand, allow for multiplicities. They have multiple entry and exit points, they can connect any point to any other point, as they argue:

In contrast to centred (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentred, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 21).

One can find both rhizomatic and arborescent structures in mediations of memory: rhizomatic offshoots may be found when researching archival records and arborescent systems may lurk within individual memory spaces. Stories in books or in film or television can be arborescent – following a linear or cause and

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 50 effect sequence – or rhizomatic in a fragmented style that is deliberately discordant, such as in ficto-critical writing. They may contain both: a fragmented structure that has its own logic, or a linear story which has elements of rhizomatic trajectories within it. Rituals and commemorative practices can be seen as both arborescent and rhizomatic: they follow a logic determined by the original event, but their context (such as the adaptation of a traditional Italian religious festival into an Australian suburban setting), and the performative nature of the rituals can give them rhizomatic qualities as new generations add new elements and give the rituals new meanings (a disco or DJ concert after the religious parade, hot-dogs and chips together with biscuits shaped like the bones of martyrs).

I regard memory as generally rhizomatic: it can be entered at any point, traversed in any direction; any part can be connected to any other; and any path may be followed to any number of joining tubers. There is no end point; each path leads to a junction where other lines go off in any direction. The Freudian unconscious is also rhizomatic in that its tubers can erupt or come to the surface; connecting hidden memories to present activities in unexpected ways. As Deleuze and

Guattari argue, the rhizome 'ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains'; like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7).

There is no logical sequence to follow through a rhizome or through memory.

You cannot force a memory to come forward without a 'catalyst'. The memory is dormant until an 'image' calls it forth.

◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 51

The sensation of the clean sheets on

my skin was an 'image' that called

forth childhood, and in a rhizomatic

process, tubers erupted to the

surface of my mind; recalling my

mother and her domestic practices

and leading on to chains of memory

associations: about illnesses in childhood when I was confined to bed, the

comfort of being cared for, and also the time Mum and Dad laid hot and cold

towels across my torso to bring down my temperature. This leads to the

memory of the special breakfast Dad always made me when I was sick and how

he would read The Water Babies14 over and over to me. I never tired of

hearing about Mrs Do-as-you-would-be-done-by and Mrs Be-done-by-as-you-

did, and looking at the beautiful illustrations Tom and Ellie and the Ice Fairies.

I still have the copy that he read to me.

◊◊◊

Rhizomes and memories are multiplicities. A multiplicity, as Deleuze and

Guattari explain:

ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world…There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object or to divide in the subject…A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes and dimensions (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:8).

Memory and identity, like rhizomes, change with the accumulation of experience and events; changes in magnitude, dimension and shape. Each new perception is added to the totality of experience, reorganising memory each passing moment.

Deleuze and Guattari indicate that thinking, memory and the self (identity) form

14 Charles Kingsley (undated, c 1950), illustrated by Anne Anderson, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, London.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 52 one big rhizomatic structure which includes rhizomes and roots, some separate, some entwined and merged, one becoming the other and vice versa (Deleuze and

Guattari, 1987: 15-17). Memory is personally embodied, socially performative, and culturally mediated. These dynamics of memory are in play in rhizomatic relationships with one another, as well as with perception and with ever- changeable identity, The chapters that follow illustrate the rhizomatic nature of memory and identity as I follow the twisting and turning trajectories through personal and collective memory events. I begin by looking at the way two films mediate memories of growing up in two cultures and how each film represented a different cultural identity.

◊◊◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 53

Chapter 3. Echoes

An echo...cannot occur without a distance between surfaces for the sounds to bounce from. But the resonation is not on the walls. It is in the emptiness between them. It fills the emptiness with its complex patterning. That patterning is not at a distance from itself. It is immediately its own event. (Massumi, 2002: 14)

Echoing between my twofold cultural identity, as Anglo and Italian-Australian, are two films: Federico Fellini's Amarcord and Phil Noyce's Newsfront. Over time the films have taken on auras, becoming motifs for me of my Italianness and

Australianness. Martin Lefebvre suggests that we take impressions from films, which he calls a figure: 'a trace in the "soft wax" of [the spectator's] memory'.

(Lefebvre, 1999). He argues:

We each possess inside us a sort of imaginary museum of the cinema where we keep the various films and film fragments that have touched us deeply or made a profound impression on us. The figure is therefore what one retains from a film manifesting itself as a sign or group of signs that open onto the imaginary (Lefebvre, 1999: 480).

Film was once seen as a model of the working of memory, it was believed that

'past life experiences could appear to the rememberer in near-original form, in effect as a film projected onto the screen of the individual's consciousness'

(Winter, 2006: 111). Cinema does sometimes seem to replicate memory; a fictional film of a period or event we have lived through allows us 'relive' the cultural experience. On the other hand, sometimes the dramatisation can take over our own memory to the extent that we are not sure later whether we are

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 54 remembering something we experienced ourselves or only saw in a movie. The image (photograph or cinema) can alter memory, as Agacinski argues:

The image as vestige thus competes with recollection: it serves the memory less than it supplants it. It already replaces it because it is there, perceptible, real, present, whereas a memory is vague and elusive. It replaces it again when the memory of the image (and no longer the image itself) masks the memory of the thing and screens any return to the past (Agacinski, 2003: 103, quoted in McKim, 2006: 72).

I don't think Amarcord and Newsfront have supplanted my memory, but they have each reconfigured the 'apparently scattered elements which already belong to memory', into new folds of imagination (Lefebvre, 1999: 482). In this chapter I discuss how each film has aroused and organised memories, enlivened my imagination, and attached itself to my identity.

The films

Amarcord and Newsfront are themselves films that echo with their directors' memories. Both are set in times of significant transformation of the national identities of two very different countries.

Amarcord

Amarcord recalls Fellini's childhood during the rise of Fascism. It conveys a sense of the loss of innocence; not just the innocence of youth (Fellini's) but of a people and a nation. Roger Ebert reviewed Amarcord on its first release when he also interviewed Fellini who said:

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 55

What is memory? Not the cold collection of what has really happened, but a point of view toward it. Federico Fellini (interview with Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times 24 October 1974).

Amarcord (1974) Excerpt from a review in Chicago Sun-Times:

If ever there was a movie made entirely out of nostalgia and

joy, by a filmmaker at the heedless height of his powers, that

movie is Federico Fellini's "Amarcord." The title means "I

remember" in the dialect of Rimini, the seaside town of his

youth, but these are memories of memories, transformed by

affection and fantasy and much improved in the telling. Here

he gathers the legends of his youth, where all of the characters are at once larger

and smaller than life -- flamboyant players on their own stages. Chicago Sun-times,

Roger Ebert 04/01/2004

Amarcord is rhizomatic in its structure; it is without centre, beginning or end – the ship sails on. There is no discernable plot or central protagonist; different narrators appear and disappear; we enter and leave the story at various moments in the cycle of a year, in the living of a life. The film threads itself along random trajectories which coil around each other and head off, forming other tendrils of becoming. It is a mixture of farce, poignancy, lust, hope, love, despair and death, as fragmented, fantastic and frivolous as memory itself. Amarcord is eternally optimistic, even while struggling under the shadow of Fascism it finds joy in and acceptance of nature and the changing seasons, as well as in the nature of people and their changing moods.

Newsfront

Newsfront is a more solemn account of life in Australia after the war that

Amarcord foreshadows. It looks at events and issues of the 1950s that marked the

Australian political and cultural landscape for decades to come. Newsfront is

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 56 presented more as history than as personal recollection, progressing like a dramatised documentary through a linear history of events and life.

Newsfront (1978) As described in Dermody and Jacka's The Screening of

Australia:

Newsfront (1978) was a landmark film; it established a

partisan Australianness in a form genuinely analytic towards

the history of its setting, not merely period in its décor.

Newsfront starts in 1948 with the beginning of intensive

post-war European immigration under Chifley's Labor

Government, through the 1949 defeat of Labor as an early

casualty in the Cold War; the establishment of the Menzies

Government that would last a generation; the clear start of

consumerism, the suburbanisation and Americanisation of Australian life, to 1956,

TV and the Melbourne Olympic Games. It traces the fortunes of a 'Cinetone'

newsreel cameraman and his off-siders through the last years of the newsreel.

(Dermody and Jacka, 1988: 129-135)

Newsfront is a much more contained narrative than Amarcord. Its structure is linear, following events in chronological order and developing issues in a cause- and-effect style. Emotions are beneath the surface, visible only in the subtle nuances of the bodies of the characters. The narrative is controlled; there are no random trajectories heading off optimistically for places unknown. It is pessimistic despite the new affluence it heralds; it neither extols the past nor generates hope for the future.

Whenever I muse on the two films or Italian and Australian identities, I imagine that Italians coming to Australia in the 1950s entered a Newsfront world with an

Amarcord sensibility. Just as these two cultures live in me, they now inhabit

Australian national identity. In the 1950s, regardless of their war-weariness, impoverishment and the tyranny of Fascism (which somehow didn't dull their

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 57 exuberance and passion), Italians carried something of the chaotic yet optimistic world of Amarcord with them to disturb the ‗stitched-up‘ domain of Newsfront. In turn, the orthodoxy of Newsfront’s Australia offered stability and possibility to the

Amarcord-like characters seeking a more certain future.

I kept these films in my 'imaginary museum' of cinema' as they touched me deeply. Each became a 'sign or group of signs' related to my split cultural identities (Lefebvre, 1999: 480 quoted above). Amarcord recalled the Italian world of my mother's family while Newsfront reminded me of my father's world of Anglo-Australia. The impressions made on me by the films are not simply a result of their content; but also a consequence of filmic practices and the process of spectatorship. To understand the relation of film and memory affects I found useful tools in the work of Brooks and Radstone on the reciprocity of auratic gaze

(Brooks, 1995, Radstone, 1995). Marks on film and the senses (Marks, 2000a);

Connolly on 'memory traces' (Connolly, 2002); and Flaxman's interpretation of the Deleuzian concept of the 'acentred perception' (Deleuze, 1989, Flaxman,

2000a). I begin by looking at acentred perception and the memory affects of

Newsfront; then at the ways Amarcord evoked memory traces and sense memory, and finally auratic gaze in relation to both films;

Acentred perception

In his books on cinema, Gilles Deleuze charts the shift from classical Hollywood style cinema (The Movement-Image) to modernist European cinema (The Time-

Image) before and following the Second World War (Deleuze, 1986, Deleuze,

1989). Cinema before the War was dominated by spatial images and the narrative followed a kind of stimulus-response progression, with the plot shaped by action

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 58

(movement). It was transformed after the War into a disconnected montage of images in which the emphasis was on inner, psychic or emotional journeys rather than on contextual actions and reaction. For Deleuze, in The Time Image, time itself becomes a tool of narrative, complicating or disordering the relation between sequences. Our senses respond in unpredictable ways in the gaps between images, calling forth any number of possible perceptions and voluntary or involuntary memories.

Deleuze applies and disturbs Bergson's concept of the relation of film to perception (Flaxman, 2000a). Bergson saw cinema as being similar to perception, arguing that we have developed a 'habit of treating the cinema as an extension of perception', in which the subject is the centre of action (Flaxman, 2000c: 96). This habit, in turn, reinforces our view that cinema follows a 'natural' structure but, as

Flaxman notes, Deleuze argues that cinema 'does not imitate normal perception; rather, it reveals the "mechanism" of perception' (Flaxman, 2000c: 88). We generally see ourselves as the centre of action; everything that happens to and around us is perceived from our particular point of view. But, as Deleuze argues, the world does not provide us with a pre-existing centre to step into. The centre from which we see the world is never fixed, we are only ever the centre of

'indetermination' (Flaxman, 2000c: 96). Cinema, for Deleuze, allows the possibility of an 'acentred perception' as Flaxman says: '[b]ecause this centre is not presupposed and does not exist prior to the world, the possibility exists that the cinema may allow us to return to an acentred perception' (Flaxman, 2000c:

96).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 59

In 'time image' films, the illogical time sequences when the action makes irrational leaps in duration, spaces are created that can upset spectators' sensory- motor system, 'rending the subject from its habitus as a "centre of action"'

(Flaxman, 2000c: 96). This can disorient spectators from their habitual perception of the world and their place in it and leave them in a space of uncertainty. These moments of uncertainty allow us to experience a different state of being, thinking or becoming. Flaxman tells us that for Deleuze these spaces or 'interstices' are where 'thought experiences its own duration…image and thought merge on what he calls the "plane of immanence," a transcendental, preindividual, and even prephilosophical field of infinite variation' (Flaxman, 2000b: 6). Moments exist in cinema that disrupt the smooth flow of narrative when camera shot, montage or other filmic devices create spaces for 'abnormal' or 'untimely' thought, instances when 'we extract ourselves' and escape from the chaos of life, even while still participating in it. Cinema allows the self to 'leave the world' of habitus and of time, and in that deterritorialised space we can 'rid ourselves of ourselves'

(Flaxman, 2000c: 96-98).

What happens to us in these spaces in cinema when we are ridding ourselves of ourselves is what I want to explore in the spaces created in Newsfront and

Amarcord where I enter realms beyond the structure of the films. First, some background on my father:

◊◊◊

The Newsfront world of my father

My father returned from the war when he was still just 20 years old with

physical and mental illness, after serving in the Middle East, Greece and New

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 60

Guinea. On return from the Owen Stanley Ranges his Division was taken to the

Atherton Tablelands for the soldiers to recuperate before meeting their

families who would have been shocked by their poor condition. Dad came back

with pneumonia, and malaria which continued to recur for some years after

the war. When I recently obtained his Service Record from the National

Archives, I discovered that he was finally discharged suffering neurasthenia.

This was called 'shell shock' during the First World War, and is what we today

call post traumatic stress disorder. My childhood memory of him is as a thin

and anxious man who, first thing every morning on rising, would run down the

backyard to the dunny and throw-up. He was often irritable and I was taught

to cry softly so as not to wake him when he did shift-work. Later in life he was

robust, jolly and full of life, but not then.

On being discharged from the Army he joined the Australian Labor Party,

attending the local Labor League which Branches were then called. He had

various jobs: working in the local woollen mills, rabbit trapping in the bush, and

later building army barracks at Holsworthy and Ingleburn. We lived at the

outer limits of metropolitan Sydney where there were few community

facilities. In this post-War, post-Depression era there was still great poverty;

some families lived crowded together in one or two room corrugated-iron

shacks lined with lime-dipped hessian bags, kids wore ragged clothes and some

had no shoes. Our own house had been a one room dwelling with a veranda

partly built-in around it. The floors sloped, it had tiny

louvered windows in odd places, and a leaky, rusty

corrugated iron roof. We and the neighbours lived on

large tracts of thinly wooded acres, beside dusty roads

that turned into muddy quagmires in the rain. There were

no footpaths, just tracks winding along the sides of the

roads. My father became involved with others in the area Les Powell, Mayor, Fairfield 1956 to improve things like the roads and footpaths, local

parks and bus services. He eventually became an ALP Alderman on Fairfield

Council, and was mayor for two years in the 1950s.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 61

Dad became Mayor of Fairfield during the time of the mass immigration into

the area, fed in part by migrant hostels at Cabramatta and Villawood. He

inaugurated mass naturalisation ceremonies in Fairfield, possibly the first in

Australia, to cope with the huge numbers wanting to become citizens. Before

that, people swore allegiance to the Crown in the privacy of the Mayor's

office. The first mass ceremony had 75 candidates and an audience of 400:

In the modern well furnished Civic Ballroom at Cabramatta history was made for the Fairfield Municipality when 75 candidates became naturalised Australian citizens. This epoch making event which took place before a crowded gathering of nearly 400 people last Monday night, August 27, is a record for any naturalisation ceremony in Australia and we congratulate the Mayor of Fairfield who has the direct responsibility of organising and carrying out the naturalisation. (The Biz, 29/08/1956)

His final naturalisation ceremony in 1957 set another record, 174 candidates

and an audience of over 500:

This 34th naturalisation ceremony carried out in the Municipality of Fairfield with the 174 candidates, was the largest event of its kind, also marked the last time that His Worship the Mayor, Ald. L. Powell, will officiate. (The Biz, 23/10/57) My father's community activities moved us up Pat & Jack Mannix, MLA, Les in the world locally and allowed me to feel a Powell, Gough Whitlam MP 1956 cut above my playmates. Gough Whitlam was

our local Federal member and my father

always boasted that he had voted for him in

his first pre-selection ballot for the seat of

Werriwa. We had quite a bit to do with

Federal and State MPs through the Labor

Party, attending meetings and official

functions. In this world I came into contact

with local intellectuals and was introduced to

the joys of art, theatre, ballet and symphony concerts. Some of these people

helped my father and his running mate with their grammar and elocution.

Neither of them had gone to High School. It was also a world of intrigue,

debate and conflict. My father enjoyed being embroiled in political power

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 62

struggles. Many years later he parted ways with the Labor Party although

never betraying it in spirit. My political education started early: I attended

local branch meetings with my father and mother, went to official functions,

sat through boring council meetings, or did my homework in the Mayor's

office. During election time we joined others on the back of trucks, pasting up

posters on telegraph poles. I learned to mix the buckets of flour and water

glue and to paint the back of posters with big brushes. Campaigners from the

other side would also be out and about doing the same. People felt their

politics keenly, openly debated issues in public, and there were often verbal

and even physical stoushes during election campaigns.

◊◊◊

Newsfront and the spaces between

With its discontinuous narrative, it is easy to identify the interstices in Amarcord where one's point of view is disturbed and 'acentred' spaces are possible. In

Newsfront with its conventional linear structure, with one event following another in an enclosed time period, the spaces where 'untimely thought' may intrude are not so obvious. Even the archival newsreel clips are 'morphed' into the film to maintain narrative flow. However, there is discontinuity in the way the newsreels draw attention to themselves ('this is real!') and shift the spectator's register from the fictional narrative to historical actuality. Newsfront begins with a collage of clips from Australian newsreels of the late 1940s and early 1950s, showing many images that have become emblematic of that period of Australian history. It segues into showing the camera operators filming the sequences. All is in black and white until we see a newsreel about the imminent arrival of television in

Australia, after which the film continues in colour, while the actual newsreels remain in black and white.The clever segues between actual newsreel footage and

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 63 the fictional characters operating cameras to film the sequence, create a jolt – I know this footage is real, but I also know that Bill Hunter did not film it. These shifts in register provide spaces where I become 'acentred' and also shift register.

◊◊◊

There is something about Bill Hunter that reminds me of my father. It is his

hair and his haircut. There is the same vulnerability in the bare back of the

neck, but such authority in that blunt cut of hair. Dad's hair was restrained,

smooth and shiny from California Poppy hair oil which turned his red hair into

a tobacco colour. It had the look of that tobacco that came in slabs in tins, to

be rubbed, rolled and teased into roll-your-own cigarettes. For an instant it is

as if he is there on the screen. Even after all these years I still see Dad in

strangers walking past; something about the gait and its suggestion of

soldierly marching, or in the shape of an eyebrow or a cheeky grin. These are

some of the positive memories that I keep in the 'crypt' enfolded within me.

(Woodward, 1991: 91. Discussed in Chapter 1)

◊◊◊

The layering of the newsreels within the fictional narrative gives rise to a paradox: the story is fiction but the colour and dramatic action make it seem real.

The newsreels are fact but have the ghostly aura of an imaginary past; projecting nostalgia for what is no longer real (if it ever was). This ambiguity and the shifts from the narrative (the unreal-real) to the newsreels (the actual-imaginary) deliver in-between spaces that open me up to memory and longing. In those spaces I echo the nostalgia of the newsreels; they are classics such as The Enemy Within about the communist 'menace' sweeping the world and threatening Australia and Public

Enemy Number One about the plague of rabbits, no less a threat than communism.

The film story starts in 1948 and goes through to 1956 and brings experiences

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 64 from my childhood to the surface. I remember actually seeing some of the newsreels featured and they trigger other memories: the rabbit menace newsreel reminded me that my father spent six months as a rabbit-trapper, and how he taught me to shoot rabbits in the gully, and how I hated the taste of rabbit. I remember Dad's political activities, the disappointment when Ben Chifley was defeated in 1949, and the anti-communist panics of the 1950s. The Maitland floods recalled other floods locally in 1956 when people lost their belongings and had to be evacuated.

Cinema screens are a prominent motif in both films: in Newsfront they are the focal point around which the stories flow; in Amarcord they serve as a constant presence with scenes in the village cinema and Hollywood movie posters forming backdrops to the stories. The cinema also featured as a backdrop to my early life.

I used to see newsreels at the State Theatrette in the city with Mum, Saturday afternoons I'd go to the local picture show with friends, and often went drowsily to mid-week sessions with my grandmother, Nonna:

◊◊◊

Nonna at the movies

Nonna was a great fan of films. At the end of the road where she lived, there

was a cinema, although that is too grand a word to describe the leaky old

picture show that locals

called the 'bug-alley'.

My grandmother went

there every night that

they screened films; I

think it was three or

four nights a week. She went alone, except when I stayed the night at her

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 65

place and went with her, which happened frequently once my parents got

involved in local politics. The floorboards in the bug-alley gave way in some

places and made a lot of noise when people walked to the old tin dunnies out

the back. The seats were all covered in old cracked leather or vinyl.

There was a central aisle between the seats, with one row of seats running

straight across the back wall. Nonna always sat in the back row in the centre

seat that gave a clear view down the aisle, right under the stream of light

from the projector. Over time the vinyl cover of her seat had worn away

revealing the pink velour underneath that shone like a little beacon in the

dark, dank old barn. Everyone knew that this seat was Mamma's (as the locals

called her) and no one else ever dared to sit in it. Even now, 50 years later

people from my neighbourhood that I meet ask, 'remember your

grandmother's seat at the pictures?' One of them recently told me that

Nonna refused to stand for 'God Save the Queen' which was played at the

beginning of the cinema session, and would say loudly, 'she is not my queen'. At

the 'bug-alley' on Saturday afternoons we watched serials of Tarzan and

other comic heroes, cartoons and the newsreel, before the main feature.

Newsreels were an important adjunct to other sources of news (newspapers

without many photographs, and scant radio newscasts), allowing us to see

bushfires, floods, the Queen, the Prime Minister, and celebrities; they were

rare treats in the days before television. There were also specialist newsreel

cinemas, like the State Theatrette featured in Newsfront where newsreels

ran in a loop so you could pop in and out at any time. Mum and I used to go to

town about once a month to return the completed string-bags that the family

made as out-workers at home for extra money. We would always make a day of

it; we'd have lunch at Coles or Woolworths Cafeteria and go to see the

newsreels, or sometimes to the Macquarie Auditorium to watch the radio

serials being made. Mum was a great fan of foreign films and when I was older

she would take me to see Italian films at the Savoy, like Bitter Rice and La

Strada.

◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 66

The sensations and memories mobilised in the interstices between the fiction and

'actuality' of Newsfront are mainly pain and grief at the loss of my father, but there is also an ache of joy in seeing the familiar past depicted on the screen. I don't recall the actual occasion I first saw Amarcord, but I do recall seeing

Newsfront for the first time because I cried through most of it. It was just a couple of years after Dad's death and spoke of his times, his prime of life, and his dreams. I mourned the loss of a time when I was secure in the embrace and protection not just of my father‘s physical presence, but of the certainty of his beliefs and assurance in the absolute integrity of his knowledge of what was right and wrong. Those same times seem to echo in the memories of others of my generation; Jake Wilson quotes Bob Ellis as saying '[Newsfront] was conceived as

―a love song to all our fathers‖ and right from the start its creators seem to have been in mourning for a lost era and a lost style of manhood' (Wilson, 2002: 121).

The film itself is about loss: at the end of the film the central character has lost everything meaningful in his life: friends, family, lover; and the industry for which he sacrificed a great deal. He has no faith in the new world of television, consumerism, rock and roll and youth culture. All he has left is his integrity as he gleefully refuses to give in and sell his exclusive footage – of an angry Cold War clash between Hungary and the USSR at the Melbourne Olympics – to his brother who had 'sold-out' to the new medium.

◊◊◊

The film is full of indices of the era that spark memories of the 1950s: the

theme music to 'When a Girl Marries', one of the many romantic radio serials

that my mother and all her friends listened to daily while doing the

housework: the ice-man delivering ice in the days before refrigerators; queues

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 67

outside The State newsreel theatrette; and groups of mates pitching in to

help build a house extension. This was a common activity in the years when all

men knew how to use hammers, saws and chisels (our new 1950s house was

built that way). Then there are snippets of old language that resonate: 'get-

rooted', 'knock your bloody block off', 'what a donnybrook',' bite your

bum!'and 'whacko!'

◊◊◊

Watching the film again in 2005, with the distance of time since first seeing it, and the 30 years since my father's death, I realise that the loss and mourning I feel is also for me, for the self of the time depicted in the film. As Jodi Brooks concludes in her chapter on cinema and involuntary memory, in the gap between film and spectator a temporal distance is produced between the known self and the forgotten or potential self that sets up 'a kind of longing' and an 'imagined complicity' with the film (Brooks, 1995: 88).

Amarcord and memory traces

We are constructed in memory; we are simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity (Fellini cited in Deleuze, 1989: 99).

The memories evoked by Newsfront were specific but with Amarcord it was not exact memories that were triggered but the kind of 'memory traces' that William E

Connolly describes as 'real without being actual'. As he says, memory traces 'exert affects (hence are real) without themselves being refined enough to be direct objects of existential inspection (hence lacking actuality)' (Connolly, 2002: 121).

In Freud's schema, some memory traces are enduring but not consciously recognised. They remain in the unconscious, and while their fragments can be powerful, the event that laid them down in the unconscious cannot be recalled.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 68

Connolly remarks that a memory trace can be 'marked by affective intensity once triggered by an appropriate event. It can thus be powerful in its efficacy in the present, even if not determinant enough to become a clear memory of the past'

(Connolly, 2002: 120). This may be similar to the effect of post-traumatic flashes when a person momentarily 'relives' a painful past event. A smell, touch, sound or other signal can activate a 'trace', causing affect without a discernable memory to which it can be attached.

◊◊◊

Amarcord child in a Newsfront world

My mother endured rather than enjoyed her role in my

father's public life. She moaned about him always being

out at meetings and neglecting his home in favour of the

needs of other people. Nevertheless, she fulfilled her

role and accompanied him, sometimes filling in for him,

at official functions. Her main job as Lady Mayoress was

to provide supper after council meetings and to organise the annual Mayoral

Ball. For this she had to help prepare and rehearse the debutantes, organise

the supper, and officiate on the night. Her life had not prepared her for her

role in my father's world, but as a naturally exuberant and sociable person,

she performed well, although she detested having to make speeches and I

remember the look of terror that crossed her face and the way her voice

trembled.

She did a dress-making course at Granville Technical College so that she could

make all of the costumes she needed for official functions, and ended up with

a wonderful collection of ball gowns and smart suits. I benefited from her

skills too as she made me the latest styles of dresses and outfits essential for

my teenage years. We could never have afforded to buy them.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 69

To her family, il sindaco (the mayor) was held in high esteem and my father

became a bit of a hero to local Italians who took advantage of the family

connection to seek advice, have letters written and forms signed. They always

came by with a box of home-grown vegetables, a bottle of home-made wine or

grappa.

◊◊◊

In analysing Freud's ideas of memory traces 'reaching back to primordial times'

Connolly doubts that they extend so far back into the past (or forward across so many generations) (Connolly, 2002: 129). However, he keeps hold of the idea that memory traces may be intersubjectively created and 'layered into corporeo- cultural life across historical time' (Connolly, 2002: 122). This layering requires intensive reiteration through generations and accounts for the durability of some cultural forms, although the transmission is imperfect and the traces can change in this process. Just as behaviours, gestures and collective memories are passed from generation to generation, so are ethical and moral codes and beliefs. Connolly is talking about the resilience of religious experience and morality over time, and

Freud's argument about generational inheritance of traces of archaic ritualistic

15 Presentation of Debutantes, Fairfield Mayoral Ball, 1956

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 70 practices, but I see it as applicable also to other states related to memory and longing. The traces that I register do not come as a mystical experience but they do come mysteriously from sources that 'subsist below the threshold of pure representation' (Connolly, 2002: 126). They are feelings that I cannot pin down, just as Connolly describes:

A trace is a memory fragment that does not take the form of an explicit recollection. Because it is both fast in its arrival and fragmentary in its shape, it cannot be recollected in itself, even after psychoanalysis, although it can be interpreted through psychoanalysis. It becomes, however, marked by affective intensity once triggered by an appropriate event (Connolly, 2002: 120)

Connolly discusses the way experiences can be re-activated; 'the triggering mechanism touches something in the past not susceptible in principle to conscious recollection...A triggering event may activate in an adult traces from infancy, even before the individual had access to language' (Connolly, 2002: 120). I can still remember the smell of Nonna's wooden table when I rested my head on it.

The table was embedded with the integrated and rancid smells of oil, garlic, parmesan cheese and wine. I lived the first six months of my life at Nonna's and spent a great deal of time at her place as I grew up. This early experience gave me an 'ear' for the Veneto dialect, although I never learnt to speak it fluently. I instantly recognise it whenever I hear it spoken and the memory traces are activated. Amarcord, a fiction built on Fellini's recollections, which mixes memory, fantasy and history into a selection of loosely connected narratives, becomes the 'fiction' of my childhood. Memories which can no longer be relied on as fact are recalled from 'a virtual archive that includes, but is not limited to,

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 71 memory, what is forgotten or unknown, and what is known only to the body'

(Marks, 2000b: 194). My body responds to fragmented recollections with sensations that loom and recede in the gaps between Fellini's images.

In his The Time-Image Deleuze includes Fellini in his discussion of filmmakers and describes him as producing films that 'overflow the real' and organise everyday life into a 'travelling spectacle'. Fellini films have their own laws of progression and purposely confuse the real and the spectacle (Deleuze, 1989: 4-

6). Deleuze refers to articles written by Barthelemy Amengual's for a definition of the originality of Fellini's style of film as spectacle:

No distinction between watching and watched, without spectators, without exit, without wings or stage: less a theatre than a kind of giant Luna Park, where movement, which has become movement of world, makes us pass from one shop-window to another, from one entrance to another...a crystal which is always in the process of formation, expansion...it is life as spectacle (Deleuze, 1989: 89).

In keeping with Deleuze's notions of the time-image, Amarcord is discontinuous and fragmented. For me, as Marcia Landy describes it,

the image takes on a sense of indeterminacy where the boundaries between the real and the imaginary blur'. The films contain, 'a "crystalline" narration, a surface that reflects many layers and many discrete perspectives...a new kind of narration, one that is discontinuous and fragmented, rather than connected and unified (Landy, 2001: 6).

The characters in Amarcord are caricatures and the events are often farcical. In the Amarcord world of my childhood there were characters and events like those in the film; the crazed uncle, the 'refined' patriarchal cousin, the puffed up

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 72 businessman, the benign forgetful Nonno. I remember the world of my Nonna and

Nonno as being like a Fellini movie; chaotic, loud and full of passions, whether joyful, tragic or scandalous. Gatherings were noisy, full of bizarre individuals, crowded with people talking, laughing, singing, and dancing, while food and wine flowed.

◊◊◊

For the Italians living around Fairfield and Liverpool between the 1930s and

50s Nonna's house was a surrogate for il bar in the village piazza, a place to

gather and meet compatriots. Gathering at her place in the evenings and on

weekends became a proxy for the passeggiata back home. Down the bottom of

her paddock was a bocce pitch, on the back veranda she sold wine that she

bottled herself from demijohns, and beer. The wine was delivered in bulk and

we all helped to siphon it into sterilized beer bottles. In the salotto there

would be card-games with lots of shouting, table-thumping and laughter.

Nonna was a keen player, usually the only woman at the table. My uncle played

the accordion, or there was a gramophone playing scratchy opera songs. ◊◊◊

In Amarcord there are a number of occasions where the community comes together: at a bonfire to celebrate the arrival of Spring; lining the streets and craning heads over the top of buildings to watch the passing cars in the Mille

Miglia; and heading out to sea in all manner of floating craft to witness the passing of the new Italian ocean-liner, the Rex. For my Italian family and its small community, there were similar occasions when everyone got together to share a significant event. When new family or community members arrived from Italy a contingent would go to the wharf to meet the boat and drive in convoy home where a feast had been prepared. There were big parties for engagements,

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 73 weddings, christenings and confirmations, and New Year's day which was the best day of the year in my childhood, as it was for my mother:

New Year was always special. Mumma would hire professional piano accordion players, one called Puccini and another called Piccinin. They would come from Sydney; Italians would come from as far away as Griffith, Wollongong and Lithgow. We would have fantastic singing and dancing and go all night. Mumma made lots of profits on those occasions . (Powell, 1994)

After Nonna got too old to host these parties, Zia Marianna would cook a big New

Year's Day lunch, including hand made ravioli, for the extended family. We would eat it at long trestle tables outside under Zio Carlo's grapevines. There was always my particular favourite for afterwards – cróstoli – pastry rolled very thinly, cut into diamond shapes, fried for an minute in olive oil till it bubbled, then sprinkled with sugar. It was a special treat at Christmas and Mum taught me how to make it so that I could continue this little family tradition for my daughter and her Italian-Canadian husband whose father is Veneto and whose Nonna used to also make cróstoli for him.

Until the mid 1950s all of the families in the neighbourhood were of English or

Irish background. I felt quite different from them, it was as if I had a 'secret' world and experienced a life totally unlike that of any of my friends. The memory traces triggered by Amarcord call forth the way I felt in this other world. Because they are traces, it is difficult to describe precisely how that world was different, like the maternal gaze Brooks describes, returning as 'something distant and strange'

(Brooks, 1995: 84). It wasn't just their language; it was also their look and demeanour: men wearing old dusty clothes, trousers with holes or patches and

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 74 tied at the waist with rope, stooped from hard work, with grubby nails and hands embedded with soil from the garden, and a smell about them of salami, wine and fertiliser. There were women with facial hair who scuffed about in old slippers and faded cotton dresses, who drank wine and smoked pipes, smelling of coffee, cheese and olive oil; some with rotting or missing teeth, cracked heels, and husky or gravely voices. They all had strange names, not just their Italian surnames but given names – Chicco and Ciccio, Catinella, Vatta, Ettore, Bortolo and Tutti (my mother's name), Giaccomo, Enzo – some we have become more familiar with over time: Giuseppe, Angelin, Giovanin, Antonietta. I was called Diana (Dĭyahna) by my mother and her family, but Diane by my father and everyone else.

◊◊◊

I Miei Nonni

My Italian grandparents migrated from the Veneto in the 1920s, living for a

few years in Leichhardt and Lithgow before moving to Mount Pritchard in

western Sydney. Australia was not the great land of opportunity imagined by

immigrants in those years before and

during the Great Depression. My

grandparents had a hard time of it.

Nonno, Angelo Antonio Borriero, worked

as a builder's labourer while Nonna,

Carola Pegoraro, a lively and enterprising

woman, had various 'businesses' on the

go. In Lithgow she ran a boarding house

for single Italian migrants with about

eight men staying two or three to a

room. At Mount Pritchard she managed

the market garden, the bocce courts and

sly-grog business.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 75

Nonno was a quiet man, a short stocky fellow who seemed to be a figure in the

background of life in Meadows Road, Mount Pritchard. Before my time he had

worked as a kitchen-hand and dishwasher in two high-class Italian restaurants

in Sydney, Romano's and Fiorentino's. I mainly remember him sitting on the

front veranda, staring into space as if watching the grapes grow on the vines

that extended to the front fence. As a child I would often sit there with him

in silence and we communicated love between us without speaking. He would

smoke his pipe and chew the spent tobacco left in the bowl. It was moist and

charred and called cicca (chika). He would dig it out of the pipe, knead it in his

palm and chew it for ages, spitting it out into the garden when its flavour had

gone. His beard was stained a tobacco colour, and the smell of it hung around

him. An uncle who also smoked a pipe, but didn't chew tobacco, would save his

cicca for Nonno every week.

In the Depression Nonno had to go on the dole which was paid in vouchers for

food, clothing and shoes. My mother recalled: 'Nella and I would refuse to

wear the shoes which were like army boots. Poor Mumma used to cry when she

saw them on us. We would leave home wearing them but take them off and go

to school bare-foot' (Powell, 1994).

Neither Nonno nor Nonna ever saw a doctor until they got really sick in old

age. Nonno ended up with gangrenous feet due to diabetes and had first one

leg and then the other amputated. He didn't live long after that. Nonna had

asthma and eczema; she treated her asthma with gin, keeping a bicerìn (a

little glass) of it beside her bed at night. Traces of Nonna remain; I inherited

her asthma, and my daughter, her eczema. I haven't tried the 'gin cure' yet.

◊◊◊

Amarcord and sense memory

Laura U Marks writes about perception through the senses in relation to intercultural film. She discusses experimental films that use haptic devices to convey a sense of the past that remain only as traces of memory for the

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 76 filmmakers. In these films the camera dwells on objects, records rituals, uses focus and camera movements, and samples from other films, to express 'nonvisual knowledge' and represent a past which is often fragmentary. While film is generally limited technically to visual and aural information, the techniques used in the intercultural films discussed by Marks, burrow into the 'sense knowledge...embedded in culture' (Marks, 2000a: 198). In some cases, the senses are 'the only place where cultural memories are preserved' (Marks, 2000a: 195).

This process is similar to Connolly's description of the senses triggering traces of memory that are elusive, but loaded with affect. Memories and culture are carried not only in the mind but in the body and in knowledges of dance, music, taste, touch and smell. Sense memories are 'emissaries of cultural experience' (Marks,

2000a: 201). As Marks suggests:

First, our sensorium is formed by culture: it produces a map of the 'objective' world that reflects our cultural configuration of the senses. Second our sensorium creates the world 'subjectively' for us...[third] it is possible to learn a new configuration of the senses (Marks, 2000a: 203).

Sound, image, framing, movement, colour and perspective all function to provide the spectator with hooks on which to hang memories. Amarcord is not an intercultural film of the kind Marks analyses, but it functions as one for me, opening up spaces between two cultures. It is a film I perceive through my senses

– when I hear the rhythm of speech and see the way people relate, their gestures and the looks that pass between them, the way the table is set and the textures of the food – I can smell, feel and taste what the film shows. There is something more; a sense of the very ambience of past experiences. For an instant it is as if I

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 77 am not watching the film but am there: I feel that air on my skin, smell the aromas. Marks sees cinema generally as an 'agent of mimesis and synaesthesias', playing a part in 'a completing of the self in a sensory meeting with the world'

(Marks, 2000a: 214). Cinema facilitates our becoming.

By appealing to one sense in order to represent the experience of another, cinema appeals to the integration and commutation of sensory experience within the body. Each audiovisual image meets a rush of other sensory associations. Audiovisual images call up conscious, unconscious, and nonsymbolic associations with touch, taste, and smell, which themselves are not experienced as separate. Each image is synthesized by a body that does not necessarily divide perceptions into different sense modalities (Marks, 2000a: 222).

In Amarcord I am drawn into a 'sensory participation with its world' , particularly in the scenes around the dinner table (Marks, 2000a: 214). The way people eat in those scenes awakens memories of my Nonna's minestra; of the greasy feel of her table; the musty gorgonzola smell of her kitchen; the huge mound of spaghetti in my Nonno's plate sitting in a moat of soup, and the way he would fork the pasta into his mouth starting at the top of the mound and seeming to suck it all up without taking a breath till it had all gone. Marks notes that food is central to many cultures and that 'in the absence of other records food becomes even more a vehicle of memory' (Marks, 2000a: 225).

◊◊◊

Tutti i gusti sono gusti16

Nonna had a sparrow trap built in her garden, a large rectangular wooden

frame covered in wire. The sparrows could fly into a hole in the wire but could

16 There is no accounting for taste

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 78

not find their way out, although, they had plenty of space inside it to fly

around. She would kill them when there were enough for a meal of polenta e

osèi (polenta and little birds). I imagine she would wring their little necks one

by one. My mother told me how they relished the dish and would eat the whole

bird, head and all.

My father at one stage kept racing-

pigeons and when Nonna visited us,

she would eye-off the pigeons and

joke with my father about having

them for dinner. Before the days of

wildlife protection laws, my uncles

would go shooting and bring home

rosellas and cockatoos to eat. They say that today there are few birds left in

Italy, and migrating birds avoid flying over the country, thanks to the Italian

penchant for hunting and eating birds. Sparrows were not the only strange

food my grandparents ate. When I was small my mother bought a goat so that

she could give me goat's milk. The goat had

two gorgeous kids which I adored, called

Punch and Judy. One day Punch disappeared

and I found out later that he had been given

to my grandparents, slaughtered and eaten.

Recently, on a visit to Club Marconi I found

17 From: Ignazio Silone, 1943, The Seed Beneath The Snow, Jonathan Cape, London.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 79

that baby goat was on the Bistro menu. As much as I like to try new and

exotic foods I have never been able to bring myself to try it.

◊◊◊

Marks points out how a smell that is treasured in one culture may be repulsive to or not even registered in another, and that many people inhabit at least two sensoria; 'that of their culture of origin, and the new sensory organization in which they find themselves' (Marks, 2000a: 196). Nonna loathed the thought of eating mutton, an Australian staple at the time. She would proudly state she had been in the country for forty years and 'never the drip in my house'.18 My father had to teach my mother how to roast lamb and cook other Anglo food when they got married. Over time Australians have developed and embraced a new sensory appreciation of a diversity of smells from a variety of cultures they initially found abhorrent. My mother, subjected to racist taunts as a child (even from her primary school teacher – who called her 'Lena Bow and Arrow' instead of Borriero), grew up with food aromas despised by her neighbours. Yet, when the township of

Cabramatta was transformed by the settlement of Vietnamese in the 1980s, she found the smell of their food revolting and used it in her prejudice against them.

I am interested in a sense that Marks does not explore. It is associated with but not strictly about the sense of hearing, it concerns the noises humans make in speaking, singing, groaning, sighing. In particular the rhythm of speech and the grain of the voice that Barthes describes as 'the very precise space (genre) of the encounter between a language and a voice' (Barthes, 1977a: 181 emphasis in original). Amarcord triggers sense memories and traces for me in the pitch and

18 drip refers to 'dripping' which was lamb fat kept for later cooking or used as a substitute for butter and spread on bread during lean times from the 1930s and into 1950s. It was very tasty.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 80 melody of the characters' voices that convey despair, confusion, joy, passion and anger. Barthes says the grain of the voice is 'the materiality of the body' (Barthes,

1977a: 182). He describes the voice of a Russian singer who 'brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages' (Barthes, 1977a: 181). The timbres and rhythms of the voices in Amarcord are familiar to me and seem particular to Italians. They remind me of the coarse voices of Nonna and Nonno; the melodic lilt of the

Veneto spoken dialect; the soprano-like pitch of my mother and aunts (not unlike the voice of the Titta's mother in Amarcord), when they were angry or emotional, or trying to get a word in when everyone was talking at once.

Auratic gaze

Susannah Radstone discusses Walter Benjamin's 'aura' and the 'auratic gaze' in her examination of two films on memory and autobiography (Cinema Paradiso and

The Long Day Closes).19 Benjamin argued that the reflective experience of

Erfahrung was being lost in the modern world through the impact of the constant

'shock of the new' or Erlebnis (McCracken, 2002: 147). Erfahrung is a more complete encounter, one which reconfigures our memory and is integrated into our being. Radstone says that for Benjamin, this type of experience is activated in storytelling by the 'auratic relation of reciprocity between teller and listener'

(Radstone, 1995: 39). Storytelling 'presupposes, or anticipates the returned "gaze" of the listener' (Radstone, 1995: 40). Benjamin saw cinema as eroding the auratic relation between storyteller and listener but Radstone contends that cinema may

19 Felicity Collins' article, 'Memory in Ruins' provided a useful guide to the work of Radstone and Brooks on auratic gaze and Benjamin. Collins, F. (2001) 'Memory in Ruins: The woman filmmaker in her father's cinema', Screening the Past, 13:

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 81 yet trigger Erfahrung in telling stories that can activate memories and are capable of establishing an auratic relation for the audience (Radstone, 1995: 40). Radstone argues that it is the relation of storytelling to duration and mortality that gives authority and recognition to the storyteller, and from which the auratic gaze stems:

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is natural history to which his stories refer back (Benjamin quoted in Radstone, 1995: 40).

I experienced both Newsfront and Amarcord as conduits for Erfahrung. They spoke to me of the loss of people, the longing for times past, and the impossibility of return, and the inexorable cycle of life and death. Yet, there were also pleasures of remembering; the gift of being able to return via imagination to magic of spaces in the mind, thanks to the creativity of filmmakers and the relationship generated between screen and spectator.

Jodi Brooks also draws on the work of Benjamin in her discussions about cinema spectatorship (Brooks, 1990, Brooks, 1995). The auratic gaze returns memories that have been lost but 'rise as images of another self, images which fleet past'

(Brooks, 1995: 84)

What we are dealing with here is a sort of invocation, an intensification of the gaze which imbues the object with traces of a past. It both opens a temporal realm between the subject and object (a strange mix of temporal proximity and distance) and suggests a physicality – the look that leaves a mark (Brooks, 1995: 83-84).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 82

Brooks associates the notion of reciprocity of the auratic gaze with Proust's perception of involuntary memory. In his account, Proust initially registers a sensation and he has to wait for it to become thought. Brooks sees this space between sensation and thought as similar to the process of reciprocity of the auratic gaze (Brooks, 1995: 86) , quoting Proust:

I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at great depth: I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed. Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind (Brooks, 1995: 86, Proust, 1989 quoted in).

Brooks argues that the sensation of involuntary memory is 'more like a sort of loss of self in the experience of an open, pure time' (Brooks, 1995: 87). This brings to mind the acentredness produced by the 'in between' spaces of Deleuze's Time-

Image films.

I experienced an auratic relation between the film (storyteller) and myself

(audience) in both Newsfront and Amarcord and entered into an 'imagined complicity' with the films. The flow of voluntary and involuntary memories returned images and a longing for a self that exists only in memory. As Brooks writes; 'it is not the subject's look that is returned, but those images or that self which we have never known in a waking state' (Brooks, 1995: 83) There is temporal distance between the 'present' of the narrative and the past of the newsreels in Newsfront and between my present identity and the lost identity of

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 83 my childhood in Amarcord: a distance 'between the self and an other self— unknown, forgotten, possible (and melancholic)' (Brooks, 1995: 88)

Brooks points out two types of look that leave a mark, 'the look of love and...the evil eye', suggesting they may be related. She notes Hansen's suggestion that the intense gaze, 'the look that leaves a residue – is a memory of the maternal gaze'

(Brooks, 1995: 84, Hansen, 1987). The memory of this gaze is buried deep in memory and is 'returned as something "distant and strange"' (Brooks, 1995: 84,

Hansen, 1987: 215). When watching Amarcord what is returned to me is this kind of affect, a distant and strange 'maternal gaze.

In an essay on Deleuze, Bergson and cinema, Amy Herzog echoes the idea that film's power lies in its ability to shape time in ways that are implausible 'working not toward action, but toward the zone of indeterminacy which lies between perception and action' (Herzog, 2000: 12 of pdf). She quotes Bergson:

Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states...recalling these states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one point alongside another, but it organizes them with itself [avec lui], as it happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak into one another20 (in Herzog, 2000: 12 of pdf)

Watching Amarcord and Newsfront I enter a 'zone of indeterminacy' where myriads of memories, sometimes ambiguous and conflicting, melt into one another, weaving divergent experiences from the past into the present me.

20 Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 100, as quoted in Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 121. Translation altered by Olkowski.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 84

The memory events of Amarcord and Newsfront trigger in me a mysterious

'affective intensity', speaking to fragments of my Italianness and my

Australianness, both with equal, although different intensities. Each film produced different feelings of loss. Newsfront returned grief about the very tangible loss of my father and created another space to mourn his absence from my life. Yet, it also reminded me of what I had learned from him, how rich my life was through his having been part of it. He unwrapped a world for me, one that showed me that

I could travel beyond the horizon of life's circumstances; in any direction, towards any goal. The longing produced by Amarcord was for things that were intangible: a return of a certain sense of self that only remained in fragments and traces of memories.

◊◊◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 85

Chapter 4. Murmurs

When I was a pubescent girl, going on eleven years old, an 18 year old Italian woman was shot dead on her way to work early one morning in neighbouring

Fairfield. The memory of it has stayed with me even though I didn't know the woman. The returning memory of this event was another catalyst for this project.

In this chapter I look at events surrounding the murder and reflect on the status of immigrants in 1950s Australia.

The story of the murder of the young woman in Fairfield, Nunziata, has been

'lying in wait' for me since I was ten years old, as was the story of the murder of

Joe Cinque for Helen Garner (Garner, 2004). She became interested in the puzzling circumstances, the people involved and events surrounding the young man's death, and decided to write a book about it. She wondered at her fascination: 'a story lies in wait for a writer. It flashes out silent signals. Without knowing she is doing it, the writer receives the message, drops everything, and turns to follow' (Garner, 2004: 25). The murder of Nunziata, or Nancy, became part of the rhizome of my life. I have been asked why this story was important to me, and at first I couldn't say, but in the process of writing I have come to realise that it occurred at a time when I was going through something of a crisis of identity and when there was a marked shift towards my Anglo 'half'. The story became woven into my life and attached itself to my identity development in my adolescent years.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 86

A life remembered

The young woman's given name was Nunziata, but her Australian friends, neighbours and workmates called her Nancy. On 10 March 2005, the fiftieth anniversary of her death, I visited Nancy's grave and put some flowers there in remembrance. She would have been 68 years old and may have had children and grandchildren and done interesting and important things if her future had not been brutally taken from her. I know her only through newspapers and remembered rumours, archived inquest documents and a police file. The event was extraordinary and left a powerful impression on me. Here was a murder in our own district, one involving Italians; a revenge killing; a young attractive woman; a vanishing murderer; and rumours of Mafia involvement. In the weeks and months after her murder, the search for the suspect and his mysterious disappearance led to speculation about the whole affair in newspapers. Gossip about the murder and its aftermath reinforced the existing negative characteristics attached to Italians during that era: uncontrollable passion; criminality; shiftiness; dark moodiness; subjugation of women; and a perceived reticence to mix with locals and adapt to the ways of their new country.

◊◊◊

Thursday 10 March 1955

I picture her walking out of the house that morning. It's early. The sky is still

overcast and Sydney is in its third week of steady, heavy rain. The tomato

plants in the garden are bent over with the weight of water, and the rows of

beans are sinking in a soggy mess of mud.

Nunziata walks along the edge of the gravel road to avoid getting her toes wet

on the overgrown grass of the track that wound along the footpath. It's a long

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 87

walk to the station and her sling-back sandals are not the best kind of

footwear in this weather.

The rain has stopped but the mist from the creek hovers in the scrubby

bushland, shrouding the trees dripping water onto the leafy floor. Nunziata

sniffs at the smell of wet, decomposing leaf mouldy, and savours the novel hint

of eucalyptus that belongs to this country.

The street is empty and quiet, the darkness has not yet completely lifted, but

Nunziata is cheered by the lights she sees in houses at the intersection

ahead.

Her stomach registers anxiety as she thinks again about breaking her

engagement to Raffaele, but at the same time she feels that a great weight

has lifted from her heart now that things between them have been settled.

She is relieved he took it well when her father told him she did not want to

marry him; he agreed they would all remain friends.

She crosses the wooden bridge of the creek near the intersection when she

sees a movement, hears a whisper of sound in the bush on her right, and

instantly her senses register too much, all at once. It is Raffaele and he is

calling her.

◊◊◊

There were witnesses to Nancy's murder. One was a man living in Loscoe Street,

Fairfield, near where Nancy was shot. He had just finished shaving when he heard rapidly firing gunshots, as if from an automatic rifle. He pulled back the curtain of his window and saw a woman lying on the road about 60 yards (about 55 metres) away with a man crouching over her. Another two shots were fired as the witness dropped his razor and rushed outside. A neighbour joined him; one rang the police as the other ran to Nancy, but she was beyond help. The witness said the man who had shot Nancy ran away, 'like a man with rubber legs'. He remembered that he

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 88 had often seen Nancy walking along the street on her way to work and sometimes saw her with the man who had shot her, at the very spot where she was now lying.21

At the hospital Nunziata was pronounced dead. She was bleeding from the left nostril and her mouth was filled with frothy blood. There were seven bullet wounds in her body:

◊◊◊

Statement of Dr Naaman George Malouf at the Inquest of Nunziata Inzitari, October 1955 I found the body of a young woman, well preserved. There was a bullet wound in the lower part of the right thigh which went through her leg.

There was a bullet wound on the inside of the left thigh, there was no exit wound. There was another bullet wound on the left side of the abdomen at the left of the umbilicus which came out through the back. There was another bullet wound at the middle edge of the left breast which pierced the left lung. There was another bullet wound through the right breast which went through the right lung and out through the back there. There was another bullet wound to the left breast which went through the left lung and out the back. There was another bullet wound through the left wrist.22 ◊◊◊

A photograph in the police file shows everything left of Nancy's dissolving

'present' in the damp street that morning. She had worn a red coat over a blue skirt and blouse, a black belt, a scarf, and, on her feet, a pair of shabby red sandals. In her vinyl bag she had carried a mirror and a comb, a clear plastic money purse,

21 Inquest transcript Archives Office of NSW, Ref: 8/3071 File: 55/1895 22 Inquest transcript Archives Office of NSW, Ref: 8/3071 File: 55/1895

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 89 and a ticket holder with a Workman's Weekly train ticket in it: 'Fairfield to

Strathfield and Burwood'. She had also carried a striped umbrella. 23

The photo in the police file shows these belongings laid out for examination. It is a sad image of the remnants of Nancy's life. These objects are emptied of her being but hold shadowy traces of an imagined a future. A future that collided with the past and ancient rite of honour killing and propelled her into non-being.

Shame

In the 1950s large numbers of migrants from Southern Italy began arriving in

Australia. My family, from Northern Italy, regarded them with disdain. With a curled up top lip they called them all Calabrese – whether they came from

Calabria or elsewhere in the South. I was taught to despise these newcomers. I recall this memory now with shame and find it difficult to write about; perhaps afraid that the contempt instilled in me decades ago, may remain buried beneath my regulated surface and come forth. I have worked through my prejudice, not just through being educated in 'political correctness'24 but by learning about and gaining an appreciation of the culture and traditions of the various regions in

Southern Italy. I am attracted by the richness of the history as well as the music and dance of the South, its literature and folk-tales, and the characteristics of the people. I marvel at the strength and resilience of their ancestors over centuries of poverty, the ravages of natural disasters, invasions and political neglect that have plagued the region. I also came to understand that if some Calabrese were

23 Police file Nunziata Inzitari, State Intelligence Group Library, accessed October 1998 24 As Meaghan Morris writes, 'Political Correctness is now used disparagingly, but began as a way of 'handling power relations of "race", ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality – by means of wide- ranging but often small-scale cultural reform'. Morris points out that its negative use 'expresses a dismissive attitude to those who advocate change' Bennet, T., Grossberg, L. & Morris, M. (Ed.), (2005) New Keywords: A revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford, Blackwell.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 90 illiterate, and seemed ignorant of the social changes happening in other parts of the world, it was due to isolation and lack of education and not a lack of intelligence. Over time I recognized that people from everywhere had the same aspirations as everyone else: stability, financial security and opportunities for a better life. Like most migrants, southern Italians often sacrificed a great deal to ensure the survival and success of their children. Many had to start life again, often going backwards before they could achieve anything as they struggled with a new language, new ways and great uncertainty.

Elspeth Probyn writes about shame in her book Blush, pointing out that it can have productive and positive aspects, 'shame alerts us to things, people, ideas that we didn't even realize we wanted, It highlights unknown or unappreciated investments' (Probyn, 2005: 14). She says that shame can teach us about engagement with others and with ourselves (Probyn, 2005: 35). Eventually, when

I began to feel the shame I now write about, it did produce a positive outcome, but back in the 1950s the Calabrese were my 'other' and a source of fear and disgust. I was told they were dirty and ignorant, that they lived with animals in their houses, that they were not really Italian but Africans or Arabs (betraying other prejudices). I had always been conscious of my Italian family being different from the local Anglo community but in the 1950s the growing ill-feeling of the mainstream Australians was aimed at all Italians. This projected a whole new identity of Italianness that was confusing and confronting to me.

I was taught to distinguish myself ('superior Northern Italian') from the other

Italians ('inferior Southern Italian') and to stress to people that we were Northern

Italians. But the rest of Australia did not make such distinctions and regarded us

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 91 collectively simply as Italian. I began to feel the effects of the suspicion and hostility of Anglo-Australians towards Italians. Local children at school knew of my Italian grandparents but I had never been called a Dago until after mass Italian immigration. I was at an age when children are extra-sensitive to name-calling and don't want to be different from the group. Rather than defend Italians I cringed; instead of empathising with the Calabrese I hated them even more for contaminating my view of what it meant to be Italian. Many Calabrese were now living in the neighbourhood and I found many of their customs objectionable, mostly with regard to the treatment of women. I knew girls who lived cloistered lives, confined to the house, or working in the shop or garden, always under watchful eyes. They were not allowed out to play with other kids in the street once they were past a certain age. Older girls were not allowed to go out socially without a chaperone and were never allowed to be alone with a male who was not family. Even engaged couples had to have someone with them at all times. Older women were often dressed in black to comply with strict mourning rituals. A neighbouring Calabrese father resented compulsory education, particularly for his two oldest girls, he wanted to send them out to work as soon as possible. He refused to buy his daughters uniforms or even exercise books and pencils. I would sometimes give them some of mine. Their work in the garden and house left them no time to do homework. As soon as it was legally possible they left school and went to work in factories.

By this time in my life I had been immersed for six years in the Australian school curriculum which was very British oriented – Empire Day was a still big annual celebration at school. Ironically I was always cast as Britannia in the tableau because I was tall. My Anglo father had always affectionately disparaged my

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 92 mother's Italian ways. He was one of those Australians who celebrated the achievements of bush pioneers, loved Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson and colonial bush ballads. He was something of a bushman himself. He knew the names of different gum trees, could recognise bird calls and knew how to survive in the bush. I absorbed his proclivities together with his strong working-class and Labor

Party sensibilities as I grew up. It was during this period of my early teenage years that my cultural identity became blurred. I came to feel embarrassed and ashamed of my Italian family and had developed more of an Anglo-Australian mentality. In some ways I felt at war within myself; my Anglo 'half' embarrassed by the Italian side and my Italian 'half' feeling discarded by the Anglo side. This resulted in some shameful behaviour on my part.

◊◊◊

Betrayal

Every Friday the school walked down the road to a park to play sports. We

walked past my grandmother's house; she was always out the front, waiting

for me to go past so that she could wave to me and give me a shilling or a piece

of 'chunga' (chewing gum). It was around this period of my life that I snubbed

her. This day we were walking on the opposite side of the road past her house.

As I walked down the road with the other kids I refused look her way even

though I could see her across the road leaning on her fence. I am mortified at

how ashamed of her I was on that day as she stood in her old apron, tatty

cardigan and slippers and her untidy hair. She knew that I had not simply been

distracted and had purposely ignored her. She was understandably very hurt

and told my mother who was horrified and made me realise what I had done.

◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 93

It is painful to remember the way I betrayed Nonna's love. Probyn discusses the various affects of shame, including on the body in the form of blushing (Probyn,

2005: 27-29) The remorse I feel is much greater than a 'blush'; to remember it is a mortification that shrinks my heart and soul. Even my body seems to shrink from the inside; sucked into a tight, contorted pain. Was there a positive or productive outcome from this memory? My mortification almost overwhelms my reason, but

I suppose it was a lesson about my capacity to hurt and betray, and of the need to be 'care-full' of how to treat others. It sensitized me to the feelings of others, so that despite my prejudicial opinion of Southern Italians, I was never openly hostile towards them, with the exception of haughtily snubbing young Italian men.

Groups of Calabrese youths would strut down the streets and stand on corners in

Cabramatta, ogling the girls walking by, including me. They would 'undress you with their eyes', lewdly running their eyes from your head to your ankles and back again. They would ask if you wanted a lift home or to go for a drive with them in their flashy cars. I always walked past them with my nose held high in the air and eyes looking straight ahead, they would call me 'La Contessa'. They were beautiful, but dangerous, with their smooth olive skin, dark brooding eyes, immaculately dressed in Italian 'glossy' style, their hair slicked. Many Anglo girls took up their offers and went out with them. Sometimes they were together for quite a while. A couple of Anglo girls got pregnant to the Italian boys and disappeared from public view for a time. The boys had cast them aside and went back to Italy to find obedient and virginal brides when it was time for them to marry, or their families would arrange it for them. I developed such an aversion to

Italian men that when Nonna pressured me to go out with a nice young boy from a

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 94 good Veneto family I couldn't stand to kiss him good-night and never went out with him again.

I was not taught to despise any other ethnic group, and don't remember feeling any hostility or fear of people from cultures other than the Calabrese. However, I was part of 1950s' Australia with its history of prejudice against, and mistrust of, people of non-Anglo background generally and in particular against anyone with dark skin: Aboriginal Australians, Pacific Islanders, Africans, Asians and those from the Middle-East and Southern Europe. The appalling treatment of our

Indigenous population did not register in the consciousness of most urban

Australians in the 1950s. In retrospect I now realise that many of my classmates probably had Aboriginal heritage, but no one admitted to it. Possibly they were no more aware of it than I was. I did not meet a person who identified as Aboriginal until I was an adult. I discovered many years after my first marriage that my husband's great grandmother was a Wiradjeri woman who married a white man.

Most of his family refused to acknowledge the connection; only the younger ones took an interest and made efforts to trace their heritage.

Ausies, Ities and others

The Australia that Nancy and her family arrived into was one where immigrants were expected to assimilate. It would be years before 'multiculturalism' was even a flicker of a thought in the Australian Government's agenda. It was supposed that newcomers would discard the ways of their home country and adopt all of the attributes of existing Australian culture and 'way of life', with its strong allegiance to British heritage. There were no clear instructions on how to achieve this, or even what it meant. Immigrants learnt by trial and error. In the workplace they

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 95 were castigated for working too hard, working for less than standard wages and conditions, not taking smokos and so on. In business they were resented for being too keen to succeed, and for opening all hours with the whole family working.

Those who tried hard to conform to the mysterious 'Australian way of life' found there were some things that couldn't be adapted, particularly for Southern

Europeans because of their different appearance. They weren't fair and freckled or long-limbed so they could not blend in as easily as Dutch, Germans or Eastern

European migrants.

In these pre-multiculturalism days, difference was frowned upon, and not only for immigrants. A tacit requirement of sameness permeated the 1950s for all

Australians. Of course there was political dissent, but within accepted democratic parameters, although the Menzies' Government attempted to outlaw the

Communist Party. Generally the population conformed to accepted standards of behaviour and style of life. There was limited choice of housing design, clothes or available foods. People from other countries, with their different ways and strange foods were regarded with suspicion. In this era when visual communication was unsophisticated and limited, and few travelled outside their own countries, the

'otherness' of the newly arriving people was more noticeable. I remember kids from Holland coming to my school in their baggy britches and clogs; German kids in Lederhosen, Russians with colourful waistcoats and shaved heads. We had never seen anything like this before and made awful fun of them. What an introduction we gave them to Australia.

Before multiculturalism there was no 'permission' to be different, no encouragement to honour one's heritage or keep alive the language, customs and

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 96 traditions of home. Speaking a foreign language in public was severely frowned upon, sometimes provoking a stream of abuse from bystanders. Few Australians tried to be helpful. Shopkeepers, hospital staff and bureaucrats would speak louder rather than slower when an immigrant could not understand them.

Sometimes they pretended not to understand at all as frustrated foreign-speaking women would point and gesture at an item in a shop's display cabinet. Non-

British immigrants unlucky enough to live in hostels found the canteen food provided for them inedible. It was difficult to obtain familiar foods, except through a few established networks of their own compatriots who had arrived earlier. Italians arriving in the 1950s were fortunate in this regard, as there were already small established communities who grew, produced or imported their own

Italian foodstuffs, coffee and wines.

Immigrants from Southern Europe (mainly Italians and Greeks in the 1950s) were unfortunate in that they were more conspicuous than Northern Europeans.

Australians responded to these differences with curiosity, suspicion and hostility.

For example I remember that hospital staff had a difficult time accommodating visitors to Italian patients. It was customary for the whole extended family to visit a relative in hospital. In those days hospitals were quite regimented institutions where visits were restricted to one hour in the afternoon and one hour in the evening. An Italian patient attracted dozens of visitors, all talking in Italian at the tops of their voices, creating pandemonium and disturbing other patients. They often brought strong-smelling food from home as the hospital food was unpalatable. The visitors, and the food, were often rudely ejected by hospital staff.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 97

Southern Italians like Nancy and Raffaele suffered as much or more ill-will and intolerance from Northern Italians as they did from Anglo-Australians. As Joseph

Pugliese remarks in his account of the difficulties of assimilation, he already inhabited an 'otherness' within his home country, before he encountered hostility in Australia; 'my Calabrian identity was to a degree already marked as other to the hegemonic image of 'the Italian', stereotypically represented as exclusively co- extensive with the North (Pugliese, 1995: 234). Mainstream Australians considered Calabrians as strange, alien and other. To Northerners they were sinister, stupid and stubborn people who still lived in the dark ages and were mixed up with extortion and protection rackets. What disturbed the Northerners even more was that they were being lumped together with the Southerners in the eyes of other Australians. However, while South Italians only suffered sneers from Northern Italians, they suffered systemic prejudice at jurisdictional, bureaucratic, political and cultural levels from institutional Australia.

Pugliese recounts a story from pre-multicultural Australia, when his uncle was detained for some time on arrival to Australia because of his dark skin and the suspicion that he was an African posing as Italian (Pugliese, 2002: 244). In other writing Pugliese describes how officials applied a 'whiteness test' on some potential immigrants, sometimes going so far as to check the whiteness of their bottoms to clarify their racial status (Pugliese, 2002: 157-163). Pugliese writes about the difficulties of shaking off difference and becoming 'same' when living in new culture, and the 'self-laceration' this often demanded, as mentioned in my

Introduction (Pugliese, 1995). This strikes me as similar to the 'body's sense of being out of place' that Probyn writes about, and the 'shame of the cultural outsider' (Probyn, 2005: 38, 39). She speaks of this as being a shame 'felt in the

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 98 rupture when bodies can't or won't fit the place – when, seemingly, there is no place to hide' (Probyn, 2005: 39). One may try very hard to be the same, but a slip of the tongue, the misunderstanding of a gesture or one's demeanour can betray that 'you're not from here' (Probyn, 2005: 38). Policy changes that celebrate diversity and encourage the conservation of cultural identity do not always fix this; even while nurturing minority differences, we desire sameness so as not to be left 'outside' or 'behind'. Belonging to the majority is sometimes necessary for survival.

◊◊◊

Nancy's process of assimilation would have been facilitated by having a job

where she worked with Anglo-Australians and travelling to and from work on

public transport. It would have been more difficult for her mother who

worked in the house and market garden. Nancy was friendly with the young

Australian woman, Sharon, who lived next door. Sharon appeared as a witness

at the inquest, saying she had helped Nancy with learning English and that

Nancy 'told me everything. She just didn't want him [Raffaele] that's all

there was to it'. Sharon had spoken to Nancy on the day she broke the

engagement and said that Nancy 'was quite pleased. She was very happy about

it'. Nancy's mother also said that Nancy was cheerful and happy since

breaking up with Raffaele. Her father stated that Nancy had told him that

Raffaele was 'very false'. Sharon told the inquest that Raffaele was very

possessive of Nancy.

◊◊◊

Same same but different25

Pugliese argues that the pressure to become 'same' has not been alleviated by the policy shift to multiculturalism. He holds that assimilation remains the aim of the

25 A saying common in South East Asia often to indicate that something of dubious provenance is just as good as the real thing – such as a fake Rolex.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 99

Australian Government, simply recast in a new mode that contains differences.

He views multiculturalism as a technique of repressive tolerance put in place, in the Australian Government's own words, to manage 'the consequences of cultural diversity' (Quoted in Pugliese, 1995: 235), as Pugliese says:

Indeed, the tokenistic quality of multiculturalism is enabled, I would argue, by an ongoing process of assimilationist inscription which underwrites and guarantees the reproduction of the same order simultaneously as it gestures toward difference (Pugliese, 1995: 235).

Pugliese argues that cultural diversity is permitted but with limitations; it is framed by compliance with pre-existing Australian laws and customs. He sees this as leading inevitably to a process of assimilation. In Pugliese's view, Australia's racism is ontological in nature and permeates the nation at all levels; 'inscribed at the very epistemic level of the discursive practices by which colonial nations represent themselves' (Pugliese, 1995: 249). He quotes an announcement by

Immigration Minister Billy Snedden in 1969:

We must have a single culture – if immigration implied multi-culture activities within Australian society, then it was not the type Australia wanted. I am quite determined we should have a monoculture, with everyone living in the same way, understanding each other, and sharing the same aspirations. We don't want pluralism (quoted in Pugliese, 1995: 251).

The same sentiments are echoed in the current immigration debate: the proposed

'Australian values' test for prospective citizens, and the preference of Prime

Minister Howard for 'integration' rather than multiculturalism. As Howard said at the end of 2006, 'there has been a lesser emphasis by my government on zealous multiculturalism and an increasingly greater emphasis on integration' (AM, ABC

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 100

Radio, 14/12/2006). This arose in the context in the proposed introduction by the

Howard Government of a citizenship test which the Prime Minister said was

'about cohesion and integration'. The then Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Robb said the test would be

'an important extension of the Government's broader philosophy of mutual obligation' (The Australian 12/12/2006). As Anne Summers wrote in Sydney

Morning Herald:

Integration of a population is a perfectly reasonable concept and a desirable state of affairs for any nations, so why is its usage seemingly somewhat sinister? It's not just Howard's track record…that makes us suspicious. It is the setting up of integration and multiculturalism as opposites, and the implication that some groups are going to be excluded as a result of the new barriers to citizenship. Who these groups might be is not hard to guess (Summers, 2006).

Further emphasising the shift in policy from diversity and pluralism to unity and integration the Prime Minister, in the January 2007 Cabinet reshuffle, dropped the words 'Multicultural Affairs' from the Ministry of Immigration and Multicultural

Affairs and replaced by the word 'Citizenship'.26

◊◊◊

Would Nancy and all of the hundreds of thousands of immigrant in the 1950s

have passed the 'values test' and qualified for citizenship? For a start, most

of them could not speak English, many of them could not read or write, and

few would have known anything about Australian history or customs.

Nevertheless, whether they came with educational qualifications, professional

skills or simply their toil-worn hands, the immigrants who came to Australia in

the 1950s and 60s succeeded in establishing themselves, founding businesses,

26 Sydney Morning Herald 23/01/2007

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 101

educating their children and made a vital contribution to the development of

the nation. Yet, on the standards espoused by the present Coalition

Government, many would not have got through the current 'barriers to

citizenship'.

◊◊◊

Ghassan Hage holds a similar view to Pugliese on Australia's tolerance and acceptance of its ethnic others, pointing out that 'a power relation is drawn between those who do the accepting and those who are accepted' (Hage, 1998:

102-03). In Australia it is those belonging to the mainstream British founding culture who do the accepting, who behave on the assumption that it is 'up to them to direct the traffic' coming into and settling in the country, and to bestow acceptance on them (Hage, 1998: 17). Unlike Pugliese, Hage sees the 'fantasies of

White supremacy' not as an affirmation of the status quo but as a response to fear about the loss of White sovereignty. By believing and behaving as those who have the power to tolerate and accept, or not, Anglo-Australians avoid confronting 'the will of the ethnic other' (Hage, 1998: 101,-102). As Hage points out:

The multicultural national will, like all national wills, tolerates national otherness, but only in so far as this national otherness is in no danger of constituting a counter-will. Indeed, within multiculturalism, we find many examples where, when the national multicultural will is threatened, multiculturalism starts showing a rather nasty side (Hage, 1998: 112).

The 'nasty side' he is talking about is the ways Australia 'cages' unwanted immigrants who arrive without proper documents. In recent years this 'nasty side' includes the forced repatriation of two men who spent most of their lives from childhood in Australia, but who had criminal records and had never been

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 102 naturalised. One of these, a man of 33, had spent all but the first 25 days of his life in Australia, but was born overseas where his mother happened to be on holiday (AM, ABC Radio, 2 January 2007).

In a more recent book Borderwork in Multicultural Australia, Bob Hodge and Jon

O'Carroll take an optimistic line on multiculturalism (Hodge and O'Carroll, 2006).

They praise the 'feel good' aspects of multiculturalism – enjoyment of the diversity of food and the enrichment of Australian culture – whereas Hage sees these as negative; as being permitted for the benefit of white consumers (Hage,

1998: 120-121). Hodge and O'Carroll take issue with Hage's views on tolerance, using the analysis of another writer, David Burchell, who sees tolerance as implying 'reciprocities of rights and duties between communities or between individuals and government' (Hodge and O'Carroll, 2006: 56). Tolerance is not bestowed by any one upon another but benefits all participants; one cannot support intolerance without opting out of the society that relies on it. Hodge and

O'Carroll see it this way:

In this view, tolerance becomes a threshold. A tolerant society is one that facilitates the reciprocities of mutual relationship. At the individual level, it is left to each person to act accordingly – which can make it seem, as Hage thinks, that the tolerance is freely 'given'. But in this respect, tolerance is a bit like taxation. One might resent writing the cheque, but one must write it all the same. (Hodge and O'Carroll, 2006: 56-57).

Hodge and O'Carroll's views provide a dynamic and multi-dimensional interpretation of intercultural relations. They regard the performative nature of the relations between people as a significant measure of multiculturalism at work in everyday social practices. However, despite their mollifying words, I cannot

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 103 dismiss the observations and analyses of Australia's racism by Pugliese and Hage.

I feel empathy with the targets of racism and shame at Australia's treatment of its

Indigenous people, refugees and people of non-European races. At the same time

I have greater understanding of why, in the face of this kind of racism, in my pubescent years I found being Italian a disadvantage and began to feel shame about Italianness which moved me towards Anglo culture. My sense of being a body out of place that Probyn identifies and the 'shame of the cultural outsider'

(Probyn, 2005: 38-39) was twofold; I was not able, or did not want, to sustain, or contain the two within one body. As an adolescent my desire was for sameness, to belong with the majority.

A life in the making

Nancy arrived in pre-multicultural Australia and began to assimilate within the

Calabrese community milieu that still carried with it the customs and expectations of the old country. She met and became engaged to Raffaele within a year of arrival. She was eighteen, lived with her parents, worked in a factory, was friendly with her Anglo neighbours and the people with whom she worked. She was becoming socially acclimatised. Perhaps as she observed the life of other young Australian women she considered that options other than marriage to

Raffaele were available. Her parents had not pressured her into becoming engaged, and her father did not object when she told him she wanted to break it off. But her punishment for a small step away from the old customs – breaking the engagement – was death. I am reminded that my mother broke of her engagement to a young Italian man when she met my father. Fortunately, her former fiancé did not come from a culture where honour killing was so hideously defended.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 104

◊◊◊

The town Nancy's family came from was Arena in Calabria, a small village on a

mountain top midway between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas, just below the

'instep' of the Italian 'boot'. Raffaele came from the same town. One of his

cousins was also a cousin of Nancy, but they were not 'blood' related. They

had known each other only casually; their families weren't close so her father

was surprised to see him at the wharf to meet the boat when Nancy and the

rest of the family arrived from Italy. A short time later Raffaele began

making regular visits to the Inzitari home and in a few months Nancy and

Raffaele became engaged.

After about a year Nancy changed her mind about marrying him and broke the

engagement. Raffaele initially seemed to accept the decision, but a couple of

days later he sent a letter addressed to Nancy at the Nestlé's factory where

she had worked. When he did not receive a reply he went to the factory to

talk to her. He did not know that Nancy had changed jobs and had not

received the letter. In it he begged her to reconsider their engagement and

to reply before Wednesday. It seems that if she did not contact him by

Wednesday he planned to kill her. On the Tuesday he was seen driving past

her home in a taxi wearing dark glasses and lowering his head as he passed. On

the Wednesday he went to Mick Simmons sports store and bought a rifle and

ammunition. The manager of the Gun Department showed him how to use the

gun. His brothers noted that he was upset about the broken engagement and

had not been to work that week. He lived in a house he was jointly buying with

his brother in Leichhardt, sharing it with eleven other Italian boarders.27

◊◊◊

According to rumours I heard at the time, Raffaele had wanted Nancy to move into the house he and his brother were buying, but she did not like the idea of sharing a house with another couple and boarders. The inquest documents did not

27 Transcript from Coroner's Inquest, Archives office of NSW, Ref 8/3071 File: 55/1895 (court translation)

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 105 speculate on any motive other than the former fiancé's resentment at being rejected. The Italians I heard gossiping about it considered it to have been an

'honour' killing, which they regarded as not uncommon among South Italians. The formal records of Nancy's death revealed nothing more about motive. Inquest transcripts and police records were non-committal and newspapers highlighted the sensational and sinister aspects of the murder and the manhunt.

A life scandalized

Newspapers mediate memory and after tracking down newspaper stories my recollections of Nancy's murder became instantly contaminated, overwritten by these texts. In Sydney in the 1950s there were four metropolitan daily newspapers; one morning broadsheet, The Sydney Morning Herald, and three tabloids: The Daily Telegraph (mornings), and The Mirror and The Sun

(afternoons). Most people obtained their news from newspapers in 1955. The only independent broadcast news was by ABC radio. Commercial radio news was

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 106 generally taken from newspaper sources and there was no television until 1956.

The newspaper stories are rhizomatic; unbound, or, as Deleuze might say, 'vague'

(as in vagabond) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 367). Newspapers hint at more than is said and allow spaces between phrases and lines for feelings to escape.

Newspapers become the 'archive' of popular memory, often researched for a sense of a spirit of their times, in preference to the cold formality of official archives.

In comparison to the newspaper accounts, the Coroner's records are restrained.

The language is controlled and bureaucratic. Even the witness statements seem have been 'formalised'. The expressions emphasised here sound suspiciously like

'police-speak': I was 'taken to my place of employment' instead of 'taken to work';

'they spoke in a foreign tongue' when the witness is likely to have said 'they spoke another language'; and 'when I looked back later they were not in view' when an ordinary working man would probably have said 'when I looked back later I couldn't see them'.28 The formal records are contained, they leave is little space for speculation; much remains unsaid, and there are no hints as to what the unsaid might be.

Perversely, when reading a current newspaper we often suspect a political or moral slant, or doubt the accuracy of some reports; yet when researching or recreating the past we take them as reliable record. The archive and the media are machinic assemblages that record events for posterity. The archive deals in concrete facts, while the media embellish, filling in the gaps in the recordable/recorded facts. The memories stored by both archive and newspaper are determined as much by the structure of the storage machine as by the event itself. The archive, as Derrida reminds us, is a legislative assemblage with rules

28 Transcript from Coronial Inquest, Archives Office of NSW, Ref 8/3071 File 55/1895.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 107 about what it should contain, about access, about the material conditions of storage and so on (Derrida, 1998). Archives are geared towards permanency – a kind of long term memory. Newspapers are like short term memory; printed each day for immediate consumption and disposal. They may waste for burying, burning or recycling. But copies are also saved for posterity and archived in libraries (and now online). They become another research tool and chronicle of the past, revealing much about contemporary attitudes and concerns.

The Manhunt

The prevailing negative views about Italians are revealed in media reports about

the search for Nancy's alleged murderer, Raffaele Vartuli, her

former fiancé. A hunt for him began immediately. Trains

were intercepted, and special patrols watched highways,

interstate and country rail and air traffic. Appeals were

announced on radio and published, with photographs and

descriptions of the wanted man, in the mainstream and Italian

press, screened at cinemas, and in a special display at the

Royal Easter Show. Newspapers called it 'one of Sydney's

most intense manhunts' (Mirror, 1955, March 10). After a

few days, police were reported to have received dozens of

calls from people who claimed to have seen the wanted man in locations as far apart as Bondi and Griffith. Newspapers reported sightings of the suspect all across NSW, in Victoria and Queensland. Ships were searched and the Italian communities in Sydney and Melbourne were questioned. The body of a

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 108 man who jumped off the Sydney harbour bridge was thought for a time to be

Vartuli.

Newspapers frequently suggested the Italian community was secretive, recalcitrant, shifty, and generally not an integral part of Australian society. They reported that Italians refused to cooperate with police and that police suspected that Italians were hiding the killer. The Mirror reported:

Police conducting a round-the-clock manhunt for the gun-crazed killer of an attractive 18-years-old girl at Fairfield yesterday are combing Sydney's entire Italian community. They believe compatriots are sheltering the wanted man…Many Italians already interviewed have stubbornly refused to co-operate with police on the pretext of language difficulties…Squads of police throughout the night raided a number of Italian migrant homes in the Leichhardt, Paddington, East Sydney and Fairfield districts (Mirror, 1955, March 11).

One can imagine the response when police raided homes. Recent immigrants can be easily silenced by fear of authority and many have genuine language difficulties, and some do feign such as a form of resistance. In a later edition of the same paper, reported in bold print, police are reported and thinking that

Vartuli was:

hiding at the home of a fellow countryman awaiting an opportunity to slip through the police dragnet to get to the canefields. Because of the dense Italian population in North Queensland, police would have extreme difficulty in tracking down the man (Mirror, 1955, March 11).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 109

Of Mediterranean appearance

The notion that 'police would have extreme difficulty' identifying one Italian from others in a 'dense Italian population' (which could not have been all that dense in the vast expanse of Far North Queensland), suggests that all Italians all looked the same to Anglo-Australians; just as in more recent years people expressed the notion that all Asians looked alike; and no doubt all Anglos look alike to Asians.

It takes time and familiarity to distinguish features in an unfamiliar group of people. In the early years of mass Italian and Greek immigration, Anglo-

Australians regarded anyone of Mediterranean appearance very much as 'other' and in this 'manhunt' any swarthy-looking man with 'funny' hair, a dark complexion or speaking with a foreign accent, might be the culprit police were looking for. This is another racist echo that comes from past decades into the present when the same kinds of suspicions are held about people who happen to be of Middle-Eastern appearance.

In the case of Raffaele Vartuli, some telephone informants saw the manhunt as an opportunity to dob-in any Italians they did not like: one woman said Vartuli was sleeping with her daughter; another caller said, 'you are looking for a Dago who done a murder', and reported that she had seen him at a Kings Cross fruit shop; a woman caller said a prostitute was hiding him at Randwick; and another, sounding like a jilted lover, wanted police to pick up an Italian who was 'a false pretender'. A man reported seeing three Italians in a car in Dunedoo; another man thought the culprit might be the man to whom he had lent ₤5 at Griffith. Police acted on information received from one caller saying that the suspect was seen getting on a bus at Strathfield, they boarded the bus and found the identified man

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 110 was Hungarian.29 Anyone 'foreign looking' – dark, oily complexion, 'lairy' clothing, an unusual hair-style or certain demeanour, and an accent – could potentially be a murder suspect.

The Truth newspaper was sensational in its front page feature entitled, 'Who is hiding this man...is his mysterious disappearance yet another illustration of the activities of a secret society existing in the Italian community in Australia?' The newspaper suggested Italians were keeping silent about

Vartuli because they feared retribution from the Italian secret society, or were themselves involved in it. The newspapers alleged that the 'Black Hand Gang' had helped many accused Italian men by paying for their defence, providing false alibis and 'whisking' them away and driving them 'to remote farms at night in high powered cars' (Truth

24/04/1955). The Sun also reported the secret society angle, saying 'Italians fear of reprisals from the Black Hand Gang is hampering police in their hunt...Police are inquiring into a suggestion that Nancy's slayer was a member of the gang.

Many Italians have told detectives that the killer was justified in murdering the girl' (The Sun 14/4/1955).

Le Chiacchiere30

I remember sitting on my Nonna's back veranda listening to everyone talking about the murder and speculating about how Raffaele got away. We all waited eagerly to read the latest newspaper reports. Nancy had been killed because she

29 All quotes taken from notes in Police File, Nunziata Inzitari, State Intelligence Group Library, accessed October 1998. 30 Chatterings, gossip

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 111 dishonoured, disrespected and shamed Raffaele by refusing to marry him. Her breaking of the engagement would be seen as a statement about him. She had to pay for humiliating him, for thinking she could have a life without him. She was treated like a dog that had turned on its master and had to be shot. There was no suggestion that Raffaele had killed Nancy in the heat of passion. The murder was pre-mediated and planned. He had bought the gun and the bullets and learnt how to use it for that purpose. He had risen early in the morning to get from Leichhardt to Fairfield to meet her on the way to the railway station. He shot her and continued to shoot her after she fell. He ran away and disappeared, never to be seen again; as far as we know. The gossip at Nonna's was that had been smuggled out of the country by sympathetic countrymen or the 'Ndrangheta (the Calabrian

'Mafia'). Ever since the 1920s there had been rumours and newspaper speculation about Italian secret societies, variously known as The Black Hand, the Camorra or the Mafia. There were also whispers among the Italian community that made me believe such groups existed; another mark of shame for Italians. If there were connections to the 'Ndrangheta in Australia, people would have good reason to be wary of talking to the police. The strict code of silence, close knit family and village structure of the organisation and its history of horrific assassinations and kidnappings would be enough to frighten anyone with the remotest connection

(Snedden and Visser, 1994). When I think of it years later it seems possible that rather than help him escape someone in the Italian community may have found him and killed him in payback. I often wonder what happened to him and where he is now. It is what keeps the memory active for me. Did he jump on a ship and escape to another country with a new identity? He could have married and had children and now have grandchildren. Is he still alive in some South American

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 112 country, in the United States, or even somewhere in Italy? Or is he buried in some as yet undiscovered grave in outback Australia with a bullet through his head? We may never know. But we know what happened to Nancy.

A life archived

The analysis of the archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us (Foucault, 1972:130).

There are two kinds of archival records of the murder of Nunziata Inzitari; those of the Coroner's Court and the Police. The Coroner's Inquest records statements of witnesses to the murder, doctors, family, friends and others with whom Nunziata and her alleged murderer came into contact.

◊◊◊

The Coroner found that Nunziata Inzitari… on the tenth day of March 1955

at Hedges Street Fairfield in the Liverpool

Police District in the said State died from

shock and haemorrhage, from multiple

bullet wounds feloniously and maliciously

inflicted upon her by Rafael Vartuli at the

same place and on the same day. I FURTHER

FIND THAT THE SAID RAFAEL VARTULI WHOSE

PRESENT WHEREABOUTS ARE UNKNOWN DID IN

THE MANNER AFORESAID FELONIOUSLY AND

MALICIOUSLY SLAY THE SAID NUNZIATA

INZITARI. (1955/357: upper case in original)

◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 113

In an article on memory and the Internet, Belinda Barnet draws together a number of salient comments about memory and the archive from Derrida's Archive Fever

(Barnet, 2001, Derrida, 1998). She notes that the archive 'mediates and constructs the very nature of the "events" being archived', and points out:

There is no originary event to be stored, no history, but the production of history in the manner of a machine. What is forgotten or lost in the act of archiving is the event itself. This is why Derrida heralds the archive as the death of lived memory . (Barnet, 2001: 223)

Derrida talks about the concept of the archive, its etymology, and political underpinning. The Greek archive was guarded by the 'archons' who had the power to hold and interpret the documents deposited, and 'in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law'. The Greek word arkheion is the name of a place, a government office. In this place, under 'house arrest' the documents dwell permanently. This dwelling, says Derrida 'marks this institutional passage from the private to the public' (Derrida, 1998: 2-3). In the public recording of Nancy's murder she becomes public property, the property of the State. Murder is disorder; Nancy has to be classified, put in order. The law inscribes itself on her body, on her life and assumes authority over it, she is institutionalised. A life reduced to a statement, consigned to the archive in the language of the law. A vibrant, joyous, sad, thoughtful, creative being, is transformed into marks on a page, in writing that, as Darren Tofts said in his book

Memory Trade, 'removes words out of a living, shared present and locates them within an external, visual space of breathless signs' (Tofts, 1997: 57).

The transcript of the inquest is in the language of authority. 'Legal-speak' distorts the event of Nunziata's murder from corporeal horror into orderly text.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 114

Bureaucracy asserts authority over it and places it in the fold of the law. She is no longer a woman, daughter, sister, friend, but an object consigned to the limbo of a

'cold case', an unsolved crime in the police vault and the State Archives.

A life forgotten

The Coroner's file is a public document held in the NSW State Archives. Police records are not as easily accessed, especially since the case remains open because the murderer was never found. I gained access to the file on Nunziata by request through the Police Records section and was permitted to read through the file. I do not know if the file was complete; there may have been other material that was not available to me. Unlike the Coroner's records, which are formal, typed statements, the police file is simply a bundle of handwritten notes, news clippings and a few formal statements. The police file stutters to a standstill in 1957. It produces no answers, only trajectories trailing off into dead-ends. What it contains are bare traces of information, names and sightings; leads which apparently were followed up and found to be useless. There are no comments, theories or suggestions as to what had happened to Nunziata's killer. There are no hints as to why the investigation stopped, whether it just petered-out for want of more evidence or police gave up the search for lack of resources or resolve. There are many unsolved crimes, but this one seems peculiar in that the perpetrator was known and the search for him started within minutes of the crime yet he was never caught. He seemed to have vanished into thin air. The file does not reveal how hard police searched, whether they contacted Interpol, the Italian police, authorities in the USA or any other country to which he might have escaped. The

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 115 file remains open, formally, but is effectively closed. And Nunziata is left on the shelf, long dead and forgotten.

It seems that the police did not know how to approach people in the Italian community to get useful information. Bureaucracies in the 1950s had little or no experience of foreign cultures and were overwhelmed by the relatively sudden presence of so many people of diverse cultures. There was no systematic use of interpreters, no intercultural training, insufficient contact between Anglo-

Australians and 'New Australians' and little interest in the lifestyles of these people from unknown places. If the newcomers did not understand local ways, they were assumed to be stupid, stubborn or subversive and were treated accordingly. It seems little has been learnt through the experience of cultural plurality before multiculturalism. The same problems occur over and over again with the arrivals of immigrants from various parts of the world. Police, in particular, have always had difficulties penetrating immigrant communities. They do little to foster relations with new ethnic groups or to be sensitive to some refugees' history of terror, often suffered at the hands of police or other state agents. Police and the media often project the criminal behaviour of a few onto a whole ethnic community. In the case of the manhunt for Nancy's killer, judging from the police file I viewed, little headway was made with the Italian community, or the friends and families of Nancy and Raffaele. I wonder if the police might have found her killer if they'd had more intercultural experience, had made a greater effort and been provided with more resources. After a few months of intense activity, the search was apparently given up, and Nancy was buried in the archives, with less ceremony that she was buried in the earth.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 116

Wedding Dresses

Nancy was buried in her wedding dress. The Sun reported on the funeral:

The girl's parents were so distressed…they had to be led away to cars where they were comforted by relatives. Many Italian men wept openly. Six of Nancy's former girl workmates cried bitterly in the church yard...While Mass was being said two detectives searched the church grounds and two others mingled with mourners (The Sun, 12/3/1955).

Reading about her being buried in her wedding dress sets of a chain of memory associations for me. I remember that around the same time as Nancy was murdered my new aunt was decked out in my mother's wedding dress, to stage her wedding to my uncle. The two had been married by proxy before she arrived in

Australia. The dress had a long history and was worn by five brides. It was new when Auntie Nella wore it for her wedding, then my mother wore it in 1943, followed by Mum's best friend, then another friend of the family, and finally my new aunt. The multiple uses happened during and immediately after the war when there was a shortage of everything, particularly luxuries like silk, satin and lace.

The wedding dress was stored away wrapped in tissue in a cardboard box on top of mum's wardrobe, waiting for another bride. I hoped it wasn't waiting for me.

My new aunt was Calabrese, something I found a bit confronting. After all the negative things my family said about Calabrese, now we had one in the family. I felt sympathy for her. Not able to speak English, nor Veneto dialect, it must have been so hard; new husband, new home, new family, new country, and everything so different to the home she came from. Because the wedding was by proxy my aunt had missed out on being a bride, and it was thought proper, once she arrived,

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 117 to have the priest bless their union. The dress was retrieved, pinned and tucked, hems taken-up, then cleaned and pressed till the satin glowed. With a new bouquet, veil and tiara, the dress had another outing and was again photographed for the family album. Years later there was another wedding, that of her daughter, my cousin, an occasion that marked me in a quite different way, which I discuss in the next chapter.

Here are the five brides who wore the wedding dress, left to right: Nella, Tutti,

Freda, Antonietta, Marianna.

Proxy marriages were not unusual in the migrant community in those days; young men pining for the girl they left behind would have to marry her by proxy before her parents would allow her to leave home for an unknown future. The difference in my uncle's case was that the couple had never met. Her father was anxious to bring his family to Australia and Nonna made a deal with him to bring out his eldest daughter to marry her son. I went with the whole family to Woolloomooloo

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 118 to meet the ship when she arrived. My uncle was slightly deaf and a bit slow intellectually. Nonna had never made him go to school. There was no assistance then for educating disabled or 'backward' children so he never learnt to read and write. He was no great catch and I wondered if my new aunt would have married him if she had met him beforehand. I remember feeling embarrassed; thinking that this poor young woman would that night have to sleep with my uncle, a stranger to her. It was another blush-making shame to add to being Italian.

At the time these events were taking place I was beginning to move away from

Italian to Anglo cultural identity. The killing of Nancy became for me a kind of allegory for all that was negative about being Italian in the assimilationist

Australia of the 1950s: honour killing, subjugation of women, masculine aggression, mediaeval sensibilities, and organised crime. It also confused my discriminatory attitude towards Calabrese; I was affected by the death of this young woman who happened to be a Calabrese. I couldn't hate her, although I felt hostile towards the culture that put her in this position. This contradiction of prejudice and empathy: distaste for the patriarchal customs of Calabrese and empathy for the women subjected to it, prompted me to re-evaluate the North

Italian attitudes towards the people of the South. However, the affair and the events surrounding it – the rumours about honour killing and Mafia thugs and the way these reinforced the negative image of Italians – also turned me to face away from my Italian connection and towards the Anglo-Australian I had come to know and trust.

◊◊◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 119

Chapter 5. Family Tracings

In a drama series on SBS TV, The Circuit, the lead character who does not know his Aboriginal bloodline is told 'It is important; knowing where you come from, who you are'.31 This sums up why I set out to find out where I belonged, even though, as Probyn reminds, 'it is deeply insufficient to think that we can comprehend forms of belonging by seeking to refer them to an underlying structuring principle, a stable and guaranteeing referent' (Probyn, 1996: 34). I sought genealogical strands, not in the hope of finding an underlying principle, but out of a desire to reconcile the ethos of the family streams that have merged in me. I made pilgrimages to the home towns of my Italian and English grandparents in the hope of finding a spiritual connection with places where they had lived – some sense of belonging to their 'country'. 32 I studied family documents found in ceilings in old suitcases, collected photographs of relatives distant in time and place, talked to friends of the family, and made expeditions to State and National archives hunting for records of family members. This chapter considers the results of this search which was prompted by a family event which challenged the perceptions I had about my cultural identity.

During my teenage and young adult years I mixed and worked with people of many different ethnic cultures. My friends were mostly second generation

31 The Circuit, SBS Television, 15/07/2007. http://www21.sbs.com.au/thecircuit/index.php 32 'country' here is borrowed from the Indigenous Australian term:' Country: A term used by Aboriginal people to refer to the land to which they belong and their place of Dreaming. Aboriginal language usage of the word country is much broader than Standard English' http://www.dreamtime.net.au/indigenous/glossary.cfm .

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 120 immigrants with parents from Poland, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and what was then Yugoslavia, and a couple of Anglo-Australians. I did not mix socially with Italians, except for my family. I was involved in organisations such as the Girl Guides where there were few, if any, non Anglo-Australian members.

In many ways, I was isolated from Italian lifestyle and culture apart from that of the family. Nonno and Nonna, and most of their compatriots in Australia had been here for a generation when I was growing up; their lives in Italy were so far in the past that they rarely spoke of it and had let many traditions slip away. The customs of the newly arrived Italians, mostly from the south, was very different from that of the Veneto community I knew. There were no Italian clubs around then and the only community events I attended were the annual Italian picnics at

Lansvale. The earlier immigrant Italians, and particularly their children, had adapted, in varying degrees, to mainstream Australian culture and lifestyle, although they retained certain expectations of the behaviour of their children.

I had not abandoned Italianness completely; but it hovered around the edges of my identity rather than being a core part. There were certain behaviours expected of me, such as obedience to my parents, respect for elders, performing family duties and obligations, remaining a 'good' girl and not behaving in a way that would dishonour the family. These were not exclusively Italian behaviours – the same was expected of other Australian children – but they seemed to have a greater 'weight', or had to be more visible, in Italian culture. I lived at home until I was married even though the trend at the time was for young women to leave home and share flats in the inner city. Some of my friends had done so, but it didn't even occur to me to join them. I attended all of the obligatory Italian family events, visited my grandparents every week and, after they died, went to the

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 121 cemetery every month with the aunts to care for their grave. However, in many ways I behaved outside the boundaries of what was considered an appropriate style for a good Italian girl. Instead of perfecting domestic skills, I learnt to drive and studied at night school for the HSC. I went to unchaperoned parties and went out alone in cars with (non-Italian) boys. When I got married we insisted on a low-key wedding; no fuss, no bridal gown, no reception. My (Anglo) husband-to- be and I drove together to the church in his old VW Beetle (oddly, my father had insisted on a church wedding). Our parents and a couple of best friends had dinner afterwards in a classy local restaurant. We moved into a house we were buying near my parent's place. (The house was nestled in a forest of gum trees and Italian neighbours would tell me I should cut down the trees and plant tomatoes). After a few years my husband and I travelled around Europe and worked in London for a couple of years. During this time we separated and when I came back to Australia we divorced. I began another relationship, had a child and moved back into the house in the gum trees.

Rift

These were not unusual things to happen in the lives of Anglo-Australians but were not common in Italian-Australian families. My close family were all assimilated enough to understand my choices and they remained supportive and affectionate towards me. My comfort in this was disturbed by an event late in the

1970s which caused me to seriously question my cultural identity. It was a rather petty set of circumstances but had a deep impact on me. A young cousin, the daughter of Mum's brother, was brought up in strict fashion by her mother who was from Calabria, (as discussed in the previous chapter). All Carolina's activities

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 122 were closely monitored and she was not allowed out without a chaperone. My offers, when she was a teenager, to escort her to youth events at the Club Marconi were refused by her mother; no doubt because I was not considered to be a good role model. When Carolina was to be married the whole extended family was invited to the wedding – every single one, except me! My mother was very offended and when she asked why I had been left out, my aunt said it was because

I was not really part of the family and I was not Italian.

I was astounded. The wedding itself mattered little to me, but it was a shock to be dismissed and excluded in that way. Even though I had adopted a predominantly

Anglo-Australian mentality I still valued my Italian family. How could my upbringing – the 'half' of me nurtured by grandparents – be so casually voided?

The incident caused me to reassess my life up to then and to think about where to locate myself in relation to Anglo and Italian cultures. I was hurt and confused for a long time, but came to realise that I had grown into identifying primarily as

Anglo-Australian and had moved out of the ambit of my Italian heritage.

Ausie-Itie

My mother had an ambiguous relation to her Italianness. She identified strongly as Australian, she was born and did her schooling here, although her first language was Veneto-Italian. I recall occasions when I would suggest something to her and she would exclaim, 'No. Ausies don't do that!'33 She wanted to be buried as a Roman Catholic, but was horrified when I asked if she would like her funeral to be conducted in Italian (we often talked about what I should do when

33 Unfortunately I can't remember what I suggested, only the sharpness and irony of her response which must have wiped the memory away.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 123 she died; where she had money hidden and where all her important documents were). On the other hand, whenever we went to an Italian restaurant she would embarrass me by speaking to the waiter in Italian (or more often dialect) with a loud voice, asking them irrelevant questions and making comments, to show off her heritage. When she was ill in hospital in her final days she spoke to me in

Italian, not to show off, but in a kind of regression to childhood.

She spoke English with a broad Australian accent and gossiped easily with all her local Australian neighbours and friends. She could break into dialect mid- sentence if there was another Veneto around. It seemed that she was comfortable being either or both an Australian and an Italian; she simply selected from either cultures to suit her desires and circumstances. She would allow a 'natural' response to emerge depending on the context: she was a proud Italian at the

Opera, and an equally proud Australian Legacy member at the Liverpool RSL

Club. Mum occupied heterotopic34 space where she did not see divisions or different categories of belonging. As Probyn says, 'heterotopia designates the coexistence of different orders of space, the materiality of different forms of social relations and modes of belonging' (Probyn, 1996: 10). Mum's identities flowed into and out of one another, they were never fixed or easily categorised.

Folded in a multiplicity of belonging she would flash first one surface then another; comfortable and secure in both. Unlike her, my identity was fractured. I didn't feel 'legitimately' Italian, even less so since the episode of my cousin's wedding. I could not fit myself neatly or wholeheartedly into an Italian sensibility.

This was partly due to the limited models I then had of what that meant; as I noted above, I did not mix with many Italians. This was before multiculturalism and

34 Foucault's concept, in Probyn 1996 pp 10-11

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 124 being or becoming truly Australian was the goal. It was as if Australianness would arrive in the air immigrants now breathed, seep into their pores. In reality, if it was achieved at all, it was through studying and mimicking behaviours and attitudes. I was lucky, I had a ready-made model at home with my father and knew how the 'be' an Ausie. I was comfortable with Anglo culture, yet because of my Italian family I did not feel completely, unequivocally Ausie.

Retrieval

As Australian policy with regard to immigrants changed and multiculturalism replaced the former policy of assimilation, it became 'cool' to have a non-Anglo heritage and I began to wonder if I could reclaim my 'rights' to identify as an

Italian-Australian. Indigenous Australians can claim Indigenous status if they meet three criteria: descent, self-identification, and community acceptance. An

Indigenous person is 'a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he or she lives'. (Australian Bureau of Statistics: 1289.0)

This definition was established by the High Court in 1983.35 If I applied a like definition of Italianness I could meet the first two criteria but I was not sure of being accepted as part of any Italian community. I also had more work to do on the issue of identifying as Italian.

35 following a High Court judgement in the case of Commonwealth v Tasmania (1983) 46 ALR 625. http://www.abs.gov.au (1289.0 - Standards for Statistics on Cultural and Language Diversity, 1999)

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 125

Pilgrimages and Expeditions

On ABC TV in November 2006 a series called Family Footsteps recorded the journeys of four young Australians to their ancestral home. In one episode Sara returns to Egypt and visits her father's family, who are complete strangers to her.

They welcome her lovingly with hugs and tears and she is overwhelmed at the emotion of their greeting and surprised by her own tears and the intensity of her feelings. Watching their reunion I found myself sobbing. A great sense of grief and longing welled up from somewhere deep and engulfed me. Where did these feelings come from? I wondered if I had inherited a sense of loss of home from my grandparents; or was it a desire of my own to find that imaginary 'stable and guaranteeing referent' (Probyn, 1996: 34). When I examined my feelings further I realised that I was longing a non-existent 'home', grieving for the loss of a sense of unconditionally belonging somewhere. Rationally I know these are absolutes that cannot be realized, but they create affects and desires that propel me. I have never had a sense that I was returning home on my visits to Italy, nor did I feel I was searching for origins or a place where I belonged. I went there with curiosity, to see the places where my grandparents had lived and to experience Italy and get to know the remaining cousins who still lived there.

Visiting Zanè and Piovene, Vicenza, Italia

My first trip to Italy was in 1970 and I stayed with my cousins only a few days.

We had exchanged home movies and audio tapes but I had never met them and was surprised by their enthusiastic welcome. The family consisted of cousins, the children of Nonna's sister. There was Casimiro, his wife and six children, and his

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 126 three spinster sisters all living in a big house together. It was both exhilarating and bizarre to embrace close relatives who were complete strangers. Loretta

Baldassar, in her book Visits Home, talks about this complex emotions and the sense of the familiar/unfamiliar in this kind of experience:

It is difficult to explain the outpouring of emotion that characterised my 'return'. It certainly had nothing to do with reason, yet it wasn't irrational. Perhaps this is what Walker Connor means by the 'non- rational core of nationalism' – it's a feeling of belonging, beyond reason...In my case it was the feeling of belonging to a family and to a place I was unfamiliar with. The people I met experienced me in a similar way, I was one of them but also unfamiliar. Our meeting exposed the fractious family histories generated by migration. It gave vent to both the pain of loss and the joy of reunion (Baldassar, 2001: 2-3).

While living in London I went for a return visit to Italy after I had separated from my husband. They were sympathetic although disturbed by my marital separation.

It was a demanding visit on both sides as we tried to discuss personal and emotional things across a thick language barrier but it created a greater intimacy between us. They were my only family on that side of the world and they responded in a sensitive and protective manner.

Since 1970 I have made three return visits. I enjoy being in the home villages of Nonna and

Nonna, to walk the streets they walked, stand outside the houses they once occupied, visit the churches where they prayed. It doesn't feel like home, but is

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 127 familiar and enfolding. Casimiro was Mum's cousin and thus my 'second' cousin; his children were my 'third' cousins. Italians tend to regard everyone with even a remote 'blood' connection as 'cousins'.

In recent years it is Casimiro's children and his wife that I visit since he has passed away. All are now married with children of their own. On every visit to

Zanè I am fondly welcomed and my motives for visiting are never questioned.

Our differences of religion, upbringing, politics and cultures do not intrude on the warmth of our times together. I have never stayed with them for more than a few days as the hospitality is overpowering. Lavish meals are prepared and I am never left to my own devices. Every minute of my day is organised with trips to nearby towns and local sites of interest and dinners with the extended family. When my daughter was travelling overseas a few years ago I met her in Venice and, hoping to keep the family link alive, introduced her to her generation of cousins (my fourth cousins, her fifth – or sixth?). I fear that when I die, the link will be broken, although, my daughter is now married to a Canadian whose father was born in the

Veneto, so there is a continuing family connection to the region. I now keep in touch with cousins in Italy by email and SMS text messages.

The visits to Zanè and Piovene produce conflicting affects. Being there accentuates my Australianness, it is so obvious that I am 'not from here' (Probyn,

2005: 38). On the other hand the visits are nurturing; each time I come away feeling closer to the family, more familiar with Italy and the richness and complexities of its culture and history; and a little bit more proficient in the language. Like many second and third generation Italians, I read and understand

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 128 the language reasonably well (my grandparents always spoke to me in dialect) but

I speak it badly and with great embarrassment.

On my first visit in 1970 I was introduced to several people of Nonna's Pegoraro clan which seemed to be half of the inhabitants of the village. Today, Pegoraro is the third most common surname in the town of Zanè.36 In some towns in Italy there are concentrations of families with the same surname so they often have sopranome, nicknames, to distinguish different branches of the family. Nonna was Carola Mora Pegoraro. In Italian mora means mulberry or blackberry, dark- skinned or Moorish. No one ever seems to know how the names originated; it happened too far back in time. Nonno's name, Borriero, is currently tenth on the list of the most common surnames in Piovene where he was born. On my last visit

I sought out our last remaining Borriero relative and found her in a nursing home.

When I asked for her at reception they said, 'Borriero Spacca?' This was Nonno's sopranome and I was glad I knew it. Spacca may mean to break or split, as in splitting wood for kindling, but in dialect it could mean braggart or loudmouth!

Part of the joy of visiting Italy is finding these connections: hearing words and expressions only ever heard within my family; listening to the familiar dialect and feeling like I know it. Maybe it is simply nostalgia, but while I never feel I really belong there, the experience of visiting my grandparent's home awakens something that has always lived in a shadow within me: as if I had always had an imaginary friend and suddenly found that she is real.

36 http://veneto.indettaglio.it

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 129

Exploring the archives

The desire to return to origins is the malady of the genealogist; the melancholy search for roots is a never-ending expedition full of crevasses and dead-ends.

Countries like Australia, Canada and the Unites States of America have huge communities whose roots lie elsewhere and are often unknown. Many late 19th and early 20th century immigrants did not have documents, photographs or objects from their former homes and rarely exchanged letters with their families left behind. It is as if, in coming to a new country, the New World, they wanted to look to the future and forget the past. As Richard Alba notes, in recent years the celebration of ethnic origin has become popular in the United States, after many decades of expectations of assimilation or 'melting pot' outcome of the hugely diverse population of the country (Alba, 1990: 1-2). He puts this down in part to the 'maturing of a third generation of ethnic Americans, who no longer needed to be defensive about their place in America and could afford to assert pride in their ethnic roots' (Alba, 1990: 2). This has precipitated an interest in genealogy, sometimes beginning with the smallest piece of information about a grandparent.

Researchers confront the huge archival repositories and sift through countless brittle documents to find 'a few lines or...a few pages, countless misfortunes and adventures, gathered together in a handful of words' (Foucault, 1979: 76).

Carolyn Steedman reflects on Jules Michelet's notion of the archive as a place where 'ghosts' of lives wait to be exhumed: 'According to Mitzman, Michelet understood the Historian's task as pacifying the spirits of the dead, exorcising

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 130 them "by finding the meaning of their brief existences"' (Steedman, 2001: 71)37

The archives hold tiny fragments of lives of my family and tell me little of their real stories. As Steedman says, the archives contain 'stories caught half way through; the middle of things; discontinuities' (Steedman, 2001: 45). Memory is also discontinuous; people and events pass across the surface without anchorage, without origin or destination, shadowed by question marks.

In Archive Fever, Derrida describes the archive as subliminal memory, calling it hypomnesic 'a mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum'. The archive is a place to which memory traces are despatched

(Derrida, 1998: 11). It is a place where we search for beginnings in an obsession that becomes a malady. To have archive fever: 'is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement' (Derrida, 1998: 91). We are each an end point of genetic threads and trajectories that go back in time to the first human: and to something prior. There is always something prior. We can only go as far back as records have been kept. We can learn about the times before that by reading histories and using our imagination. I can suppose my Italian ancestors go back to the ancient

Veneti tribe, although they may have been Goth or Hun invaders. Similarly, I can imagine my English ancestors were Ancient Britons living in the wilds of

Wessex, but they could have been Roman invaders. Now that would be ironic. It is apparently now possible to dig deeper into origins by ordering a DNA testing

37 Referring to, Alfred Mitzman (1990), Michelet, Historian, New Haven, Yale University Press: 42-43; and Michelet, 'Preface de l'Histoire de France': 281, in Oevres Completes, Tome IV (Paris, Flammarion, 1974)

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 131 kit online, taking a swab and sending it back for analysis, then getting the results to 'discover your deep ancestral origins' with 'Genetic Genealogy'.38

Expedition 1

My first archive expedition is to find traces of the Borriero family. Nonno and

Nonna left Italy in the early 1920s, at the same time as many Veneti. Nonno had previously been to Germany to work and also migrated to the USA in 1914.

Emigration on a temporary or permanent basis by Veneti was common and has a long history. In the 1920s there was a surge of emigration to Australia from the

Veneto. Some left Italy for political reasons; finding it difficult to live as communists or anarchists during the rise of Fascism (Baldassar and Pesman,

2005: 44-48). My grandparents, as far as I know, were not political refugees

(although I remember them singing 'Bandiera Rossa'); they left because it was impossible for them to survive economically in Italy at that time. Nonno came first, followed a couple of years later by Nonna and my aunts Marianna and Nella

(Caterina). Nonno found work as a brickie's labourer in Lithgow and they lived there for a few years before moving to Mount Pritchard.

◊◊◊

Angelo Antonio Borriero (Spacca) - 5 July 1884-31 July 1961

Nonno's first application for naturalisation in 1930 was refused because he

had been convicted of two crimes in 1925: 'sly grog selling' for which he was

fined ₤30; and 'burying nightsoil near his house' – a fine of ₤10. As well as

selling wine to local Italians, Nonna kept a boarding house in Lithgow for single

paesani who came there to find work. No doubt the extra people created a

problem with the toilet pan filling before the scheduled weekly pick-up, and

38 http://www.dnaancestryproject.com/ydna_intro_ancestry.php

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 132

had to be buried. This was not an uncommon practice, well into the 1960s,

when extra visitors filled up the pan before it was time for the 'dunny-man'

to come. I wonder if my grandparents' neighbours had informed on them or if

police had singled them out for observation because they were Italian. It is

quite possible. An eye was being kept on Italians in the 1920s because many

communists had migrated to Australia to escape Fascism. Gianfranco Cresciani

has written about the existence in 1926-27 of an anti-Fascist organisation in

Lithgow with 130 members, one of many around the country. They came under

scrutiny when the Italian Consul-General brought them to the attention of the

Australian Government which banned their newspaper Il Risveglio in 1927

(Cresciani, 1979: 2-3 of online copy).39 The number of people living in and

visiting Nonna's place – as boarders or drinkers – may have aroused suspicion.

Perhaps some of her boarders were political refugees like many of the

Vicentini who came to Australia,40 some from Schio, a neighbouring town to

Zanè and Piovene (Baldassar and Pesman, 2005: 44-48).

Nonno's second application for naturalisation, six months later, included a

favourable police report and was approved. 41 The file at the National Archives

(NAA) contains the name of the ship Nonno arrived on and notes that during

the First World War, between April 1914 and July 1919 he had been in the

United States.

Carola Pegoraro (Mora) in Borriero – 12 August 1885-5 July 1965

Nonna gave birth to ten children, three of them in Australia. In Italy the first

was child born in 1911 but over the next nine years four of her children died

before their second birthday. During the First World War when Piovene was

close to the war front Nonna was evacuated to Cremona. The family record

from Italy shows that one of Nonna's children, Pietro, was born there in 1916.

However, according to Nonno's NAA file, he was in the USA during these

years.42 Mum had told me that Nonna had had an affair with a soldier during

39 http://www.takver.com/history/italian.htm 40 From Province of Vicenza 41 National Archives of Australia: A12217, L11559, Angelo Borriero 42 National Archives of Australia: A12217, L11559, Angelo Borriero

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 133

the war when Nonno was away. It seems the child was a result of the affair.

He died aged 7 months.

◊◊◊

Expedition 2

While searching Australian archives I find other traces of family members who, in

World War 2 came to the attention of the authorities simply because of their ethnic origin. Some Italians became Enemy Aliens and left behind traces in the archive that are 'brief, incisive, and often enigmatic – at the point of their instantaneous contact with power' (Foucault, 1979: 80). The NAA files tell of the sad and uncomfortable consequences for many immigrants whose lives were thrown into tumult in unexpected circumstances. When Italy entered the war in

1940 on the side of Germany, Italians in Australia were suddenly rounded up and incarcerated. As Gianfranco Cresciani writes:

People were visited by plainclothes policemen, who also confiscated all papers, books, photographs and personal documents that they could find in the house, and were taken by car, taxi, bus or tram to local police stations, and ultimately to Long Bay and Pentridge jails where they were given the same treatment and food as the other inmates (Cresciani, 2003: 100).

From the prisons the internees were taken to the POW camp at Liverpool and later to various and distant regional and interstate locations. Italians who were not interned, or who were released on 'parole', had all kinds of restrictions placed on them. They had to carry an Alien Registration Card and report to the local police station regularly; they had to obtain special permission to hold a driving licence

(which restricted where and when they could drive); they were not allowed to

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 134 hold a wireless licence or own a wireless set; and they could not gather in large groups without raising suspicion. Nonna had kept up her sly-grog and bocce

'business' operating during the war until some neighbours dobbed her in to authorities, accusing her of holding Fascist meetings. Nonna was appalled; these were the same people she had fed with free fruit and vegetables during the

Depression when her produce came back unsold from the markets. Even though they had lived in the neighbourhood peacefully and with reciprocal respect for over ten years, they were suddenly seen as outsiders.

◊◊◊

Nella Maso nee Borriero

Auntie Nella was granted Australian citizenship as a child under Nonno's

naturalisation. She had been in Australia from the age of two, but when she

married an Italian who was not naturalised she was reclassified as Italian.

Consequently she became an 'enemy alien' and had to carry her Alien

Registration at all times. She had to apply regain her Australian citizenship

and retain 'the rights of a British subject'. Her application is also in the

National Archives. As part of the 'rebirthing' process she had to undergo a

security check which included interrogation and a search of her home.

Neighbours and friends were also questioned and asked to vouch for her

character.43

Tomaso Maso

Nella's husband Tom was interned at Liverpool and Cowra for a short time

before he appealed. The transcript of the appeal hearing reveals that an

informant had told police that at the Fiorelli premises (where Tom worked),

when Mr Fiorelli entered the factory, 'the entire staff in the factory, who

were engaged in making spaghetti sprang to attention and gave the Fascist

43 National Archives of Australia: C123, 5825

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 135

salute'.44 (Perhaps making spaghetti was in itself seditious!). Police followed up

this information and seized Uncle Tom who was the only non-naturalised

worker at Fiorelli's.

At the hearing Tom was asked how far his home was from the water canal

(maybe he planned to poison the water supply?), whether there were Fascists

working at Fiorelli's, or people wearing black shirts, or people giving the

Fascist salute. Tom was asked why he had not become naturalised after living

in Australia for 15 years and pressured about which country he supported in

the war. He would not be pinned down:

-Do you want Australia to win this war? - It is hard for me to answer that. -Why -I do not think it is a fair question. -We want to know which side you are on, whether you are for Australia or for Australia's enemies -I am quite satisfied with Australia -We want to know which side you want to help -It does not make any difference, I do not want to help any country in the war -Do you not see where you are; you are either for the country or against it, there is no fence you can sit on today, you have to be on one side or the other. Have you anything further to say? -No 45

Despite the tribunal's hostile tone and Uncle Tom's reluctance to commit to

the Australian cause, he was released on licence from the Internment Camp at

Cowra on condition that he worked as a charcoal burner 'for the duration of

the war at and six months thereafter'.46 Another uncle did the same sort of

work at a camp in Tasmania and a cousin was conscripted into the labour corps

and sent to Alice Springs.

◊◊◊

44 National Archives of Australia: MP1103/1, N9781; C123, 3677 (emphasis added) 45 National Archives of Australia: MP1103/1, N9781; C123, 3677 46 National Archives of Australia: MP1103/1, N9781; C123, 3677

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 136

Cyber-traces

An Australian education in the 1950 had given me knowledge of the history of

Britain, but almost nothing about Italy. In recent years I have tried to learn some of the history of Italy and the Veneto region ( Baldassar and Pesman, 2005,

Barzini, 1964, For eg: Clark, 1996, Richards, 1994). I have read a range of Italian literature and a book about Zanè (DalCorobbo, 1995). What has been a great bonus in recent years has been the Internet and all of the web sites set up by small towns across the world where local history and customs can be explored.

In Archive Fever Derrida ponders the possibility that digital communication will transform 'the entire public and private space of humanity' (Derrida, 1998: 17). He wonders whether Freud would have used the computer instead of the Mystic

Writing Pad to describe the process of archiving and memory. Freud and his

'contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples' had communicated with hand-written letters. What would the archives contain, wonders Derrida, if they had been able to access 'MCI or AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, television, teleconferences, and above all E- mail' (Derrida, 1998: 16). One could now add to this list: mobile phones, blogs, chat-lines, digital audio and video, pod-casting, flash-cards, lap-tops, palm-pilots,

Wikipedia, U-Tube, My Space, the World Wide Web, and Google. These techniques have certainly transformed the process of research and archiving and made the tracing of family connections a new word-wide activity. A story in the

Sydney Morning Herald told how Google helped a third generation Lebanese

Australian to trace his relatives in the USA. After decades of having no contact,

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 137 he was able to visit and re-establish a relationship with his cousins (SMH

08/01/2007).

Later generations do not always know the exact places their forebears came from, the ship on which they arrived, or the maternal family names lost through marriage. There has been an increased interest in tracing family histories in

Australia since around the time of the bi-centennial in 1988 when many were prompted to find out if they had a convict past or could trace their ancestry back to the First Fleet. As Huyssen remarks, the prevailing interest in history and collective memory by communities has come about in the face of global

'supranatural structures' (Huyssen, 1995: 5-6, also see Nora, 1996). People become preoccupied with personal and smaller realms in response to monolithic and universalist discourses of history. Not everyone is interested in tracing their family history but it is a passion for many others, and an obsession for some.

Perhaps those with broken family links or who have only fragments of knowledge about their families' pasts, have a stronger interest in finding out about their origins. For many it starts with curiosity and an interest in history generally.

Where do my grandparents fit in history's narrative? Where did they come from?

Why did they leave? What sort of life did my great-great-great grandparents live?

It is fascinating to imagine how one's ancestors survived the Plague, or to think of the suffering of, say, some great-great-grandmother as she worked the fields and looked after six children while her husband was fighting a war, or was travelling the countryside looking for work; and to wonder whether you may have inherited her strength of character.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 138

The increased interest in the developed world has in turn been a catalyst for the digitisation of records. Now there are numerous Internet sites containing all sorts of information necessary to trace immigrants and lost family connections: names of immigrants' arrivals and ship's passenger lists as well as census details, and births, deaths and marriages, in various countries. However, researching Italian family backgrounds can be quite frustrating. Records in Italy have not been digitised and it is necessary to speak Italian in order to navigate through the country's complex bureaucracies. Before Italian unification (1850-1870), births, baptisms and marriage were recorded parochially and not always by larger regional institutions. The records are best searched in person and local authorities are not always helpful. I was lucky that my cousin Casimiro worked for the local

Comune47 and obtained records of our grandparents' families, going back a couple of generations. The records give me the names of people to whom I am related:

Catelan, Gasparin, Greselin, Calgaro, Canaglia, Zironda, Curiele, Fabris,

Faccin, Dalle Carbonare, Sella, Galvanin, Alonti, Pegoraro, and Borriero. I know the families of the four last names, but may never meet any of the others.

Even so, I enjoy knowing their names. I like saying them out loud; the rhythmic and exotic sounds of them are soothing; like a refrain. They are trajectories in the rhizome of my family story connected to me by threads across time and space.

There are countless online resources for tracing your family: formal sites like the

UK Ancestry.com, Australia's national and state archives, registers of Births,

Deaths and Marriages and other official records that have been digitally converted. In addition there are thousands of sites set up by individuals and families and towns , and scores of other sites such as Italian Surnames and sites

47 Local Government body

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 139 about dialects, traditional card games, nursery rhymes, songs, folk-lore and religious rituals. I recently had a joyful experience of the value of such sites when

I was able to retrieve and validate something of my own fragmented pieces of memory and history. I did a search for dialetto Veneto, the dialect spoken by my mother's family, which is dying out in Australia. In a magic moment I discovered a nursery rhyme/game that Nonna and Mum played with me as a child. It seems there are several version of the nursery rhyme. Finding this was a moving experience for me. It didn't just take me back to childhood for an instant – it affirmed my memory. This is the one I remember.

Manina bela fata penela dove sétu sta? da me popà cosa ti galo dà polentin e late.... gate!gate!gate!1

I remembered the words, and even sang and played it with my daughter, but I was never sure if I remembered the words correctly. I had never heard it sung by anyone other than Mum and Nonna. It was a joy to find it and see that it was not some nonsense language spoken only by my family. It was real; other mothers and grandmothers had performed it with their children.

Researching through archives online avoids having to deal with the actual dust of old files that Carolyn Steedman talks of in her book Dust (Steedman, 2001). You are not breathing in the poisonous vapours or particles from paper, leather-making or other industrial horrors that linger in archived files and cause real fevers. Yet it feels as if a kind of dust enters the brain; that particles seep into the cells; contaminating you with a mal of nostalgia, memories and desires. I am amazed at

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 140 the depth and breadth of the information contained in the archives and put at our disposal. Internet searching is addictive, there are so many possibilities; each

Google results list promises potential. I feel myself becoming detective; pulled along a trajectory as one clue leads to another; arriving at junctions then veering off in different directions as one question produces a dozen more. A compulsion urges me on. I am hooked.

◊◊◊ Mal d'archive

I have got the fever. It feels like a fever; a mal. My face is flushed, my brain

cells flashing, my heart beating fast; I cannot stop to make a coffee or walk

the dog that is pawing at my leg. I continue to get sidetracked, with clue after

clue leading me hither and thither finding more leads, more questions; it

becomes a compulsion. As Derrida says:

It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from

searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after

the archive, even if there's too much of it, right where something in it

anarchives itself. (Derrida, 1998: 91)

I must stop. I must get on with my writing...there is no way back to origins, no

commencement to be found; just traces of remnants of scattered people of

the past. But what have I stumbled upon here? It is UK Ancestry site. I

cannot resist searching the Census data and Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Some of my ancestors are there but I resist searching further. They can wait.

They are not going anywhere anymore.

◊◊◊

I could spend weeks on the UK Ancestry site tracing the Powell family back as far as the 17th century through birth and census records. Many of the sites will only give tantalizing crumbs to tempt you. To search deeper, you have to pay a subscription or a fee. In becoming more familiar with the mystery and potential

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 141 treasures in the archives I decided to find out a bit more about my English family who were so unknown to me. I remember aunts and uncles and cousins on occasional visits and at one or two weddings and funerals among the Powell family, but there was nothing like the intimacy I shared with Mum's family.

Nevertheless, I was interested in finding out more about where Grandad had come from. I had learnt so much about English History at school yet so little about the

England of my grandparents. It was not until my third trip to Europe, in the 1990s, that I visited the West Country of my English ancestors.

Visiting Bridport, Dorset, UK

When my English grandfather died, I found some treasures

in his belongings. He had saved my parent's wedding

invitation; he must have been a sentimental fellow, even

though everyone accused him of being hard and unfeeling.

He had also kept a note from my father written in pencil on a torn scrap of paper from a school exercise book. It was written on the night Dad left home aged about fourteen:

I left last night and I thank you very much for what you have done for me and also for the money wich [sic] you gave me and I hope that you won't be lonly [sic] home hear [sic] by yourself. Still I have to see what the world is like and I will take your advice so Good bye [sic]. I will write as soon as possible and tell you how I am getting on. Les. (Personal collection)

I also found a stash of letters and photographs that had been sent by Granddad's sisters and other relatives from England over many years. This gave me a sense of loss with regard to the Powell family that I had never previously experienced. In

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 142

Granddad's stash were photos of his sisters and, most poignantly, of his father, my great-grandfather, about whom I knew nothing. I was shocked to think that I had so many relatives I had never heard of.

The Powell family in Australia had never been close, all of the children leaving home and making their own ways in the world as soon as they were old enough to work. I had assumed that English families didn't stay closely in touch and didn't care for each other very much. I was wrong; the letters from my great-grandfather were affectionate and expressed how much he missed his son and grandchildren.

Letters from my great-aunts were similarly warm and sentimental. Those from my great-grandfather were in beautiful copperplate writing, even though his grammar was not perfect, revealing the 'I done' and 'I seen' that I remembered my father having used.

The address on my great-grandfather's letters was 'The Chantry' and I found a

photo of it in an old book about Bridport in Granddad's

collection. It is the oldest building in Bridport, dating

from around 1300. It was once called Dungeness and was

possibly a toll-house before it became a priest's house in

1362. It is believed there was a tunnel underground

connecting it to the nearby church. In the 20th century it was partitioned into rooms for tenants, which must have been when my great-

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 143 grandfather lived there. It is now a Trust building and is available for holiday accommodation. Once it housed poor people, now I could not afford to stay there at £800 per week or even for a short time at £100 per night midweek in the winter.

The town of Bridport is believed to date back to around 900 AD and appears in the Doomsday survey of 1086. It is a kilometre inland from West Bay which is part of what is now called the Jurassic Coast. My great-grandfather and grandfather worked making ropes out of hemp. It has been a major industry in

Bridport from the early 13th century when men twisted the long strands of twine as they walked along the 'rope walks' – long laneways that are still evident in the town. The visit to Bridport was pleasant but not very satisfying because there was no family there to 'anchor' me to the place. I wandered around and tried to imagine the life my great-grandparents had lived. From the letters it sounded like life had been a struggle, they mentioned the air-raids during the war and my great- grandfather had written about the loss of a son at sea, and his wife after a long illness. He had also spoken about the pain of never again seeing his son or meeting his grandchildren in Australia, of his hard life of working at the rope mill and the kindness of a neighbour who lit his fire so that he would have time to make a cup of tea before going to work. While in Bridport I read the history of the town, visited the museum and the Chantry, walked to West Bay and sat on the pebble beach, and felt lost. In Zanè having family to visit had made all the difference; there were people who knew the family's 'sacred sites'; they had made me feel embraced. In Bridport I was a stranger without family, without local knowledge and without a sense of continuity. The only connection I found was when I heard people talking with the same soft lilt of the West Country accent that my grandfather had spoken.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 144

Expedition 3

In Dad's family there had been a couple of minor 'scandals': his parents had divorced when he was a toddler, and an older brother had committed suicide; these matters were mentioned but never discussed. The archives contained material about both events. Dad's parents were divorced in 1931 and his brother

Ronald died on 1 May 1941 aged 21 from 'cyanide poison wilfully self administered'. 48 I shudder to think what that must have been like, to swallow such an awful poison. In The Poison Principle Gail Bell mentions what happens when cyanide is taken:

When an excessive oral dose is taken there is salivation, and a series of very unpleasant choking sensations, culminating in a mouth foaming with almond breath, and collapse. The interval between the dose and onset of symptoms can be as short as ten seconds (Bell, 2001).

Something serious must have happened to cause a single 21 year old man to kill himself. The search leads me through birth and death records, to Inquest indexes and finally to the big State Records storage archive at Kingswood where I read the transcript of the Inquest into Ronald's death. It tells me he was proprietor of a sports store in Balmain and was a keen footballer, heavily involved in local club activities and a winner of trophies.49

◊◊◊

Ronald Stanley Powell - 1919-1941

48 State Records NSW Box 19/3660, File 703 49 State Records NSW Box 19/3660, File 703

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 145

The transcript of the inquest shows that people who lived in rooms at the

back of Ronald's shop heard noises coming from his flat at the front of the

store and went to investigate. They found him 'gasping for breath' and called

a doctor but it was too late. One witness said, 'The only thing that I noticed

that appeared to upset him was this telephone message'.50 I wondered who

had phoned him and what had the call been about. I soon found evidence at

the inquest from telephone caller himself:

On the 1st May 1941, about 5.45pm, I telephoned the deceased at his

shop. I said that I thought that it would be better if I did not see him

again on account of a few things I had found out about him and that I

did not want him to come to my home. He seemed to be shocked. I did

not give him a chance to say anything and just told him to take my advice

and stay away from my home and rang off. I did not know anything about

him making a will in my favour until after his death. I am not related to

him in any way and cannot give any reason why he should have done that.

On 7 April 1941, I was quite friendly with the deceased.51

◊◊◊

I found it strange that Ronald left all of his property to a 'friend' he had known for such a short time. I requested the Probate file and read the will. It is dated 7 April

1941, when the witness was still 'quite friendly with the deceased'. Ronald left a net amount of ₤138.5.3.52 Archives only provide fragment of people's lives embedded in formal documents, but reading between the lines I create my own narrative, jumping to the conclusion that he was gay and that this young man had broken his heart. I feel a great sense of compassion for Ronald and the difficulties he would have faced if he was a gay working-class man in the 1940s.

50 ibid 51 State Records NSW, Coroners Court records Box 19/3660 File 703 52 State Records NSW Probate Item 262610

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 146

Another document I found in my searches notes that Ronald had the top joints of two fingers missing.53 My father also had the top joint of his thumb and first finger missing. Dad said it had happened when he was a boy playing with a detonator which exploded. Perhaps Ronald was involved in the same game and that's how they both lost the tops of their fingers.

Traces

As Thomas Osborne says of Foucault's The Life of Infamous Men, most of the information held in the archives is about unfamous people who 'begin life as unfamous, as ordinary, but become fantastic – infamous – through the archive'

(Osborne, 1999: 61). Foucault sought the left-over facts about people in his research; he wanted to look at records of people whom he said were:

destined to pass away without a trace; that there should be in their misfortunes, in their passions, in those loves and in those hatreds, something grey and ordinary beside what is usually estimated as worthy of being recounted; that nevertheless they should have been traversed with a certain ardour, that they should have been animated by a violence, an energy, and excess in the wickedness, the meanness, the baseness, the obstinacy or the bad luck which would give a sort of frightening or pitiable grandeur to them in the eyes of their peers, and in proportion to their very mediocrity (Foucault, 1979: 79).

Members of the Powell family are on record only because their lives entered the ambit of the law and had an 'encounter with power...which turned its attention, even if only for a moment, to their complaints and to their small tumults'

(Foucault, 1979: 79).

53 Record of Service Universal Training. National Archives of Australia, Series B4747

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 147

Expedition 4

Divorce was seen as a disgrace in the 1930s, particularly when it involved adultery. There was no anonymity or protection then for the divorcees or their children; the sordid details of people's lives were reported in 'scandal sheets' such as The Truth newspaper. Apparently, the niceties of my grandparents' divorce were revealed in that newspaper for all to read. I haven't been able to find the newspaper reports, but at the State Records of NSW depository at Kingswood I read the affidavits and transcript of the divorce 'trial', held before a jury of four people

◊◊◊

Powell V Powell – Married 1909-Divorced 1931

The court dossier tells me that Dad's mother, Ada, left home in the late

1920s, taking two older children with her and abandoning her husband and five

other children. Dad was the youngest, about four years old; the others were

six, eight, ten and thirteen. Grandad (Ralph) sued for divorce citing desertion

of three years and adultery. The affidavit alleges she had been living with a

man and had a child while separated. Ada counter-sued on the grounds of

technical desertion, saying that Ralph had not provided her with any financial

support. It seems Ada's lover abandoned her, and their son. He could not be

found for the service of the summons and did not appear in court. In his

absence he was ordered to pay damages of ₤200 to the husband 'in respect

of the adultery', which says something about the position of women in that

era.

I am amazed at Ada running away in the 1920s when women had little chance

of independent living. She was in her late thirties and had no marketable skills

apart from housekeeping and child-rearing. Witness at the divorce trial said

she had been a live-in housekeeper and child-minder, she had moved around

from household to household doing this to survive.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 148

◊◊◊

After their mother had left, Dad's sister Dorothy, then ten years old, had to care for the family. I remember my aunts and uncles telling stories of the hardship they endured as children and the meanness and harshness of their father. They talked about how they had to get up at dawn every morning to work on the farm; clearing land, planting, hoeing, picking fruit and pruning trees and with frozen fingers before going to school, and how they had to cook and eat meat that was crawling with maggots (there was no refrigeration). Despite the grim upbringing, or perhaps because of it, Dad was very affectionate, more so than my mother. He loved to cuddle but often when he put his arms around Mum for a squeeze when she was busy doing something she get impatient with him and shrug him off. He trained me from infancy to enjoy 'cuddle-time' and I would sit on his knee for a hug well into adulthood.

At the end of my Powell expeditions I am left feeling nothing for these people because I feel nothing of them. They were strangers and I rarely saw them as I was growing up and I don't remember every going to visit aunts and uncles at their homes. We visited Grandad about once a year. I knew more about the lives of some of my neighbours than about Dad's family.

However, I am moved when I retrieve my father's war service record which shows that he put his age up to twenty-one to enlist to go overseas, when he was still only seventeen. He was in the 2/2 Division, 6th

Battalion AIF and served in the Middle-East, Greece and New Guinea. His army

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 149 mates called him Sandy Powell. The Kokoda Track nearly finished him off, and he spent the final year of the War in Australia.

'And the waste, memory waste'54

The archives hold billions of fragments of millions of people's lives. They lie dormant, like memories, waiting to be recalled. The search for roots has been fascinating but also disappointing because of what is not there. Much remains concealed, as Derrida points out:

Beyond every possible and necessary inquiry, we will always wonder what Freud (for example), what every 'careful concealer; may have wanted to keep secret...what may have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of his 'life'...burned...without even an ash (Derrida, 1998: 101).

Archives contain only traces, tiny fragments of often meaningless detail. It is a kind of waste; memory waste. Unlike everyday refuse, we do not discard the leftover documents of people's lives at the tip, but preserve them in archives; in special containers under special conditions, sealed against dust and bugs that eat paper, and against inappropriate handling. Unlike the objects in museums, archive materials are generally not on display (although major Archive collections do have some exhibitions). Fragile pasts prone to disintegration must be handled with care. Access is free but not simple. It is a delicate task to track back in time.

Attendants guard the archive and provide expert guidance, and surveillance. The researcher moves through a labyrinth where several junctures have to be navigated in the correct order. An index must be consulted for the magic numbers

54 Go Betweens – Cattle and Cain

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 150 obtained that point to another index containing codes for box and file numbers.

Then there are forms to complete and 'tickets' to obtain (readers ticket). Finally, gloves must be donned before the delicate traces of the past can be handled. The archives take the rhizomatic lives of people and attempts to order them by fitting them into an arboreal structure.

It has been exciting to excavate and wonder about these crumbs of past lives.

Derrida remarked that there is a likeness between the archive and archaeology

(Derrida, 1998: 92). Like archaeologists, archive researchers dig up a morsel and turn it into a treasure. I make acquaintance with people who are dead. I am a collector, no less than those who fill their houses with art objects or fill museums with unearthed artefacts. I collect piecemeal knowledge that I do not really know what to do with. I gather it around myself like a shroud. It becomes a virtual family crypt in the brain that I can visit now and then.

In my pilgrimages and expeditions I found I was emotionally connected more to my Italian family that I was to my English family. This was because of the more intimate knowledge I had of Mum's family and the casualness of contact with my

Dad's family. Mum had maintained a connection with her Italian heritage with language and customs, while Dad lived as if he had no family background. The home towns of Nonna and Nonno had an aura that returned my gaze whereas my

Grandfather's home kept itself distant from me. On the other hand, paradoxically, while I feel little affection for my English family I am more fond of England as a country and feel more comfortable there, than in Italy. Perhaps this is because, having been brought up and educated in Australia, I am more familiar with British customs and institutional practices. And although I am familiar with Italian home

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 151 and family life, I am less knowledgeable about Italy's bureaucratic structures and customs. When in Italy there is no way of not being identified as a tourist, whereas in England I can blend in to the background.

I have learnt that the Italian side of my family suffered in various ways from being immigrants; arrested for petty crimes, their allegiances questioned, and their liberty and citizenship hindered or taken away during the War. The English side of my family also had a tough, hard-working life (although without suffering ethnic prejudice) and was a somewhat dysfunctional family; children abandoned by their mother and bullied by their father, each leaving home by the age of 14. I have also discovered that both grandmothers had extra-marital affairs and bore children in awkward circumstances. I now have mountains of information: documents, photographs, and things leftover from my parents and grandparents. I have bought special archive folders to store it all. I am becoming the family archon (guardian of documents) (Derrida, 1998: 2).

I shiver as I read again Derrida's 'warning' that the search for origins, the keeping of archives is a sickness 'a movement toward death...to want to make an archive in the first place is to want to repeat and one of Freud's clearest lessons was that the compulsion to repeat is the drive toward death' (Steedman, 2001: 6). Is this archive fever a sickness of aging and nearing the end of my life? Is it because I want to leave traces of my own?

◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 152

Chapter 6. Remainders

Things are 'sealed off from their origins, ensconced from their own true stories, which are the stories of people, of work, of lives' (Cohen, 1997: 13, in Frow, 2001: 275)

Everywhere you rest your eyes, invisible stories blossom (Cohen, 1997: 289, in Frow, 2001: 275)

In this chapter I discuss the power of things in domestic and public spaces and contemplate their power to produce both pain and joy: a nostalgia and longing for lost people and lost times, as well as delight in the affects of memory. I also consider how material is organised in the home and the museum, and how different contexts generate different memories, histories and narratives of the past.

Some things can reveal a past we have not personally experienced, telling about the practices and everyday lives of people in ancient times. Things that once belonged to a loved one can bring forth a nostalgia of the kind Stewart discusses: a longing for origin and 'unmediated experience' of what the souvenir represents

(Stewart, 1993: 24). The memory of a person can be 'at once impoverished and enriched' by an object that once belonged to them, but no object can return the lost person to us. It is in the gap created by the 'inability of the sign to "capture" its signified, of narrative to be one with its object' that nostalgia erupts (Stewart,

1993: 23). Things are attached to our person; we use them to manifest ourselves in to the world. They constitute a material 'refrain' that we stitch together into a garment that helps to define us.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 153

Left-behind things

We do not always know what to do with the things we have collected or which have gathered around us, seemingly of their own accord. There are some that we cannot throw away even though they have outlived their usefulness. Perhaps they were gifts from loved ones, or an expensive item once passionately desired, or the loved object of a deceased friend or relative. People are always leaving behind things: when they grow up and leave home, move house, move country, leave the scene of a catastrophe, and when they die. Some things left behind long ago are preserved by accident; in ruined cities, by design in tombs, or simply lost or forgotten under the dust of centuries. Some are later unearthed by archaeologists who puzzle over their meaning and extrapolate cultures and whole civilisations from these remainders of past lives. Things – material objects, documents, artefacts, photographs – form the basis of our knowledge of the past and of past lives. They make history and often end up in museums or archives for future generations to puzzle over or be amazed by.

With the 'acceleration of history' that many writers have commented on (Huyssen,

1995, Huyssen, 2000, Nora, 1996, Nora, 2002) in our current era, many ordinary people have become family 'archaeologists', excavating the more recent past; busily digging up the history of ancestors, their houses and suburbs, and collecting objects linking themselves to the past. They create family museums seeming to follow the advice of C Montiesor who encouraged these practices. She is quoted in Susan Stewart: 'every house ought to possess a "Museum," even it if is only one shelf in a small cupboard' (Stewart, 1993: 162). Some people seem to enjoy living the museum they have created; they decorate their houses in 1920s,

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 154

1950s or 1970s styles and wear retro fashions or vintage outfits. Some make a lifelong hobby of collecting remainders of the past; spending their weekends visiting antique shops and garage sales looking for authentic, genuine artefacts.

While thinking about personal collections, museums and archives I was reading

Gay Hawkins' book about waste which is full of suggestive ideas about 'things' that are useful to my thinking about left-behind objects (Hawkins, 2006). It strikes me as a great contradiction that at the same time as we are producing vast amounts of waste and madly trying to find ways of hiding it, recycling it, burying it, and eliminating 'the past'; we are scrambling to hang on to the debris of history and give it pride of place in frame, album, exhibition and museum.

Vessels of memory

Huyssen suggests this rapid recycling of the past will result, in us 'getting stuck in an ever shrinking present' (Huyssen, 2000: 31). In an earlier book Twilight

Memories, he notes the seduction of 'cultural relics':

Objects of the past have always been pulled into the present via the gaze that hit them, and the irritation, the seduction, the secret they may hold is never only on the side of the object in some state of purity, as it were; it is always and intensely located on the side of the viewer and the present as well. It is the live gaze that endows the object with its aura, but this aura also depends on the objects materiality and opaqueness (Huyssen, 1995: 31).

Objects with this aura confronted me when, in August 2006, I went to a 50s Fair at the Rose Seidler House at Wahroonga. The house is maintained by the Historic

Houses Trust as 'one of the purest examples of mid-century modern domestic architecture in Australia' (most mid-century domestic architecture in Australia

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 155 was of the fibro variety but I don't think the Trust has preserved any examples of these).55 At the Fair there were dozens of stalls selling 'fifties paraphernalia. They looked like the very objects that we or our mothers had thrown out to make way for the latest in décor in the 1960s and 70s: Laminex tables and plastic bowls, dinner sets with each plate different solid colour; polka-dot cups and saucers; and anodised aluminium lampshades and teapots. I personally detested many of these objects in the 1950s, seeing them as cheap and vulgar while I desired sleek and elegant. I saw plastics and veneers as signs of the poverty and bad taste I wanted to escape.

One of the stalls at the '50s Fair had a set of canisters identical to one my mother had owned. They were beige Bakelite with red lids and lettering and labelled

Flour, Sugar, Rice, Tea, Coffee. My daughter has kept one as a souvenir; I don't remember what happened to the rest of them. They used to sit on my mother's kitchen bench top in their stepping order from biggest – for Flour – to the smallest, a very tiny one, for Coffee (which, judging by the size, was a less significant beverage in the 1950s). The containers lived in the background of our lives like wallpaper and were witnesses to our conversations, laughter and tears. They shared and absorbed our chatter over meals at the kitchen table; were privy to intimate tête-à-têtes between me and my mother while we did the dishes; they vibrated at our shouts from sink to lounge-room where my father had the TV turned up loud. My father rarely, if ever, used the canisters; they were part of my mother's domain and she kept them in immaculate condition, as she did all of her belongings. The last time I remember seeing them they were faded from sitting

55 Historic Houses Trust leaflet, Rose Seidler House and the 50s Fair, 27/08/2006

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 156 for years in the sunlight that streamed through the window and from the regular wipe-overs and annual washing they received. I can still remember the vaguely chemical smell and smooth, glossy feel of the Bakelite, and the hollow sounding scrape of the lid being lifted to scoop out the tea leaves with the special silver tea- spoon that lived inside (I still have that spoon in my own tea caddy).

In 'Thing Theory' Bill Brown refers to sociologist Georg Simmel, who wrote that the source of an object's value resided in 'the subject's desire, and not the productive labour' (Brown, 2001: 13). Brown also refers to Benjamin who

'recognized that the gap between the function of objects and the desires congealed there became clear only when those objects became outmoded' (Brown, 2001:

13). But sometimes outmoded objects attract new desires and acquire a new value, often transformed from utility objects to decorative or memorial objects. Some items are in continual circulation. Things, as Brown says, are unable to:

just be themselves...they are tired of our perpetual reconstitution of them as objects of our desire and of our affections. They are tired of our longing. They are tired of us (Brown, 2001: 15).

Poor canisters! As I look at them at the Fair I am at once close to and distant from them. They are so distant in time yet I know them so intimately. They overflow with meaning. Just laying my eyes on them evokes such inexpressible affect through my whole body and being. We shared a past but do not share the present.

It was not me as I am now who shared a life with those canisters. So much passed between me and the canisters and so much has passed between the time and space we resided in and me of the present moment I behold them again. It is as Brown says in 'Toy Story':

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 157

If the history of things can be understood as their circulation, the commodity's 'social life' through diverse cultural fields, then the history in things might be understood as the crystallization of the anxieties and aspirations that linger there in the material object (Brown, 1998: 934).

The canisters at the Fair are no longer the utilitarian objects they once were (the substances they once held are now kept in containers with more efficient seals).

The set has been 'reobjectified' into 'a recreation that renders it other than it was'

(Brown, 1998: 954). The canisters have been transformed into fetish objects for a collector who seeks to appropriate something of their aura and recapture the ambience of the 'innocent' 1950s when they lived on the brink of a new world order, when life was somehow less complicated. Susan Stewart notes:

When objects are defined in terms of their use value, they serve as extensions of the body into the environment, but when objects are defined by the collection, such an extension is inverted, serving to subsume the environment to a scenario of the personal (Stewart, 1993: 162).

The collector of these objects may be acting with nostalgia or irony; for me there is no desire to posses them or return to their time or place but simply a feeling of sadness and loss at their passing.

Remains of the dead

When the last parent dies, their belongings, accumulated over a lifetime, have to be confronted by the child/children. There are hundreds of things: big things like houses and furniture and little things like jewellery and safety pins; things which were kept, utilised, admired and enjoyed; things which were significant and

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 158 precious to their owners, but which have little use or meaning to those who inherit them. Much can be discarded with great relief but some things are difficult to dispose of; it would be like discarding your mother or father. When my mother died I kept many objects that are saturated with her presence, in particular two aluminium cake tins that still shine like mirrors from being scoured regularly with steel wool. I don't use them; not only because I could never keep them so gleaming, but because I feel I might erase her spirit which still imbues them. They sit resplendent on a shelf in my cupboard to greet me every day as I go about in my own kitchen. When I occasionally scrub a saucepan with soap and steel wool

(it is great therapy in times of stress), I feel her presence and wonder if she will materialize out of it like Aladdin's genie to grant me three wishes.

When she died there was much to be disposed of and many things I couldn't part with: fine needlework samples from her sewing courses; dishes and vases from her pottery classes; a favourite cardigan; cherished pieces of jewellery; things she had kept from my childhood, and things that were mementos of my father. The belongings of my parents that I have kept constitute a kind of museum; just as

Montiesor suggested, they are stored on shelves, in drawers and cupboards of my house. I have become a participant in 'musealization'; an obsession with the past

'that is no longer bound to the institution of the museum, narrowly understood, but infiltrated all areas of everyday life' (Huyssen, 2000: 32). The term 'musealization' was coined by Hermann Lübbe to describe the preoccupation with history in the late 20th century (cited in Huyssen, 2000: 32). Huyssen asks; 'why are we building museums as if there were no tomorrow?' (Huyssen, 2000: 28). He suggests; 'memory and musealization together are enlisted as bulwarks against

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 159 obsolescence and disappearance, to counter our deep anxiety about the speed of change and the ever shrinking horizons of time and space' (Huyssen, 2000: 33).

Musealization

As well as the current obsession of compiling personal collections and family histories, there are increasing numbers and varieties of institutional museums of: natural history, social history, local history, war, military, transport, policing, maritime, technology, and art galleries and major libraries with museum functions. Then there are foundations such as the Historic Houses Trust which restore and preserve historic buildings. There are also a number of museums about recent history, such as immigration and specialist ethnic museums. I will look at some of these below.

Things in museums acquire a significance they did not have in their 'real life', and, paradoxically, also represent 'the real' as documentary and material evidence of the past. Once an object enters into a collection, whether institutional or private, its meaning changes. It is no longer simply a tool, a utensil, an appliance or personal accessory; it has lost its original reason for being and is now revered evidence of the past or a curiosity. It has lost its ability for adaptation to other uses: a biscuit tin that may have been used as a hiding place for romantic letters or a money-box; an ornament used as a door-stop; or a curtain remade into a table cloth. In the museum they lose parts of their own narratives and become fixed with the burden of history. They channel the culture and society that produced and utilised them. When placed in a museum objects acquire additional qualities, as

Valerie Casey reminds us:

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 160

Museums do not just gather valuable objects but make objects valuable by gathering them. The museum is able to produce cultural knowledge by organizing how the materials it authorizes are seen – by controlling the Gaze (Casey, 2003: 2).

Objects are displayed in museums together with textual or performative

'interpretations' that direct how the viewer should understand them. In cultural and social history museums the emphasis is less on the objects themselves and more on creating a narrative. They become anecdotes of their utilisation in the lives of people in the past. The objects of ordinary people are often lost to history as they are either 'used up' or seen as having no value and thrown away. The few that remain are given high status, as Casey says:

a cook‘s iron griddle and a child‘s wooden toy are elevated to extraordinary levels of museal importance because the narrative is built around them, not because of their notable aesthetic, functional, or historic value. As a result, the attention to social history has signalled a departure from object-focused modes of museum display, and has encouraged museums to more creatively express their ideas (Casey, 2003: 9).

Casey sees this transformation as a shift in focus for the visitor 'from authentic object to narrativised gaze' which nurtures collective memory and a sense of belonging' (Casey, 2003: 10, 13). Collective memory is maintained through

'mnemonic sites, practices and forms' such as community events, re-enactments, anthems, heroes, literature, film, commemorative celebrations and monuments

(Olick and Robbins, 1998: 124). For Australians mnemonic sites might include

Anzac Day, the Melbourne Cup, the Ashes, Australia Day, the Aboriginal flag,

Uluru, the song Waltzing Matilda and the poem A Sunburnt Country. Collective

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 161 memory is also sustained by Museums which narrativise the past and display things relating to historic events or periods for audiences who seek 'wider socially sanctioned narratives into which they can fit their own story' (Gleeson, 1997: 5).

Just as with individual memory, reconstructions and reinterpretations of the past are made in response to present circumstances. Things for display are chosen with regard to present-day sensibilities and interests. There is no 'singular account of the past, but a nexus of contested and competing representations that circle around the thorny problem of how to remember, and articulate, a past' (Best and Robson,

2005: 2, 5). The recent 'History Wars' in Australia are evidence of this, where certain forces have been working to discredit and dismiss the 'black armband' view of our history – one which acknowledges the devastating impacts of British settlement on Indigenous Australians – in favour of silence on this history and an emphasis on the courage and pioneering spirit of the colonisers. Another example is the conflict around Australia Day commemorations of British occupation of the country, seen by Indigenous people and others as a day of sorrow rather than of celebration.

Museums are generally part of 'official' memory (history/culture) while a few focus on 'vernacular' memory; the experiences of groups of people involved in extraordinary events such as the Holocaust and migration. Historian John Bodnar sees official and vernacular memory as being in opposition while Alon Confino suggests it is not so clear-cut. Vernacular culture, according to Bodnar, is derived from:

firsthand experience in small-scale communities rather than the "imagined" communities of a large nation...what social reality feels like rather than what it should be like...derived from the lived or

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 162

shared experiences of small groups (Bodnar quoted in Confino, 1997: 1401).56

Official culture is grounded in the power of institutions which use the past to unite citizens and draw on 'commemoration to restate what they [think] the social order and citizen behaviour should be' (Bodnar quoted in Confino, 1997: 1401).

Confino believes this suggests that vernacular memory is authentic and official memory is manipulative and does not agree with Bodnar's view. He suggests, 'in the real world, things are not as neat. Not only is vernacular memory not as saintly and official memory not as brutal, but they constantly commingle'

(Confino, 1997: 1402). Immigrations museums in Melbourne and Adelaide, and

Sydney's online museum, the Migration Heritage Centre, are examples of official

'memory' which incorporate some vernacular elements. The Italian museums at

Griffith celebrates vernacular memory within an official milieu. The New Italy museum at Lismore is vernacular in content and structure but efforts are being made to formalise it through the subsidised creation of an online site.

Immigration Museums

Immigration museums commemorate the extraordinary journeys of individuals who travelled geographically and emotionally across worlds to establish new lives. For those immigrants who lived and died leaving little material evidence of their existence the museums become memorials to their contributions to the nation. For following generations and the nation, immigration museums are tributes to the vital part migration has played in the development of the Australian

56 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, Princeton, NJ, 1992

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 163 nation and community. The museums also pay tribute to Australia as a multicultural nation as well as acknowledging prejudicial policies of the past

(although they nothing about present day 'border control' policies). The Migration

Museum at Adelaide is housed in the former poorhouse or Destitute Asylum. I have not visited it in person but have visited its website. It has a monument in its courtyard, The Immigrants (a sister monument to one in Asiago dedicated to emigrants), and Settlement Square where the names of immigrants can be engraved on pavers in the courtyard. There is no immigration museum in Sydney, but the Maritime Museum has a Welcome Wall to record the names of immigrants on bronze plaques and enter them into the museum's database. I placed the names of my Italian grandparents there so that something of their existence remains after we who remember them have gone.

Inscription BORRIERO Angelo and PEGORARO Carola Location On the Welcome Wall: Panel Number: 005 Column Number: 1 Line Number: 015

Name 1 Details Name 2 Details Surname BORRIERO PEGORARO Given Names Angelo "Spacca" Carola "Mora" Date of Birth 15/07/1884 12/08/1885 Date Deceased 31/07/1961 05/07/1965 Original Vocation Agricultural labourer Shopkeeper Town of Origin Piovene, Vicenza Zanè, Vicenza Country of Origin Italy Italy Place of Arrival Sydney via Fremantle Sydney State of Arrival NSW NSW Date of Arrival 09/09/1922 1924 Method of Arrival Sea Sea Town First Settled Lithgow Lithgow State First Settled NSW NSW Australian Vocation Labourer Market gardener

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 164

Comments Angelo (Tony) Borriero (Spacca) arr on S.S. Polenzo 1922 after working in USA 1914-1919. Carola Pegoraro (Mora)-Borriero arr with 2 children in 1924; 3 more children born Lithgow. Later settled in Meadows Rd, Mt Pritchard. Children: Marianna (Dalsanto), Nella (Maso), Madalena (Powell), Roberto. Survived by 6 grandchildren and many great grandchildren.

Submitted By Surname POWELL Given Names Diane Relationship To Names Granddaughter

The Immigration Museum, Melbourne

Melbourne's Immigration Museum provides an example of Casey's point about museum design transforming attention from objects to 'narrativised gaze'. The museum as a whole performs as a narrative, beginning with its 'slogan' – A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. The visitor is invited to identify with the journey from this 'once upon a time' opening line through the four 'chapters' in the story in the galleries: Getting in; Leavings; Journey; and

Settlings.57 The complexity of being accepted as an immigrant is the theme of the first gallery, Getting in. It shows a history of Australian immigration policies including legislation which restricted the immigration of Chinese, Greeks,

Italians, Russians and Jews at various times. The Settlings and Leavings gallery gives examples of people's reasons for leaving home and their experiences on arrival. Objects and documents are dispersed throughout; thimbles, a camera, a tuning fork, a tailor's notebook, house keys, the ubiquitous suitcase, tools, passports, certificates, railway tickets, and photographs of people travelling, saying goodbye and being reunited.

57 http://immigration.museum.vic.gov.au/

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 165

The most imposing gallery is Journeys, an experiential display of the sea-journeys

of immigrants. The large gallery

contains the replica of the shell of a

ship together with sound effects –

the ship's bell, fog horn, piano

accordion playing, the creaking of

the ship, scraping of tin plates, baby's cries, voices and even toilet noises. Inside the 'ship' are replica steerage- class berths equipped with sheets, blankets, tin cups, pots, jug and lamp. Games of cribbage, cards, dominoes and a lace making kit are spread around a common room. This gallery gives prominence to the transit between one country and another, perhaps in recognition of this important trajectory when people were literally and metaphorically an in-between space; balancing grief at loss of the old with exciting anticipation of the new. In the scheme of migration, the journey is a fleeting moment albeit one that is filled with pathos. I imagine Journeys was given special treatment because of the performative and experiential advantages it offered. On the day I visited hoards of schoolchildren were enjoying climbing and jumping about the replica bunks. This part of the museum was obviously created to provide an interactive experience for children who may get bored gazing at 'sacred' objects. Devices such as this are designed to bring history

'to life' and have come about partly in order to attract visitors to meet the demands by governments that cultural institutions be economically viable. Narrative and

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 166 performative experience in museums mediates collective memory, shaping it into consumable bites. The traditional museum display of objects laid out with little interpretation leave more space for individual readings, but do not engage the visitor emotionally. Experiential displays give insights into past events, creating affective knowledge.

The Immigration Museum displays 'official' memory but vernacular objects to create a texture of authenticity. The performative part of the museum was alive to imagination; the sounds and layout created the ambience of a sea voyage and seemed to be particularly appreciated by children. Overall the exhibitions were effective and educational. The museum includes a library and provides access to databases for researching one's own immigrant ancestry; it is an alive space.

Deadly and lively exhibitions

Andreas Huyssen talks about museums being 'burial chamber[s] of the past', but adds that they can also be sites 'of possible resurrections, however mediated and contaminated, in the eyes of the beholder' (Huyssen, 1995: 15).

◊◊◊

In the forecourt of the Museum of Sydney is a permanent soundscape

sculpture, Edge of the Trees (Laurence and Foley, 1995).

'From the edge of the trees the Cadigal people watched as the strangers of the First Fleet struggled ashore in 1788. We can only imagine what their thoughts would have been. This sculptural installation by artists Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley symbolises that first encounter. Richly embedded with materials and language, the sculpture evokes layers of memory, people and place.'58

58 http://www.hht.net.au/museums/mos/collection#trees

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 167

The sculpture fills me with sadness with its cluster of 'tree trunks' evoking

Aboriginal burial sticks, and the sounds suggesting the murmur of ghosts of

the Cadigal people. It is a monument; a memorial to Indigenous Australians. It

is about death, yet it breathes with memory traces that seep into the senses.

◊◊◊

I visit the Museum of Sydney to see an exhibition about Bondi that is a lively display of a place that we all know and have experienced: the beach, summer and fun. We see that generations before us have had similar experiences. They may have worn different cossies, had different hair-dos and arrived on different modes of transport, but all with the same joy in their faces:

The museum also seems to fulfil a vital anthropologically rooted need under modern conditions: it enables the moderns to negotiate and to articulate a relationship to the past that is always also a relationship to the transitory and to death, our own included...as our own memento mori, and as such, a life enhancing rather than mummifying institution...a site and testing ground for reflections and temporality and subjectivity, identity and alterity (Huyssen, 1995: 16).

However not all museums have this revitalizing effect and, in their articulation of the transitory nature of life, seem to remain mummifying.

New Italy, 'A Living Heritage'

The museum of New Italy at Woodford, near Lismore on the NSW North Coast, remains in the 'authentic object' rather than 'narrativised gaze' mode (Casey, 2003-

13). It was constructed, and the display assembled, by volunteers, including descendants and friends of the original settlers of New Italy.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 168

The museum is a complex of buildings on land beside the Pacific Highway where

Italians from Northern Italy settled in 1890 after a failed scam expedition to an island off Papua New Guinea. After many months of adversity just 217 of the original group of 340 passengers who left Italy in 1880 remained. They were eventually given refuge by the NSW Government on condition of being indentured as domestic servants and labourers for twelve months. Although the families were dispersed throughout the colony, after completing their indenture many settled together on land at Woodford in a self-sufficient community.

They built houses out of mud bricks and local stone, dug wells and established farms. The women did most of the agricultural work while the men were

59 from Italian-Australian Records Project (IARP) http://w2.vu.edu.au/iarp 60 (http://www.new-italy.com/pages/history.html

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 169 employed as labourers in the surrounding district and in the sugar-cane farms further north. For many years the community flourished and a school and church were soon built.

The museum complex began in the 1950s with a park and memorial. Over time, parcels of land and objects were collected and building of the museum began in earnest after the centenary celebrations in 1980. Volunteers recreated the buildings using mud bricks, including a replica of the house of Luigi Antonioli which had for many years been a rest-stop for travellers along the highway. The museum holds material donated by descendants of settlers. It is maintained by volunteers and despite being listed with the NSW Heritage office as an item of

State Heritage Significance, seems to receive little or no funding for the museum's maintenance, although there is support from the Italian Consulate for maintenance of its website.

Driving along the Pacific Highway, the New Italy museum complex suddenly appears out of the forests that line an isolated stretch of road. It is a rather spectral site, seeming like a ghost town when I visited it a few years ago. There were few people at the complex, which includes the Gurrigai Aboriginal Arts and Crafts

Gallery, a restaurant, a function hall, an Italian Pavilion, the museum and various monument and statues. The interior echoed the feeling of remoteness with its shadowy displays. I found the museum a sad place, a funerary collection of leftover fragments from long-ago lives and activities. It is subtitled a living heritage but it seems to me to be one of Andreas Huyssen's 'burial chambers' and I feel the ghosts of the people who once touched these musty old objects might cling to me.

It is a place of mourning for the lost lives of objects; these old farm and household

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 170 implements and faded, dusty hand made clothes; this old washboard; and sundry documents and photographs. I feel a bit embarrassed for these pathetic things; they never expected to end up as relics; consumed and discarded, their functions overtaken by new technologies. They have outlived their usefulness; they are indeed 'tired of us'. 61

Although these once essential things are no longer valued, evidence lingers on them of their labour and of those through whose hands they passed; the dried mud clinging to the scythe; its worn handle; soap scum on the washboard; and a faulty crochet stitch. The New Italy museum is about vernacular memory; derived from 'firsthand experience in small-scale communities' (Bodnar quoted in Confino, 1997: 1401). There is little evidence of any official culture or memory being involved in the museum complex; at the time of my visit it appeared that no professional curator had been involved in mounting the displays. Its narrative was fragmented, labels and interpretations were hand-written on discoloured paper, and there was no contextual placement of objects. It was as if this museum existed outside time, in some other space,

'within but without' Australia, a satellite, an aberration of history – which the original settlement was, in a way. New Italy seems to have been a kind of commune, a co-operative settlement similar to William Lane's New Australia settlement in Paraguay in the same era; although there is no evidence that the group had Utopian intentions when it set out on its disastrous adventure.

61 Photo from New Italy website http://www.new-italy.com/pages/exhibits.html#exh

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 171

The things in the New Italy museum remain as testament to the lives that shaped them and were shaped by them. As Massumi suggests, the delineation between things and bodies is blurred, 'it is not clear who is used by whom'; objects can be like 'prosthetic organs' of those past bodies, 'implicated in each other, in necessary and useful reciprocity'. (Massumi, 2002: 96). Museums usually confer quality onto objects by 'framing' them into spectacle; or using them in narrative or performative assemblages. What kind of gaze is returned by these objects? Unlike a painting or a photograph, the New Italy objects were not originally designed or manufactured for spectatorship but for utility. These are 'intransigent' objects; they do not recognise me and do not return my gaze. I am out of place in their world or they are out of place in mine (Holly, 1990: 382-383, Lacan, 1979: 95).

Of course, every object we look at returns a gaze of some kind and calls past experience into the present in order to be interpreted. I can only interpret the New

Italy objects as remnants of a lost settlement. Indeed, the place is described as an archaeological site in its Conservation Management Plan (Gardiner and Cotter,

2001-2002) and it does have an aura of decay about it. The complex is less a museum that a monument honouring a unique group of Italian-Australians and their achievements. It is unequivocally about what was; it points to the past and to death – of people and ideals and places. It suggests no potential – no future.

Griffith Italian Museum

The Italian museum at Griffith doubles as a cultural centre. Like the New Italy museum, it was established from donations given by local businesses and individuals. It also had support from Griffith City Council, and has been included with other preserved heritage structures in the City's Pioneer Park. The museum

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 172 houses a unique collection of hand made furniture such as cupboards, tables and chairs, made out of packing boxes and other odd pieces of timber. There are carefully arranged displays of former cottage industry equipment; a bootmaker's tools with hand-made shoes, a primitive knitting machine, a display of dressmaking scissors hanging like string puppets and examples of hand-tailored suits and dresses. A series of old wine-making presses, some made of wood and operated by hand, shows the progress of the local wine industry over the past half-century. I find a reciprocal gaze from the things in this museum; they are telling their stories; they speak of the affection and respect with which they were constructed and handled.

The items are thoughtfully laid out and preserved, and the annotations are brief but instructive. The museum represents both official and vernacular cultures; it has obviously been professionally designed and planned and is well-maintained. It has an official overlay but a vernacular feel, managing to convey a sense of the lives of Italian settlers in the Riverina with dignity and without schmaltz. So many exhibitions about immigration are concerned with showing how tough life was for immigrants, and their heroic struggle against the odds. The Griffith Italian

Museum turns this struggle into a romance. The displays offer glimpses into the everyday activities, industry and labour of people and tells a straightforward narrative of the lives of the Italians of Griffith. They were; they lived, loved, worked, invented, and built. They are; and they will continue to be. This museum

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 173 is not a memorial but a tribute; it communicates continuity and potential, not death or loss.

Migration Heritage Centre

As well as the museums of the material kind – housed in buildings with tangible objects on display, new technologies now provide access to multiplicities of histories and memories through the World Wide Web. Virtual museums, with seemingly unlimited potential, record memories and store remnants of the past, or rather, their images. Around the world many museums have established virtual museums for online consumption. Most material museums these days have an online component and there is even a Museum of Online Museums (MOOM) http://www.coudal.com/moom.php.

The Migration Heritage Centre (MHC) is an adjunct to Sydney's Powerhouse

Museum: a cybermuseum which does not hold a collection in a geographic location and can only be accessed online. It describes itself as follows:

The Migration Heritage Centre identifies, records, preserves and interprets the heritage of migration and settlement in New South Wales from 1788 to the present day. We aim to give new perspectives on Australian history, ensure a more representative heritage is preserved for future generations and also to validate migrants' experiences and challenge myths and prejudices. We are an innovative virtual heritage centre similar to an online museum. Our website presents an exciting program of online exhibitions you can view featuring community collections, family belongings and people's memories. You can also visit many of our exhibitions at venues across New South Wales. The website is also a gateway to plan your visits to explore fascinating heritage places and regions important to New South Wales' history of migration and settlement. www.migratonheritage.nsw.gov.au/about/index.shtml.

Online exhibitions show only virtual objects and a visit on an Internet browser is not the same as seeing them in their material reality. In 'Toy Story', Brown

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 174 suggests that the resurgence of interest in material residues of the past could be a response to postmodern symptom of seeing so many things not in themselves but via screens where we can see them in great detail but cannot experience them through touch, texture and odour (Brown, 1998: 960-961). Huyssen also distinguishes between seeing things on screen and being in their presence. He wonders whether being in the presence of the material object may provide an

'authentic experience as opposed to the always fleeting unreality of the image on the screen' although he does acknowledges that things in museums are always also mediated and situated in a particular mis-en-scène (Huyssen, 1995: 32-33).

However, in the traditional museum we are also separated from things by screens, whether by material barriers of glass or Perspex or by the metaphorical screen of the 'sanctity' of museal objects and their mediated context. There we also only see the things that have been chosen for display by a curator. We are in the presence of objects but distanced; we are not permitted to touch them, to feel their weight or texture, nor to get close enough to see the fine detail or smell them. Does the material object have more 'auratic' potential?

In cybermuseums we are eternally separated from the objects on display.

Nevertheless there are many advantages with virtual museums: they usually provide a more detailed narrative – a story – creating potential for a reciprocal gaze between story-teller and audience. Online museums are still 'primitive' in computer terms but have the potential to allow users to engage in as yet only imagined interactivity. Users will eventually be able to 'enter' the online space and use the objects to create their own world. Soon users will at least be able to manipulate images to achieve different views – zoom in or out, look at it from an aerial perspective, turn it around or upside down. There is the possibility to

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 175 interact with professionals, collectors and other enthusiasts via message boards, to add new details or narratives to go with an object or interpretation. Even now online museums provide a rich experience, they are often more flexible and accessible than a material museum and can supply additional knowledge with text, audio and video. In a physical museum the narrative flow has been decided for you and the objects have been classified and categorised in advance. In a cybermuseum you do not have to walk through galleries of things you are not interested in; you can click straight onto what you want to see; you can move around at will, jumping from subject to subject, place to place and back again – much easier on the feet and back. The range of stories online can be broad and detailed and the size is virtually unlimited.

The MHC website includes the first British immigrants, with photographs of things such as Matthew Flinders' hat, Sir Henry Parkes' briefcase, Governor

Bourke's 1835 declaration of Terra Nullius. It moves on to other early immigrants with a photo of a Chinese opium box from the goldfields. Most of the other exhibitions are about migrants who arrived in Australia after the Second World

War. Belongings, is a collection of objects and the stories of people who owned them.

The online museum is also a useful repositories for cultural histories and a means of extending the life of an exhibition. Small community exhibitions about a particular ethnic group or event do not always have suitable exhibition spaces.

Many regional exhibitions are short-lived and, once packed up, are lost or linger in a local history library where they are not easily accessed. Published online they can be available forever at relatively little cost. The MHC contains many such

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 176 collections. The World Cup Dream tells stories about the migrant families of some of the Socceroos who played in the World Cup. People and Cultures at

Work is about the people from diverse cultural backgrounds who work at and attend health services in Liverpool. Sharing the Lode is a comprehensive collection of stories about the history of settlers at Broken Hill. From Estonia to

Thirlmere about poultry farmers on the south western outskirts of Sydney. Getting

Married is about the courtship rituals in cultural groups living in Marrickville;

'Serbian, Bangladeshi, South Indian, Lebanese, Greek, Vietnamese and Anglo-

Celtic, embracing Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic and Orthodox rituals and traditions'.62 These many small exhibitions add up to an abundance of people's personal stories and recollections adding a dimension that is not available in traditional museums except via brief 'interpretation' boards or in catalogues.

Online museums are new kinds of archives; a place where history and collective memory are documented and consigned to a place which, in Derrida's words

'assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression' in a new dimension' (Derrida, 1998: 11).

Museums of the heart

Museums were once institutions that served the interests of the ruling class as a

'triumphalist showcase for the loot of territorial expansion and colonization'

(Huyssen, 1995: 16). Today many museums are keen to display the everyday lives of ordinary people and even though they are institutions of 'official' memory, they serve additional functions in excess of their intentions, as Huyssen says:

62 http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/gettingmarried/.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 177

No matter how much the museum, consciously or unconsciously, produces and affirms the symbolic order, there is always a surplus of meaning that exceeds set ideological boundaries, opening spaces for reflection and counter-hegemonic memory (Huyssen, 1995: 15)

We each bring our own history and memory to an exhibition and view the displays with our individual interests and desires. The objects in museums return the gaze of our distant ancestors and in that exchange we communicate with the past, present and future. We also channel time in the museums of our own making; through the collections of left-behind things of our families. These are museums of the heart, commemorating love and loss of what was and nurturing our journey into the future.

When sorting through the belongings of my parent's home after my mother's death

I found an old watch; another vessel of painful-joyful memories. Nonna had brought it back as a gift for me from her trip to Italy in the 1950s. It had a large plain face, at a time when most women's watches were petite and set decoratively in marcasite or fancy gold curlicues. We were still poor and my father did not own a watch, so it was decided that he should have this one and when I was a bit older, and when they could afford it, I would get a more suitable, prettier watch. The old watch is no longer ticking. Its leather band had long ago been replaced by a cheap one of nylon webbing. The glass is so scratched it almost obscures the face beneath. The gold casing is worn from the years on my father's arm. It looks like a piece of rubbish. But I can't throw it away. I can still see it nestled in the red-gold curls of the hair of Dad's wrist. These things that belonged to my parents return my gaze

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 178 as surely as my parents once did, as John Frow says when he ponders on things while packing up his belongings to move house:

the true role of Things, of underlying thingness, is to be the mirror of our souls, the object that makes us a subject, that makes us real. That's why the auratic thing returns my gaze: it is myself that I see, looking back in astonishment at its mirror image, myself (Frow, 2001: 273).

As I look at the watch and at the other remnants of my parents' lives they return my gaze. It is not a morbid ritual but a way of cherishing my life. In preserving the belongings of the past – which is also my past – I am tending to my own future.

◊◊◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 179

Chapter 7. Memento

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here (Barthes, 1981a: 80).

In this chapter I examine the ways a photographic exhibition uses the noeme of photography (its inimitable feature, the 'this is how it was') to recreate a narrative of the past, and how the 'radiations' from the there-then of the photograph to the here-now of the spectator are influenced by the milieu of their occurrence. I begin by providing background about an exhibition which I co-curated; From the

Backblocks to the Frontlines; Italian settlers in south west Sydney. I discuss the curatorial process and various aspects of the photographs as they move from family album to historical artefact and some of the effects of the exhibition for participants and spectators.

In both Rhetoric of the Image and Camera Lucida Barthes discusses the

'stupefying evidence of the this is how it was' of photography which he identifies as its noeme (Barthes, 1977b, Barthes, 1981a). This feature allows the photograph to appear as a 'message without a code' and reinforces the myth of photographic

'naturalness', a simple copy of what is there in nature, leaving aside obvious codings of lighting, framing, focus and so on. Barthes reasons that photographic meaning resides in the relations between the photograph and the spectator in the here-now context of spectatorship: '[the photograph's] unreality is that of the here- now...its reality that of the having-been there' (Barthes, 1981a: 77, 85-89, 99-

100).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 180

Barthes contends that when we look at a photograph in the present – say of our parents as children – the photo is evidence that they did exist and that is how they looked. What is real is that they were in that place at that time and looked like that. What is 'unreal' is that the photo allows them to appear to us in the present.

As Barthes says, 'every photograph is a certificate of presence' (Barthes, 1981a:

87). For the spectator the real of the photograph is 'a reality one can no longer touch' (Barthes, 1981a: 87). However, the present in which we see the photograph may influence the way we view that past reality. A photograph is always looked at in a context, in a particular place and circumstance. Places and occasions of looking help to code the reading of a photograph. A photo of a woman in the business pages of a newspaper can have a different meaning to the same photo in her family album. Different meanings would arise if the woman had just died or if it was in an exhibition about serial murderers, or on a banner protesting about rape, or if there was a caption saying she was a former rock star, a Nazi war criminal, or a Holocaust survivor.

In 2006 I was involved in a

reconstruction of the past,

researching and co-curating a

photographic exhibition; From

the backblocks to the frontlines

(Backblocks), about Italian

settlers in south western Sydney.

It included photos from personal collections which were assembled into small narratives on panels that together made a larger narrative. The photographs were of the there-then displayed in the

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 181 here-now. They were taken from the privacy of family albums to a public space to be viewed in context with other photos. The context and occasion of their display bestowed a meaning on the photos as a collection that they would not have had as individual photos in family albums. Although the migrant story is familiar to many Australians, the particular history of Italian settlers of Liverpool and

Fairfield have not been widely acknowledged or recorded, yet there are more

Italians in this area than in any other locality in Sydney. One aim of the exhibition was to recognise the achievements of the Italian-Australian community of south west Sydney. It hoped to affirm an identity that has been amorphous – the Italian community is dispersed over a wide area throughout Fairfield and Liverpool and is just one among a great many non-Anglo ethnic groups in the area. It is not a community living closely together in an identifiable delimited space like the

Italian community of Leichhardt.

The there-then - Italians in south west Sydney

The first known settlement of Italians in Liverpool and Fairfield was as far back as the 1880s when two groups of Italians lived and worked in the area. Some came to work in a paper mill at Liverpool, others to dig canals for Prospect

Reservoir at Fairfield. At least two of the 19th century settlers in Fairfield and

Liverpool had been among the New Italy 'refugees' who were rescued after a failed attempt to colonise an island of Papua-New Guinea. One, Frank Gava, had been a child during the expedition, and became a prominent local identity in the first half of the 20th century, establishing a winery and running a Post Office at St

Johns Park. Italians participated in local politics as early as 1904 when Giuseppe

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 182

Zani became mayor of Cabaramatta (now Fairfield) council and 1907 when Peter

Pavesi became mayor of Prospect (now Holroyd) council.

The paper mill at Liverpool c.1885 where many Italians worked63 ◊◊◊

Something about this photo from 19th century reminds me of the early

Lumiere brothers' film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. Perhaps

because it is from the same era and the workers milling around look similar.

The men wear waistcoats and hats and the women are in long skirts and aprons

(visible in the larger photograph). The figures in the field look as if they have

been told to stand still for the photograph, so as not to create blurs on the

plate. I imagine them streaming towards me in that jerky style of the early

films. I get a sense of what Barthes says about the mortality inherent in

photographs. The people in the there then of this image were indisputably

there in the present of the photo, and indisputable they are all going to die.

As Barthes says, 'every photograph is this catastrophe'. (Barthes, 1981a: 96)

◊◊◊ The next large cluster of Italians came in the 1920s and 1930s, my own grandparents among them. They were escaping the poverty and destruction wrought in Northern Italy by the First World War and civil unrest during the rise of Fascism. Men had often left their family at home and migrated alone. They

63 Photo in the State Library NSW collection and Liverpool Local History Library.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 183 worked, sometimes for many years, on sugar-cane plantations, farms, road and rail construction and in heavy industry to save enough money to buy land and pay for their family's passage. There was little left over to provide for comforts once this was achieved. When the women arrived they were often welcomed into a corrugated iron shed on bare acreage in the remote edges of the city. The shacks were lined with lime-dipped hessian bags and had compacted dirt floors. They may have just one door and one window, and no indoor taps or electricity. One of our interviewees, Nina, spoke about arriving aged 12 with her mother and sister in

1936 (her father had arrived eight years earlier): 'I lost my speech, tears came out of my eyes...there was no light, no sewer, no water, old shack, no ceiling, light - the lamp, tin all around' (interview Nina Zovi

27/01/05). Some fared a little better; the

Ragonesi home in 1927 (right), was a two room timber shack surrounded by market garden. It is still standing today, overgrown and neglected in Horsley

Drive.

Immigrant families made the most of their often dismal circumstances. The whole family pitched in to maintain the market garden. Much of the day-to-day farm work – watering, weeding, picking, and packing – was left to the women and children while the men went out to work as factory hands or labourers. In some cases older girls such as Nina were taken out of school to help on the farm or to mind the children so the mother could work in the garden. When boys reached legal working age they too were taken from school and sent to work to supplement the family income. Nina felt the loss of schooling keenly. Her younger sister was allowed to continue and every night she would pass on what

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 184 she had learnt to Nina. Years later Nina made sure that her own daughters went as far as they could at school and never did farm work: 'I never even sent them to get a bit of parsley from outside' she said (interview Nina Zovi 27/01/05).

◊◊◊

This photo of the Amalfi family harvesting

their produce in the 1930s has an aura of

the pastoral paintings of Jean-Francois

Millet in 19th century: The Gleaners, The

Hay Trussers. The labour of contadini, the

bodies and rituals of people who survive by harvesting

the fruits of the earth or gathering

what others have left behind, has

changed little over centuries.

◊◊◊

The 1920 and 1930 immigrant groups had paved the way for the later Italian settlers and by the late 1950s Australia was becoming more prosperous; jobs were plentiful, credit was available to set up businesses, and there was a growing domestic market for all sorts of goods and services that Italians were keen to provide. However the post World War 2 immigrants still had a struggle to be accepted, there was perhaps even greater ill-feeling towards them than towards the earlier generation of Italian immigrants because they arrived in greater numbers. Most of this generation of Italian arrivals were from Southern Italy and they endured the racist attitudes of Anglo-Australians as well as from their compatriots from Northern Italy. The post War Italian immigrants initially worked in factories or as labourers in the construction industry, but it was not long before many of them started their own businesses in construction, real estate,

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 185 car sales and repairs, transport and in fruit shops and delicatessens. Many of the next generation entered the professions as lawyers, doctors, academics, performers and artists and became politically active.

The Exhibition

[T]o reshape is as vital as to preserve (Lowenthal, 1998: 11).

The Backblocks exhibition was initiated by Linda Nellor at Co.As.It. Italian

Heritage (Coasit).64 I became involved in the project after seeing a notice about it.

I had many contacts in south west Sydney and the project complemented my dissertation research. I researched the available history in local library collections, interviewed people and collected photographs from them. Together Linda and I sorted out how to creatively represent the history and experience of people using mainly photographs, with minimal text, and with only fragments of available information about the people and events in the photographs. The form of the exhibition was largely determined by the material we had been able to collect, which seems to be the way with historiography. One relies on available material to pin the story together and fills in the gaps with informed judgements. Barthes sees the historian as making sense of a record of meaningless facts and '"filling out" the meaning of History' (Barthes, 1981b: 7/10). He writes, 'Nietzsche said in his time: "There are no facts in themselves. It is always necessary to begin by introducing a meaning in order that there can be a fact"' (Barthes, 1981b: 151). In the Backblocks exhibition we began with 'meaning' and then collected the 'facts' of photographs which we put together in a way that created a narrative. Grosz also discusses Nietzsche's analysis of history in her book The Nick of Time; 'History

64 Comitato Assistenza Italiani (Italian Association of Assistance)

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 186 makes itself, lives itself only in the value a future bestows on it' (Grosz, 2004:

115). By mounting an exhibition, we were aiming to bestow value on the history of the Italians of south west Sydney.

However, we weren't entirely free to be the 'author' of this history because the story of migration to Australia is already 'authored' to such an extent that there is little room to write against or outside the accepted tenets. One who has, Rosa

Cappiello is a rare exception. Cappiello breaks the code of appreciative migrant; she doesn't aspire to be an Australian and is not grateful for the opportunity the nation prides itself on providing. Her book Oh Lucky Country is a tirade against

Australia (Cappiello, 1984). It expresses the rage of being a migrant at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy. It is not pleasant reading, not at all what we are used to hearing from migrants; there is no appeal to sympathy and understanding of their homesickness or trauma, just reams of invective:

I'd like to stick a bomb up Australia's arsehole and then go sell papers among the ruins. You're laughing, are you? Well, go ahead and laugh. You adapt yourself. You get by on dry fucks by reading books. You stuff yourself with dumb words. I can't take it. I can't bear this wasteland. I'm going to pieces (Cappiello, 1984: 53).

Cappiello's experiences are often comic as well as tragic and her observations about Australia and its people often cut to the bone. No other immigrant writer in

Australia has matched her 'interpretation extracted from the primitive and stagnant chaos of the migrant experience' (Cappiello, 1984: back flyleaf). Is her experience common among migrants? If so, it is an experience that has been buried in the over-coded migrant story in multicultural Australia.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 187

The people I interviewed expressed none of the bitterness Cappiello conveyed.

They remembered hardships and verbal abuse but these seem to have been overlayed with their subsequent achievements and social acceptance. The photographs people showed us may have revealed the poverty and occasionally wretched aspects of their lives, but there was no shame or anger about it. In this period of 'late-multiculturalism' – and because the exhibition was a project of an

Italian-Australian organisation (Coasit) and supported by Migrant Heritage Centre and the Italian Institute of Culture (IIC) – there was no question that the exhibition was to be celebratory rather than critical. Such 'retrospectives' are expected to be in praise of Australia for enabling immigrants' lives, as if their lives only began when they arrived here. As Paul Carter says in his discussion about an Italian-Australian film-maker's earlier life:

there could be no place for these reminiscences in an exhibition about the triumph of the Australian multicultural experience. In such celebrations of social progress, it is axiomatic, as I said, that the past life of émigrés is annulled (Carter, 2004: 135).

Some of the panels from the exhibition.

The project was a celebration the history and achievements of the local Italian community. Material that fitted and reinforced the existing mythologies of the migrant experience were displayed: the journey to the unknown; the early struggle for security and acceptance; then integrating and achieving success by making

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 188 social, political, cultural and economic contributions to the community and nation.

There are many divisions within the Italian-Australian cultural community, not just the North-South divide but a cultural one between the largely unskilled immigrants with agricultural and working-class backgrounds and the more sophisticated middle-class Italians of the cities and of the 21st century. The IIC tends to support activities of 'high' culture that promote Italy's glorious artistic past in painting, sculpture, music and opera, or, occasionally, or in modern design.

Occasionally they sponsor folkloric dance and music but there are few activities promoted by the IIC that have relevance to ordinary Italians who settled in

Australia. Many of those in south west Sydney regard the IIC as elitists who view them as contadini.65 Linda Nellor, who initiated the project, had to struggle to obtain funding support from the IIC and other institutions and received little encouragement from her own organisation. I was keen to put the history and achievements of Italian settlers in south west Sydney on the record and to support

Linda through these difficulties. The shortfall in funding was supplemented eventually with sponsorship from local south-west Sydney Italian-owned businesses, Fairfield Council, the Club Marconi and Vittoria Coffee.

Memory, recognition and identity

Collective memory functions to preserve connections with the past, to enrich identity and create a sense of belonging to a community. This happens through the interplay of history and memory (the there-then) and present interpretation in the here-now of everyday life. The interpretations are flexible and adaptable and can

65 peasants

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 189 be modified and manipulated for all sorts of cultural and political purposes. As curators we provided and interpreted local history the way we saw it, while spectators – Italian and non-Italian-Australians – viewed the exhibition according to their own values, politics, history and present circumstances, making their own

'translations'.

Collective memory is a narrative 'space' made up of objects, rituals, practices, narratives, images, traces and memories. It is a constantly evolving performance of identity in the context and conditions of the community and nation in the present. Events such as Backblocks are shaped by, and in turn modify, collective memory. With the help of participants we took memories of the past and expressed them in the present, organising and 'locating' or re-locating their stories.

Backblocks created a space for the Italian-Australian community of south west

Sydney to perform its identity, to have its collective experience and memory recognised publicly and 'officially'. The constitution of identity is a complex process for individuals and groups. Ethnicity is only part of the identity of Italian-

Australians. People also have identities that have little or nothing to do with their ethnicity: as parents at their children's school, as national citizens in election campaigns, as members of a youth culture, as elderly people in nursing homes, as writers, performers, scholars, feminists, political activists and so on. However, the recognition of ethnicity and difference is of fundamental importance to belonging to the wider community, as Chris Bickerton points out:

Memory then becomes a claim for recognition, and history becomes a process whereby those excluded and marginalised in the conventional stories told about the past can be included and recognised (Bickerton, 2006: 159).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 190

Recognition is part of the process of negotiating identity in relation to significant others and social interaction. As Charles Taylor says, '[m]y own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others'. Recognition has to be won through this exchange and can be lost (Taylor, 1992: 79-80). In the political realm equal recognition of diverse community groups is hard-won. Lack of recognition can be harmful, as Taylor points out:

Its refusal can inflict damage on those who are denied it...The projection of an inferior or demeaning image on another can actually distort and oppress, to the extent that the image is internalized. Not only contemporary feminism but also race relations and discussions of multiculturalism are undergirded by the premise that the withholding of recognition can be a form of oppression (Taylor, 1992: 81).

However, recognition based on minority or ethnic stereotypes can inhibit full social participation and mobility. Miette Anderson argues that recognition is

'situational' – determined by contexts and circumstances – and argues that structural processes often foster marginalization. Sometimes too much

'recognition' may have the effect of exacerbating inequalities by emphasising difference (Anderson, 2000: 9). Perhaps the entrenched marginalization of

Indigenous Australians and the current demonization of people from Islamic and

African countries are the result of this process.

The Participants

People were delighted to share their stories and photographs, sometimes turning the occasion of our visit into an extended family get-together. They were generous with their time and with allowing us temporary custody of their precious keepsakes. They revelled in the memories stimulated by going through the

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 191 albums, retelling family history and their parents' and grandparents' stories. I could see their pain and joy as they showed their photos and told the stories of their loved ones, revealing the kind of intense 'laceration' Barthes talks about when he realises that on his own death, not only his life will be lost but also 'love', because he is the last person alive who can testify to the love between his parents.

Many of the people in the photographs at the exhibition are dead, but their children and grandchildren remember them and know fragments of their stories.

These handed-down memories are of great significance to them and their cultural identity. Marianne Hirsch discusses this process which she calls 'postmemory'. It is second generation memory acquired through an 'imaginative investment' in the experiences of parents and grandparents, handed on through the retelling of intense narratives. In extreme cases these narratives can overwhelm those growing up and in some cases their own stories are 'evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated'. Postmemory is often carried through photographs which attest to the

'unbridgeable distance' of the past (Hirsch, 1997: 22-23).

I think this distance is unbridgeable because of what has not been related; the imagined can sometimes produce more extreme impressions than the actual.

Many parents who have suffered traumatic events are reluctant to relate them in detail to their children; many holocaust survivors and returned servicemen do not talk about the horrors they have suffered or witnessed. Postmemory can occur without complete knowledge of a parent's past trauma, the memory of which they carry spiritually and corporeally and which can be conveyed to the next generation through behaviours, silences, gestures, temperament. The children of

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 192

Vietnam veterans have been found to have high levels of depression, and suicide

(The Age 16.08.2003). The Federal Government has various assistance programs for them in recognition of the problems they face.66 Some of their problems are related to medical conditions resulting from their fathers' contamination with chemicals during the war. Other problems may be the outcome of their fathers' unresolved traumatic stress which has been manifested in violence, alcoholism, depression and suicide.

◊◊◊

I believe I was affected by my father's war experiences, although he rarely

spoke of them. My earliest memories of him are of a melancholy man. Now,

when I see a photo of him in uniform, looking young and vulnerable, I

experience a flood of different emotions. I will never know the person he was

then, nor know what happened to him between the there-then of that

photograph and the here-now of my memory of him. There is a forever

'unbridgeable' gap; one that I fill with the 'imaginary investment' that was

part of his legacy to me.

◊◊◊

In allowing their photos to be on exhibition, the participants in our project were surrendering not just documents of evidence. In making their private photos public they were also sharing their 'imaginary investment' in the memories and stories behind the images.

Private-Public

the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social

66 http://www.dva.gov.au/health/vvcsp/

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 193

value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly (Barthes, 1981a: 98).

For the exhibition we took people's photos from the privacy of the family album and put them on display in a public space, moving them from personal memory into collective memory. In a sense photographs are never private, even when they are snapped in a private space or moment. They are taken to record something – an activity, people, place or time – with the assumption that others will look at them (which is why I might destroy unflattering photos of myself). Photographic images, like paintings and other visual media, are made to be seen, that is their function. However, we generally show private photos only to family and friends, few of us expect photos of ourselves or our family to be seen in a public exhibition. The majority of the photos in Backblocks were snapshots of family and close friends in domestic situations or at informal social events. Some were records of significant events in a family's life, such as the first Christmas in

Australia; the first harvest; a betrothal or wedding; honouring a visit by friends or relatives. Some were snapped to record a rare moment when the family were all together and dressed in their best for a special occasion. By being in the exhibition the photos lose their intimacy and enter the realm of public discourse.

They have escaped the family closet and been launched into circulation. The photos now belong to everyone and are open to interpretation by others. As Susan

A Crane says of personal items becoming public:

Once a text is written or a museum is founded, it no longer belongs to the author/collector, but to a public, and the author/ historian herself now enters into a different relation to the artefact that she has

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 194

produced: she too becomes a visitor to the site, or, a reader of a textualized artefact of her past (Crane, 1996: 14).

Once made public the photos become and 'event', in Backblocks the photos were enlarged and reproduced on panels of one metre square. There were titles, captions and quotations to interpret the photos and their context. The exhibition placed them, as Meir Wigoder writes 'outside the immediate private context of the family album and turned them into a testimony of a small community whose faces and dress one observed as types' (Wigoder, 2001: 10/21). In this case the type was

'the immigrant'. Placing the photographs into an exhibition transformed them into historic artefacts and subjects in the photos were situated as historical. Crane asks

'[w]hen is the personal historical?' and answers, '[w]henever one is thinking about oneself historically' (Crane, 1996: 13). Did the people in the photos, or their children and grandchildren, think about themselves historically before this exhibition?

The main photograph in this panel is of my cousin's engagement party

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 195

Marita Sturken notes that family snaps are 'already coded with social meanings about youth, childhood, marriage, family and the ideologies of (American) culture' (Sturken, 1999: 193). One could add, in the Australian context, with codes about immigrants. When placed in the public arena photographs acquire additional meaning, they take on the weight of collective memory and provide a memorial to 'make present those who are absent' (Sturken, 1999: 189). She notes that once in the public arena the images become 'free-floating signifiers, open to diverse meanings and available to many different political agendas' (Sturken,

1999: 193). The photographs become historical evidence and become symbols of historical circumstances. A photo may simply be of an unidentified family standing in front of a house but it takes on historical significance because we see that the clothing is different, the hair-styles, the way people are standing, as well as the graininess of the image. There may be a text that 'interprets' the image for the spectator and it may be framed within an overall exhibition or museum space which adds to its documentary significance. In some circumstances images may alter spectators' own memories so that they confuse their own memories with the public memories depicted in the mass media or told by other people (Sturken,

1999: 179). Sturken remarks that the personal and family images placed in the public sphere 'can be hauntingly tragic in their evocation of loss'. Backblocks was not a memorial of the kind that Sturken talks about (Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the AIDS quilt) but it acquires the aura of a monument; the photographs retrieve time, affirm 'connections to those who are still living', and 'testify to the profound incommensurability between the dead and the living' (Sturken, 1999: 179, 188-

89).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 196

Photographs have the capacity to 'wound' in the way Barthes discusses in his writings on photography. The wound or punctum of the photo that Barthes talks about is that element that arrests one's gaze, something that pricks or punctuates the studium of the photograph (the general and highly coded composition which provokes the 'docile interest' of the viewer). Punctum is a detail in the photo that attracts and seduces the gaze, something that touches a spectator. The affect may be grief or joy and can be different for each spectator. It is not something necessarily intended by the photographer and some spectators may only see the studium of a photograph (Barthes, 1981a: 40-59).

◊◊◊

Punctum

In this photo of Nonna and three of her children, which was featured in the

exhibition, the punctum for me is in the folds of the wrinkles in my mother's

grubby stockings. The

studium of the photo comes

from its aura of a past age

and poverty.

The shed, the cart wheels

and the old clothesline like a

crucifix in the background

tell of times gone by. The tall

girl in her neat uniform,

smooth black stockings and

polished shoes is not a

member of the family and

provides a contrast to the

poverty evident in the

clothes of Nonna with Uncle

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 197

Robert in her arms, Auntie Nella on the left and my mother, Tutti, in the

middle. They look so bedraggled with their scuffed shoes and tatty clothes;

the buckle of my mother's shoe is missing and her hem is hanging down, or

maybe it's her bloomers. I cannot name what it is about the wrinkled, grubby

stockings that wounds me and arrests my gaze. In them I see my mother

skipping and singing out loud with her mind on nothing but the sensation of

being alive. As I look at it I think about Barthes discovering the 'essence' of

his mother in a childhood photo of her. That's not what I was looking for but

it is there in her face; a gentle pensiveness, an expression I remember in her

until she died. The sadness I feel is not for the loss of the mother I knew, but

for the loss of that little girl that I did not know who became my mother.

There she is, her whole unknown life before her, in a life that existed before

me. And yet, she embodies me and I her. Perhaps it is a loss of something in

myself that I grieve for.

◊◊◊

Loss and continuity

Central to the photo above is my beloved Nonna who carried the same 'look' all her life: the features of her face and something in its expression. My mother had traces of it, and at odd moments I see it in myself and my daughter; this 'fragment of oneself or of a relative which comes from some ancestor…a little truth…the truth of lineage…a certain persistence of the species' (Barthes, 1981a: 104-05).

Perhaps it is the chin, or the forehead in that space between the eyebrows. Here we are in four generations:

L-R: Carola Pegoraro, Madalena Borriero, Diane Powell, Claire Allen

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 198

There are, of course, traces of the fathers that I can see, so the resemblance of

Claire to her bisnonna (great grandmother) is dim yet I imagine I see some similarity. Nonna and Mum are dead, I will die in the future, and in the very distant future so will Claire. Most of us feel a sense of loss when looking at photos of loved ones who are no longer alive. As Susan Sontag says, 'all photographs are memento mori...by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt' (Sontag, 1979: 161). Barthes also speaks of the relationship of death and Photography; 'that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead' (Barthes, 1981a: 9).

The person in the photo is dead or is going to die. That is what Barthes sees as the essential fact of the photograph.

Lost spaces-lost times

As well as many of the people in the exhibition photographs having passed away, many of the sites they inhabited have also disappeared. These are 'photographs of neighbourhoods now torn down, rural places disfigured and made barren' (Sontag,

1979: 16). The aura of these lost places moves me with their 'melancholy beauty of a vanished past' (Newhall quoted in Kracauer, 1960: 16). Nostalgia can also be felt for loss of space; producing an ache of memory for what those places represented – a first home in Australia, where the first baby was born and where life was hard but simple and times were joyful as well as harsh. The people who lived in that old shack, who drove that old bomb of a car and tilled that rock-hard paddock, were no doubt relieved to leave them for more comfortable surroundings but still feel a nostalgia for things they will never see again. These men, the truck and the landscape in this photograph have gone forever. The places of our

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 199 childhood lay down our sensory world and map our consciousness.67 The smells, sights, placement of objects and reflections of light on them, shadows, the movement of air, passageways, shortcuts and sounds we encounter in the early years of life stay with us and anchor our identity.

Crestani's truck 'Mafalda' c.1930 Bossley Park Simon Shama talks of the power and durability of landscape myths in Europe going back centuries (Shama, 1995). In Australia, it is only the Aboriginal people who have such long enduring landscape 'dreaming'. Australians who have been here only a few generations have few landscape myths of our own: Farm Cove,

Rushcutters' Bay, the Tank Stream, the Blue Mountains; and legends association with bush rangers like Ned Kelly or explorers like Leichhardt and Burke and

Wills. Other more mystic landscape myths we have borrowed from Indigenous

Australians, such as Uluru and Kakadu. For immigrants, landscape myths might include Bonegilla and other migrant hostels, internment camps, the Snowy River

Scheme or Woolloomooloo, where some of them first set foot on Australian soil.

We may have our own personal 'sacred' sites, places we 'erect mental boundaries around' even if we have lived there only for a short time, (Read, 1996: 2). Peter

67 David Malouf, Sate Library of NSW Seminar, Memoir and Place, 24 June 2006

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 200

Read writes about place-bereavement, the grief that people feel when a house, district, building, shopping centre, playground, or wilderness is replaced, layered over and changed to serve a different purpose. David Malouf provides an evocative account of the memories we attach to our childhood homes: 'Nothing much remains of Edmondstone Street, and our house, Number twelve, went ages ago, though I recall it well enough; I can feel my way in the dark through every room' (Malouf, 1986: 4).

Places become meaningful through the activities that take place there, linked

'through repetitive prosaic practices, ritualised performance, and institutionalized commemoration' (Osborne, 2001: 3-4, 6). Meaningful places become woven into our identity and reinforce our social connectedness. When familiar places disappear under layers of progress, the activities that gave them texture and meaning also disappear. These spaces in our identities remain only through memory. As John Frow says, [p]lace is a marker and a guarantee of the continuity of personal identity: memory is a way of identifying, and perhaps repairing, loss

(Frow, 1997: 245). Seeing a photograph of a once familiar place can trigger all sorts of associations. We can 'revisit' that space and remember what it felt like to stand in a place that is forever different from how it was, but something of the location forever reverberates, as Kim Mahood writes, 'the place in my head is not and never was this place. For moments at a time I am simply there. The wind which moves softly in the grass is the same wind that moves across time and through my mind' (Mahood, 2000: 49-50).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 201

The here-now

The here-now of Backblocks is within the Club Marconi where we fashion a

special cultural space for the Italians of south west Sydney, a territory for

them to inhabit. We take up their refrains and sang them back with new

rhythms.

Shaping a territory

The exhibition creates a little milieu – a territory of its own, an assemblage vibrating with the song of its markers. The panels of photos are like the plumage and performance of birds marking out a territory and claiming a space for the story of the Italians of south west Sydney. The participants hum along with the refrain, 'one ventures from home on the thread of a tune' (Deleuze and Guattari,

1987: 311). The exhibition hummmms: against the incursion of loss, the overwhelming affect of grief, and to ward off the return of the dark spaces of the past. Here in our little gathering, individual territories converge fleetingly.

Spectators brush up against each other and refrains resonate and merge then disperse; vibrating together with a rhythm that 'fends off chaos' (Wise, 2000: 302)

Like nomads we 'struggle between spatial forces and identity' to create our space, our story among stories (Wise, 2000: 305).

◊◊◊

A family refrain

Many memories are triggered for me by photos in the exhibition but it is the

photo of immigrants on the ship that sparks the memory of a musical family

refrain. When I was about twelve, my grandparents took their one and only

trip back to Italy, after winning some money in the NSW State Lottery

(Nonna bought lots of tickets and avidly checked the results in the newspaper

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 202

with a magnifying glass every day). It was a sea voyage and they were gone for

several months. My mother seemed to miss them terribly and to fear for their

safe return. There was a song – Torna a Surriento - a sad Neapolitan song

about homesickness for port-town of Sorrento (if this was a website I could

embed the song here). It also happened to be the name of the ship on which

my grandparents went to Italy. Mum would cry every time she heard or sang

the song to herself, and I would cry along with her in sympathy and in

response to the pull-at-the-heartstrings music. In the here-now I understand

this as a refrain in my family which was formed out of an earlier journey. A

story often repeated was about how my aunt, the eldest sister was stranded

in France during the Depression. She and her husband had gone there for

work. Nonna and the girls lamented the missing daughter and saw it as a

tragedy that she could not return. It was as if she'd been kidnapped. It

seemed to leave an indelible mark on my mother. Every time someone went

overseas she retold the story of how Mary got stuck in France and whenever I

went overseas as an adult she was anxious and distressed. I still get tears in

my eyes when I hear Torna a Surriento. I have inherited my mother's fear

and this refrain resounds whenever my daughter travels overseas.

◊◊◊

The milieu of the exhibition

The Club Marconi is an 'ethnic' club of long standing and is highly regarded throughout the local Italian and wider community. At our opening the here-now includes a throng of people circling, brushing up against one another. There are lots of Italian-Australians, many older people, family groups related to those featured in the display. They are circulating around dignitaries in the form of local political figures, sponsors and representatives from the Italian Institute of Culture and the Migrant Heritage Centre. Our performance also includes the former Prime

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 203

Minister of Australia and past local member for the area (Werriwa), the Hon E G

Whitlam, who opened the exhibition.

◊◊◊

The territorialising refrain of Gough

Gough Whitlam is loved and revered by a great many of his former

constituents, especially the Italians, for whom he has a special affinity. His

electorate included vast numbers of Italians and he has been a scholar of

Italian history and culture since his mother and father read him bedtime

stories of Ancient Roman myths and legends. This inspired his book, My Italian

Notebook: the story of an enduring love affair (Whitlam, 2002) In 1998 he

was invested with the Italian Commendatore dell' Ordine al Merito della

Repubblica Italiana. He has a long history with the Club Marconi, beginning

with his participation in its grand opening in 1958. I am told he cut the ribbon

of a section of the club with the words 'é aperto' (it is open). Even now, after

years in retirement, he frequently attends events here in his old electorate,

where his presence is a territorialising refrain marking out familiar time and

space. Gough has become a cherished refrain from the past that remains part

of south west Sydney: 'every milieu is vibratory...a block of space-time

constituted by the periodic repetition of the component' (Deleuze and

Guattari, 1987: 313).

◊◊◊

The display is mounted on the walls of a large vestibule of the Club Marconi at the top of sweeping staircases. There is food, wine, music (an accordion of course) and the noise of people talking and laughing. The event has the aura of celebration and status we wanted; the opening is a great success, the speakers all succinct and the applause deafening.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 204

The spectator

Just putting up the exhibition implies and implicates the spectator/s (Holly, 1996: 10).

Visitors to the exhibition complete the circuit; they are essential to the display.

The spectators give life to the here-now of the exhibition, bridging the space between the there-then of the past depicted and their own present. Images can trigger memories for the spectator beyond what was intended by the photographer or curator. Barthes says, 'the viewer of the image receives at one and the same time the perceptual message and the cultural message' (Barthes, 1977b: 36). The cultural message in this case is tied to collective memories and the spectator is guided towards these by the text that accompanies the images. In Backblocks this is in the form of captions naming the people and places of the photographs, quotes from our interviews and snatches of narrative that locates the spectator in the history being represented. We anchored meanings of the panels and photographs for the spectators to make sense of the narrative, but it also had the effect of directing them on how to read the images. The text 'directs the reader through the signifieds of the image…it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance' (Barthes, 1977b: 40).

The photograph immobilizes Time, it 'extends between infinity and the subject...it has been here, and yet immediately separated' (Barthes, 1981a: 77). The photograph is the presence of that which is absent yet we talk about its content in the present tense. We say things like, 'you look great in this photo', 'here is my daughter', 'they are harvesting tomatoes'. The material of the photograph and our looking at it is present but the moment of its imprint always past: people and

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 205 places gone, lost forever - dead. Something comes alive in the looking-at moment of the picture; in the relationship between the there-then of the photograph and the here-now of the spectator there is a rupture, a space in which interpretation is made.

Noeme

Elizabeth Edwards reiterates Barthes view of the noeme of the Photograph:

The signifying qualities of the photograph bridge the abyss between appearance and meaning. The physical subject, the referent itself becomes indivisible from its symbolic or metaphorical meaning; the symbol becomes reality, and in this process the signifier and the signified collapse into each other...Yet these readings remain arbitrary (Edwards, 2001: 8).

The 'that has been' of the photographs in Backblocks is seen in the here-now of a celebration of survival and success; in the context of validating collective memory; in a milieu of affluence in a social club full of settled, contented, well- fed, well-housed and well-clothed Italian-Australians. The photographs are of private times and spaces where they have intimate connection and meaning. They become public where meaning is in the perception of the spectator and the context in which they are viewed. In the rupture between the photograph and the spectator, between the there-then and the here-now, a fragment (a photograph) can come to stand for the whole history. (Edwards, 2001: 8-9) Before Barthes,

Walter Benjamin pondered the noeme of the photograph, the 'magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us':

the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 206

has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it (Benjamin, 1979: 243).

The unforeseen event 'of the Here and Now' is what provides the 'that-has-been' or the there-then of the photograph to which we can never return except through the filter of the here-now of the gaze. For me, and hopefully for other Italian-

Australians of south west Sydney, the event of the Backblocks exhibition retrieved treasured fragments of the past that fortified cultural memory and identity. The

'that has been' of the photographs connected me to my Italian heritage gave me pride in the past of our ancestors and a feeling of grace in the present.

A here-now afterword

Curating the exhibition was something of a personal redemption. It was a retrieval of heritage that had slipped away and a way of paying tribute to my family. It was a way of singing their refrain. But, more than anything, it was a way for me to mark out my place within the collective memory of Italians of south west Sydney.

Following its session at Club Marconi the exhibition was displayed in the foyer of

NSW Parliament House where it was seen by different group of spectators in a very different here-now. At its opening I was presented with a Community

Service Certificate from the Premier of NSW, 'in recognition of the work performed for the Italian community of New South Wales'. This unexpected gesture meant more than the Premier could have imagined. It was like an official recognition, a 'passport' into my heritage and endorsement of me as an Italian-

Australian, something my Calabrese aunt had denied me so many years ago.

◊◊◊◊◊

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 207

Chapter 8. Souvenirs

More Italians arrived in Australia in the period following World War 2 than migrants from other countries. Today they and their offspring remain one of the largest ethnic groups. The 2001 census asked people to select their ethnic ancestry. Italian was the ancestry group most commonly claimed (after

Australian, English and Irish).68

SELECTED CHARACTERISTICS OF ANCESTRY GROUPS (a) - 2001 Generations in Australia Australian Proportion of born of Also stated the First Second Australian- another Australian generation generation born parents ancestry population Total(b) Ancestry % % % % % '000 Australian 1.5 15.7 82.8 24.3 38.7 6,739.6 English 18.7 21.1 60.2 41.8 36.5 6,358.9 Irish 11.4 16.4 72.1 75.8 11.0 1,919.7 Italian 30.9 44.4 24.7 33.9 4.6 800.3 German 19.0 22.5 58.5 68.3 4.3 742.2 Chinese 74.1 20.7 5.2 14.8 3.2 556.6 Scottish 28.2 26.7 45.1 57.1 3.1 540.0 Greek 37.8 46.2 16.0 21.2 2.2 375.7 Dutch 39.4 44.9 15.7 42.7 1.5 268.8 Lebanese 43.7 50.0 6.4 12.0 0.9 162.2 Indian 77.4 20.7 2.0 17.1 0.9 156.6 Vietnamese 73.8 25.9 0.3 6.0 0.9 156.6 Polish 49.3 38.4 12.3 36.7 0.9 150.9 (a) Ancestries stated by more than 150,000 people. (b) Total includes people whose birthplace, parent's birthplaces, or language spoken at home were not stated, not codeable or inadequately described. However, these people were excluded prior to the calculation of percentages. Source: ABS 2001 Census of Population and Housing.

As the table above shows, 4.6% of the Australian population claimed an Italian heritage; 31% of these were first generation (born in Italy) and 69% second and third generation Australian (the children and grandchildren of the Italian-born). In this chapter I look at some of the ways Italian-Australians perform their identity

68 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001 Census, Ancestry of Australia's population.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 208 with formal and informal rituals and practices. I consider how Italian identity is maintained by the first generation and ways in which later generations negotiate their way in and around shifting and complex modes of identity and identification.

As the first generation ages and dies off, the proportion of Italian-born grows smaller and it is assumed that the links to Italian ancestry will be diluted over time. The first generation usually maintain their ethnic identity with rigour, and, as much as possible continue the lifestyle of their home country. As a buttress against loss and an antidote to homesickness, first generation Italians keep hold of their language, food preferences, family and social networks, and do their best to bring up their children with traditional values. The kind of Italian identity of later generations is different to that of their parents and grandparents; Australia is their home and they have not themselves suffered the trauma of migration and loss of family connection. However, they know Italy and Italianità through accounts from their parents and acquire an inter-generational memory of their parents' distress. In some cases the grief, hopes and fears of parents is born by the second generation: parents have talked about or displayed their longing for missing family and pain over left-behind places; they have taught their children about Italy and encouraged their children behave in appropriate Italian ways.

In her book Visits Home Loretta Baldassar, spoke to many second generation

Italians about visiting family in Italy. She had herself grappled with 'issues about belonging and identity' and, when she began her research, wondered whether second generation Italians were losing their culture (Baldassar, 2001: 23), but found this was not the case:

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 209

To my surprise, I discovered an informal network of youth, the participants of which not only identified themselves as Italian, but consciously displayed their ethnic identity in a manner which created for them a closed group...The youth were all Australian-born. They thus shared a common aspect of their ethnic identity (Baldassar, 2001: 25).

In Visits Home and other work (Baldassar, 1997, Baldassar and Pesman, 2005,

Dewhirst, 2003), it is clear that Italian identity continues for following generations as 'a dynamic social resource, a set of processes that change over time' (Baldassar, 2001: 25).

Cultural Refrains

As described in chapter one, individuals and groups mark out their territories with familiar and reliable practices that are like refrains that serve maintain identity and deflect the intrusion of elements that may disturb it. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, refrains communicate territories to themselves and to other milieus

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Individuals and groups sing particular songs, play their style of music, follow familiar patterns as they go to and from work and have certain gestures that are understood within the group. This reassures people of their identity and milieu and signals it to others. Milieus or territories are not static; as they come in contact with others they may merge or adapt. Although, as

Connerton shows, some refrains can endure through many generations

(Connerton, 1989). Connerton discusses David Efron's fascinating research on the gestural languages of Southern Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrant groups in New York (Connerton, 1989: 79-82). In this milieu the group 'talked with their hands', maintaining a refrain that had endured for generations. Efron

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 210 had observed that the Southern Italians' inventory 'amounted in effect to a lexicon, a gestural vocabulary', so much a language that sometimes 'verbal accompaniment is dispensed with' (Connerton, 1989: 80).

Comparisons with earlier similar studies showed that this gestural vocabulary had survived over at least a century. Some could be traced – by reading descriptions of oratorical gestures – 'as far back as ancient

Greece and Rome' (Connerton, 1989: 80). 69

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari provide another version of territorialising and deterritorialising – the processes and flows of connections and disconnections, merging and dispersing, and modifications within and between assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:315-316) – where they discuss communities or groups as 'social machines' which are continually disrupted, operating in fits and starts or misfiring (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). They call these events 'disjunctive synthesis' and see them as necessary: 'dysfunctions are an essential element of its very ability to function'(Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 151).

Brown and Lundt examine the relations between individuals and society using this concept: 'misfirings' or events of 'disjunctive synthesis' within the organisation of social machines enable change and regroupings and formation of new codes to govern and organise interaction between groups. The process of

'conjunctive synthesis' happens as people 'take on board or "consume" social identities (Brown and Lundt, 2002: 15). The individual is fragmented, but by moving into a social group and adopting its identity, is able to perceive itself as whole. Disjunctive and conjunctive synthesis happen continually as the individual

69 Illustration from http://italian.about.com/library/nosearch/blgestures026.htm this gesture said to mean Me ne frego (I don't give a damn).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 211 passes from one social machine to another, performing various social identities(Brown and Lundt, 2002: 14). Provisional connections are made and unmade, group identification evolves and shifts. It is possible to affiliate with more than one at a time; to have the identity of 'daughter' in one set of relationships, friend in another, and Chief Executive Officer in a third. Milieus and territories are in continual flux as they merge with or diverge from each other, to and fro as they develop, transform or dissolve.

Maintaining identity

Italian-Australians keep alive their ethnic identity by maintaining their own dialects, preparing and eating familiar foods, (making their own salami and wine), keeping contact with compatriots through places of worship, clubs and extended family networks, and passing on their customs and values to their children. While this is seen as important, it does not appear to undermine Italian-Australians' ability to also assume a national identity and integrate with Australian culture. At formal events at Club Marconi, an Italian-founded social and sporting club in south western Sydney, everyone stands and joins in singing the Australian national anthem. When this is followed by the Italian national anthem, everyone remains silent as they don't seem to know the words. In the Soccer World Cup in

2006 Italians watching the event at the Club Marconi cheered heartily for the

Australian team until they played Italy, but even in this game there were as many

Australian flags as Italian flags being waved. Enthusiasm for ethnic identity does not destabilize national unity; on the contrary, in the processes of disjunctive and conjunctive syntheses, many Italian cultural refrains, particularly those performed around the consumption of food and at feste, have become sites for Italians to

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 212 negotiate a place within the national culture and in turn have become entry points for other Australians to enjoy a measure of Italian culture.

Clubs

One of the ways Italianità is maintained is through membership of Italian clubs and associations (Baldassar, 2001, Baldassar and Pesman, 2005). There was no history of belonging to Clubs in Italy; those formed in Australia came about as a response to the fragmented social networks caused by immigration and the desire to associate with one's own kind (Baldassar and Pesman, 2005: 121). In south west Sydney, the area I am familiar with, Italians in the 1950s used to gather in the packing sheds of local farms where bocce pitches had been laid, like at my

Nonna's. There they would play bocce or cards, talk and have a glass of wine, and occasionally a dance would be held with local musicians playing. These little get- togethers provided comfort and helped immigrants cope with the loss of 'home': to talk in their own language, tell their own style of jokes, play traditional card games were like a salve to their wounded hearts. They were also able to share local Australian knowledge: where to go to find a job, obtain welfare assistance, which schools were good for Italian children, where to buy good cheese, who was going back to Italy, and who was due to arrive from home. The owners of these gathering places, including Nonna, were regularly prosecuted for selling alcohol without a licence. For years the local Italians talked about starting their own club and obtaining a licence, and eventually they did so. They recruited 300 members, my Uncle Tom among them, and acquired land on which they built a small hall and opened as a registered club in 1958. Most of the original members were from the Veneto or surrounding regions and the club retains a strong North Italian

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 213 membership. Today's members are from many different regions of Italy, and from many other countries, however, it remains resolutely Italian in flavour. Sitting in one of its bistros, with the smell of coffee and pasta sauce, with groups of men playing cards, speaking various dialects of Italian, it is possible to imagine you are sitting in a bar in Italy.

The Club Marconi is of great importance to local Italians and it serves its community well. It provides a 'home away from home' in a similar way to those old 'sly-grog' and bocce courts did in the past. As well as the usual club facilities

and entertainments, it has special

activities children, teenagers and for

elders (Circolo Anziani é Amici) who

enjoy weekly lunches, regular

excursions and holidays, and the club has built a retirement village next door. The seniors appear to be the most regular visitors, some calling in every day to meet with companions, play cards, and have a beer or a coffee (I was told the club sells more coffee than alcohol)70. The club has a reassuring calendar-refrain of events that mark out the year, including many cultural festivals such as the Chestnut festival (pictured above), Italian Republic

Day, and Italian Wine and Food festival. Many of these events are organised by the clubs committee of women which has been vital to the development of the club's inclusive community and family atmosphere. The Club Marconi currently has over 26,000 members.

70 I am currently researching the history of the Club Marconi and writing content for its 50th Anniversary commemorative book.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 214

Social and sporting clubs enable Italian-Australians to meet compatriots, speak to each other in dialect about familiar things, play traditional sports and card games, keep their heritage alive and pass it on to their children. Italian parents are keen for their children to join in Club Marconi activities where the majority of young people are from the same ethnic group. They believe it provides a more secure environment for their children to socialise, and a better chance for their older children to meet a marriage partner with the same cultural background. Many parents favour their children marrying within their ethnic group believing perhaps that it creates better family harmony, as well as being another way to maintain cultural continuity. I have been told many members have met their marriages partners at the Club.71

Baldassar and Pesman note that first generations are worried about whether the younger generation will keep an interest in Italian culture and keep their clubs going (Baldassar and Pesman, 2005: 161). This has long been a concern of the

Club Marconi and as long ago as the 1960s it formed a youth association to groom committed future club members. Many second and third generation Italian-

Australians met their life-partners at youth club events and now their children participate in various club sporting or other activities, such as the Bambini Choir pictured above. There are

17 different sporting and recreational activities with junior teams attached to many of them, Club Marconi continues to hold regular events specifically for young people: dances with a DJ or live bands, a monthly disco for the under-18s, performances by popular entertainers, a debutante's ball, a youth driver program

71 Conversations and interviews with Club members.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 215 and many activities for children and youth. The Marconi soccer team also attracts a young fan-base at home and away matches.

Feste

Another way Italians Australians sustain community identity is with ritual practices and commemorations such as community festivals and re- enactments. These are mainly in the form of religious feste or sagre which are festivals of food or local produce.

The annual chestnut festival at the Club Marconi is an example of the local adaptation of a sagra, as are the big Italian festivals held annually in Leichhardt in

NSW, Carlton in Victoria and other cities around Australia. Religious festivals are organised mainly by communities of South Italian heritage who re-enact festivals celebrated for centuries in their home village or town. The feste follow traditional rituals, with repetitive elements of religious or spiritual significance: the parading of the effigy, singing or chanting, blessings with holy water, fanning of incense and a special Mass. An effigy (a statue or painting) is paraded, held aloft, through the crowd. In some parades people pin money is to the bier in hope of blessings.

Sometimes there are flaming torches, songs of praise and music played on traditional instruments accompanying the parade. After Mass there is food of all kinds, from local Italian delicacies to fish and chips and hotdogs, followed by performances and dancing, and a fireworks display to complete the festivities.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 216

The festivals in Australia differ from those held in Italy. Of course, even there each performance is different, affected by the variable contexts and participants, like a drama performed daily in the theatre. The festival in Italy has a provenance that can only ever be reference point in the context of Australia. For example, in

Lentini in Sicily the festival of the martyrs began about 1700 years ago (the three men were martyred in 253AD). It is held over many days and includes rituals of decorating the church and the saints' crypt in red and white cloth, the ringing of church bells and bands of musicians travelling through the town every day to herald the coming festival. On festival day people dress in traditional costumes and there are a number of processions. One venerates a reliquary and another parades an effigy of Sant'Alfio on a silver throne. In one procession young semi- nude devotees parade barefoot with faces painted red, some carrying towers of flowers and candles on their shoulders while singing songs of praise.72 The local

'quoted' version of the festival of the Martyrs of Lentini is held at Silkwood in Far

North Queensland each year and has a legend of its own. Caltabiano and Torre tell us the story of Rosario Tornabene, an immigrant to Australia from Lentini, whose wife had a difficult childbirth. He prayed to the patron saints of his home asking them to spare his wife and child and promised that if they survived he would honour the saints in Australia (Caltabiano and Torre, 2002).

The Australian version is an adaptation of the original in Italy, referring to it but taking account of the local context. In Silkwood, devotees in the parade go barefoot, but not naked. Red and green balloons are released over the parade by a crop-duster. There are traditional foods but also local fast-food, a mass and also a concert. Caltabiano and Torre comment on the crooning of Volare from the

72 http://www.cormorano.net/lentini/turismo.htm my translation

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 217 entertainment marquee mingling with the singing of hymns at the mass in a hall nearby, 'between the sacred and the secular, there is now no clear boundary'

(Caltabiano and Torre, 2002). The Italian festa is adapted to fit the new country but Australia in 2006 provides a rather alien backdrop for the martyrs of Lentini.

Some of the old traditions of Italy, such as these described by Caltabiano and

Torre, would not go down well in here:

In the not too distant past in Sicily it was common for especially devout followers to make the journey shuffling on hands and knees, and some might even lick the ground over which the saints had passed, eventually leaving glistening streaks of blood and spittle from lacerated tongues. But today the recitation of the rosary and the singing of hymns suffices as atonement (Caltabiano and Torre, 2002).

In Italy they have the benefit of the original churches, relics, statues and paraphernalia that confer authenticity to the commemoration and a procession that follows the same course as their ancestors over centuries. Second and third generation Italian-Australians continue to take part in performances here in a bizarre blending of contemporary culture and old traditions; comfortable with the flashings of surfaces of one culture and another in constant rotation. Refrains of past and present, Italianness and Australianness sing and dance across porous thresholds at these re-enactments where territories 'pass into one another' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 322-23). The old blends with the new and the festival has the additional purpose of bringing the Australian Lentini together.

As Caltabiano and Torre describe:

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 218

For three hours people eat, drink and reminisce about the old days when there was no Feast day to lighten the back-breaking labour in the hot and wet fields of heavy red volcanic soil; about the loved ones who stayed behind to deal with the tyrannical padrone, the greedy Mafiosi and the Fascist thugs; of how such and such a son or daughter is now a doctor in Brisbane, a restaurateur in Carlton, a lawyer in Sydney, an academic in Adelaide; of how Giovanni has three sons and two daughters and recently visited his relatives in Sicily or of how Venera still wears her gold chain with the medal of St Alfio even though she has spiked yellow hair and wears silver studded black leather; of how the saints have watched over the unfolding sadness and happiness of the lives in their extended families (Caltabiano and Torre, 2002).

Quotation

Religious re-enactments are borrowed 'texts' that bear traces of the original but are placed in an unfamiliar context. Susan Stewart analyses quotation in the context of written texts, noting the parallels between quotation and carnival. Both have 'a process of restoration and a process of disillusionment...carnival presents a reply to everyday life which is at the same time an inversion, an intensification and a manipulation of that life' (Stewart, 1993: 20). As with quotations in books, the

'utterance' of a ritual is detached from its origin, it is a performance within quotation marks 'giving it both integrity and boundary'; it takes abstract experience and contextualises it, making it 'available for interpretation and closure'. Rituals express the past in a voice that is removed from the original context. It is no longer the possession of its author; it has only the authority of use. The Silkwood feste negotiates additional meaning with a local narrative which becomes an improvisation or quotation of the traditional pageant.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 219

The quotation mark points not only inward but outward as well (Stewart, 1993:

19). In the written text, the 'outward' is the prose surrounding the quotation, in feste rituals the outward is the everyday life of the participants in their Twenty-

first century clothes and bodies. The inward is the

repetition of traces that restore the memory of the past,

not supplementing the original, but re-creating it. Every

ritual performance offers the possibility of

reinterpretation; of creating new 'texts' out of the experience. An example is the Sydney version of a Thai festival Loy Krathong which makes offerings to the water goddess with little lotus-shaped vessels carrying flowers, candles and incense, as pictured above.73 The Thai community

'quotes' this traditional festival within an Australian context where it is translated and given new meaning for both Thai and other Australians at a time when NSW is suffering the worst drought on record. Organisers encouraged people to participate in 2006 in placing the krathongs in the Parramatta River to float along in homage to the water goddess in the hope of rain.74 In commemorative re- enactments, the original 'act' is either fictional or so far lost in the folds of time that it is in the realm of fiction. Like the novels Stewart discusses, the re- enactment of ancient rituals by the Australians from Thailand or Italy 'lends to everyday life a lyric quality, a quality of recurrence and variation upon theme'

(Stewart, 1993: 20-21). Rituals are performances; physical events requiring bodily involvement in activities that transport and transform participants 'into an abstract and metaphorical play world' (Stewart, 1993: 20).

73 Photo from Thai Community of the ACT Inc website www.cmcf.org.au/CMCF/loy%20kratong%20Poster%2018-11-06.doc 74 Sydney Morning Herald supplement 'The New Parramatta' 28-29 October 2006

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 220

Bodily practices

Commemorative rituals require engagement of the body, whether marching in procession, kneeling to pray, waving flags, playing two-up or consuming particular foods and drinks. Paul Connerton talks about bodily practices as sites of memory. Gestures, postures and behaviours are learned from childhood, along with language and culture (Connerton, 1989). Bodily customs tend to be inscribed upon us; our bodies are disciplined into certain types of gesture and behaviour socially and culturally. Some of these, such as table manners, correct postures and how to hold a pen to write are taught to us from an early age. We also learn the appropriate gestures for religious practices such as postures for praying and worshiping. We pick up many other gestures by imitation as we are growing up, things like smiling, shaking hands, winking and waving. Gestures vary between cultures. For example, direct eye-contact is not acceptable in certain circumstances in some Australian Indigenous cultures; Italians in Italy wave goodbye and indicate 'come here' with gestures that are almost the inverse of the

English equivalents.

Connerton explains the role of rituals and commemorative ceremonies in terms of psychoanalysis, sociology and history. A psychoanalytic position sees ritual as a form of symbolic representation, analysed in terms of individual pathology. The sociological explanation is that ritual is 'a form of quasi-textual representation' which conveys community values. The historical view is that rituals are invented, their meanings shift over time and vary according to their socio-political context

(Connerton, 1989: 48-51). Connerton argues that these interpretations of ritual focus on content and he sets out to look at the form. He sees ritual as performance

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 221 accompanied by 'utterances' such as blessings, oaths, rhythmic verse or song, and coded 'postures, gestures and movements', such as salutes, bowed heads, upright stance, kneeling, marching or parading (Connerton, 1989: 59); Deleuze and

Guattari might call these utterances refrains.

Commemorations are re-enactments, 'a quality of cardinal importance in the shaping of communal memory' that are repeated at fixed intervals, effacing the past but reliant on it (Connerton, 1989: 61). They 'produce and provide shape for a communal desire – a wish to repeat the past consciously, to find significance in celebrated recurrence' (Connerton, 1989: 63). They reinforce community identity and collective memory, 'making sense of the past as a kind of collective autobiography' (Connerton, 1989: 70). Re-enactments of traditional Italian festivals in Australia are purposeful acts of collective remembrance that commemorate and mediate heritage and pass it on to the next generation.

Paul Connerton says that such rites give value and meaning to the lives of those who perform them; 'they do not simply imply continuity with the past but explicitly claim such continuity...by ritually re-enacting a narrative of events held to have taken place at some time in the past' (Connerton, 1989: 44-45). For those in Italy the annual repetition of performative acts of verbal and bodily gestures bring the past to the present: 'a community is reminded of its identity as represented by and told in a master narrative' (Connerton, 1989: 70). The Italians in Australia no longer have direct connections to that master narrative, they have written a new chapter. In Australia the rituals are about making present the memory of home, but with contextual variations that confer new and local meanings. The performative events are twice-removed from their origins; they re-

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 222 enact a re-enactment and they are quotations of a quotation. Ritual community events, whether religious festivals or club activities, quote memories and traditions in lyric form to the next generation. Whether the next generations will continue with the traditional traces of their parents and grandparents remains to be seen. If so they are likely to add other layers of meaning as they are performed in changing contexts and by new players raised in different cultural milieus.

Following generations

Second and third generations have a different relationship to the past and negotiate identity within Australian and Italian cultures; their refrains are different from those of their parents. They stay connected to Italian culture through their parents and community but have no first-hand knowledge of Italy (until they travel there, often as a rite of passage in young adulthood). Their identity is infused with the Australian culture into which they were born and educated. They face different challenges to those of their parents.

Challenges for the first generation were around struggling with change; with new ways, language and culture; and with loss and trauma. Their ethnic identity was shaken, but remains intact; embedded in their character from infancy. Rather than fully assimilating (becoming the same) with Australians, they have sort of grafted themselves onto Australia; becoming cultural additions rather than dissolving into the existing culture. They seem to have cherry-picked bits of the new customs and added new 'verses' to their refrains – many to do with cars, homes, enterprise, and clubs, but they kept their own ethos and identity as Italian. They modified their ways only as much as was essential for survival; for example, learning English so they could work (although so many of the older Italian-Australians still speak it

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 223 poorly, and some older women, not at all). They are anxious for their children to maintain their Italian links; perhaps fearing that their children will become estranged from them otherwise. Parents of all cultures have the same fear, but for those living in a foreign culture, the need to keep family close is more pressing.

The second generation has to balance the expectations of their parents to be 'good

Italians' with those of the nation to be good Australian citizens, and to negotiate identity within and between Italian and Anglo-Australian cultures. Some grow up torn between the two. Parents encourage a sense of pride in their children regarding their Italian heritage, but the children themselves have to struggle with acceptance by their peers, and sometimes have to suffer taunts and abuse about their ethnic origins in the school yard. Others happily keep a 'foot in each camp'; being 'Italian' with the family and 'Australian' when they are away from home.

Young people often do their best to stay connected to Italian culture through their parents and community but many discover just how Australian they are when they return to their ancestral homes in Italy. Of course they love the Italy of today and revel in rediscovering the Italian way of life, but some find it too different.

Baldassar describes the experiences of home visits by the second generation. All were moved by their visits 'home' although some found life there 'to be much more restrictive than life in Australia...migrants of both generations complained about the gossip and small-town mentality of the locals' (Baldassar, 2001: 290).

Some felt they became more Italian as a consequence of their visit home and interacting with their relatives. They thought the visit was important for maintaining their Italian identity but insisted that 'Italians in Australia are different from Italians in Italy'. Those with whom Baldassar spoke identified as

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 224

Italian-Australians or 'Australians with Italian ancestry' (Baldassar, 2001:289).

These days Italianness is a bonus in many circumstances, as Baldassar noted:

Australian-born Italians share an experience of growing up in Australia. However, the older youth experienced more anti-Italian sentiment during their childhood than did the younger. Unlike their elders, the generation born after 1960 grew up with an increasingly positive image of Italy. Danny and Mark Zamin recall trying to hide their ethnic identity while at school in the 1970s and yet in the 1990s they employed this identity as a sales pitch in their boutique (Baldassar, 2001: 288)

In the complex realm of Italian-Australian identity there are many ways of being both Italian and Australian. Italian-Australians today are fortunate to live at a time when there is a more positive attitude towards Italians than in the 1950s when

Italy was seen as a third world country and its immigrants to Australia viewed as socially, intellectually and culturally inferior. Today, as Baldassar and Pesman point out,

Italy is considered one of the most developed and affluent countries in the world...and a byword for style and the good life. In Australia, Italian restaurants, coffee shops and designer labels are markers of fashion. These markers have been appropriated among the younger generations of Italo-Australians and fuel a boom in the "ethnicity industry" (Baldassar and Pesman, 2005: 215)75.

75 Baldassar and Pesman also point out that the positive attitude doesn't necessarily point to a change in racist attitudes in Australia: 'Italo-Australians have been accepted into the mainstream while more recent arrivals face the same prejudice and discrimination – prejudice and discrimination in which Italians also participate – that Italian migrants suffered in the past' Baldassar, L. & Pesman, R. (2005) From Paesani to Global Italians: Veneto Migrants in Australia, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia.. And, I would add, there is no change in racist attitudes towards Indigenous Austalians.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 225

The Australian born of Italian parents and subsequent generations maintain fragments of Italian identity, but the Italianità they express is modified by their

Australian upbringing. The Italian markers noted by Baldassar and Pesman are adapted by younger generations to suit local conditions and experiences. Their improvisations make them different in appearance and attitude to their peers in

Italy. Sometimes this difference is more evident on visits to Italy; Baldassar points out that young Australian Italians are recognized in Italy for their lack of attention to la bella figura and the casualness of their clothes and style. She quotes one of her interview subjects: 'I felt like I was some kind of larrikin walking down the street. People in Italy go for their Sunday passegiata...and it's unbelievable, the way they dress. They dress better than most people would go to a wedding here' (Baldassar, 2001: 279). Another interviewee who was self- conscious about their style and fashion-sense said:

We'd talk about the differences in fashion and it was hard for them to understand that in Australia it didn't really matter what you wore or how you wore it...they're very set...they're really happy wearing their designer jeans and whatever else is on the go...I get the idea that we might be a bit 'pleby': 'Oh here come the hicks. Oh wow, look at those shoes' (Baldassar, 2001: 263)

Of course, there are many differences in style among young Italians in Australia: there are those who adopt a relatively conventional Australian youth style and others who are 'woggy'. As another of Baldassar's subjects comments: wogs 'have hotted-up cars. The guys with long hair, pushed back and dark with lots of gold on and they pull their jeans right up to their waist. The girls with heaps of make- up and gold' (Baldassar, 2001: 286).

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 226

Wog culture

[I]f need be, I'll put my territory on my own body, I'll territorialize my body: the house of the tortoise, the hermitage of the crab, but also tattoos that make the body a territory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 320)

Wog style is distinctly Australian and purposely locates itself in a place of difference. It is a territorial refrain that marks out a secure milieu for young

Italian-Australian and other immigrants. It is a style of behaviour and dress performed and displayed to keep out threats like a bird's territorial dance and ruffling of feathers. Wogness is a kind of self-styled Italianness, worn as an ornament and as a tribute to their heritage. In territorialising their body, wogs become a site of memory, or memento. To use Roland Barthes' term, they embrace an Italianicity: a distinct set of signs such as style (clothes, hair, accessories), language, and attitude express not exactly Italy but, as Barthes put it,

'the condensed essence of everything that could be Italian' (Barthes, 1973: 124).

The practices of these young Italian-Australians move into the realm of 'Myth' in the way Barthes describes in Mythologies, 'it's mode of presence is memorial'

(Barthes, 1973: 122).

In this case it is not exactly Italianicity they express, but a kind of an Ausie-

Italianicity. When filtered through their own Australian experience, the sign

'Italian immigrant' is emptied of its history while the second order signification is filled with a new concept of Ausie-Italianicity. In the process they create a supplementary identity of 'wogness' – a particular type of Australian and a particular type of Italian – inventing new forms of cultural meaning and extending the boundaries of established cultural practice. As Baldassar and Pesman note,

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 227 second generation Italian-Australians tend 'to socialise with one another in informal networks, which cut across the provincial and regional boundaries of their parents, [producing] a unique Italian identity that is specific to Australia'

(Baldassar and Pesman, 2005: 160).

During the 1950s and 1960s the term wog, along with wop, dago, reffo, was used disparagingly by Anglos towards Italians and other immigrants who were, in

Gassan Hage's words, 'Third Word-looking people (TWLP)' (Hage, 1998: 18).

Wog culture includes not only Italian-Australians, but those with Greek, Lebanese and other Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern ancestors. In the last decade in

Australia there has been a plethora of wog media productions - stage shows, films and television series: Wogs out of Work, Wogarama, the Wog Boy and Pizza.

There is a website called Wog Life which I accessed in October 2003. The site has since been made available only to registered users and membership is currently suspended so I have been unable to update my information. The only visible part of the website is the list of forum postings and these indicate that the discussion topics remain similar to those in 2003. Topics in the forum include Attitude,

Identity and Get the Look. There are pages of wog humour, mostly sending themselves up (a bit of an Ausie custom), and forums of serious discussions about cultural identity and the struggles of straddling cultures. As one contributor to

Woglife in 2003 put it:

I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm a 2nd gen wog and I live in the country where I'm surrounded by skips. When I go to Melbourne to visit the family all of my cousins look and act wogish

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 228

but I don't. I feel like a real tool. What can you do to help me become more of a wog?76

Wogness is a manner and style developed by Italian-Australians which often exaggerates elements of the wog stereotype: idiosyncratic gestures, speech, behaviour, dress and accessories, adopted to distinguish themselves from the

Anglo-Australians that they often refer to as Skips.77

One thing we are not: SKIPS. No 2nd gen wog really wants to be a skip because skips have warped ideas and so do their parents. All 2nd gen wogs would much rather identify themselves as a wog than ever admit to being a skip, which we are not no matter how easy it might be to be one.78

Skips (pictured right) are a particular type of

Australian, a type other Australians might call

Ockers or yobbos. Their behaviour and speech is considered to be 'common' or uncouth, their language and style rough and loud.79 It is interesting that wogs set themselves up in opposition to Skips, rather than to upper class 'toffs', computer 'geeks' or intellectual 'nerds'. Perhaps it is because, as migrants, they have usually settled initially in 'blue-collar' suburbs where they interacted with the Anglo/White working-class. These would have been in the majority at schools, and no doubt gave migrant kids a hard time.

Going back to Mythologies, Barthes says that myth is:

76 Wog Life - 22 August 2004 http://www.wog.com.au/default.asp 77 The name, Skip, comes from a once popular children's television series, 'Skippy - the bush kangaroo'. 78 Wog Life 02/08/03. 79 A group of Skips from the TV show Pizza (courtesy SBS Television)

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 229

speech, stolen and restored. Only, speech which is restored is no longer quite that which was stolen: when it was brought back, it was not put exactly in its place (Barthes, 1973: 125).

In reconstructing the notion of wogness these later generation Australians have

'stolen' the mocking 'speech' (the whole gamut of attitudes, stigma, prejudice) used against them and brought it back, restored to a different 'place'. Barthes indicates, 'myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us' (Barthes, 1973: 117). First generation Italian immigrants suffered discrimination and prejudice of various kinds and many arrived penniless, unskilled and without accommodation. Starting from scratch, they worked, saved, built new lives and new homes, raised and educated their children and became good citizens. Their children were brought up carrying some of their parent's burden; they were often the butt of jokes about their ethnic background and sometimes suffered more damaging taunts. They mixed mainly with their own kind, few having close friendships with Anglo-

Australians. They grew up in an atmosphere of ambiguity, of pride in their heritage fuelled by their parents, and shame about their ethnicity provoked by

Anglo attitudes towards them. Wogness has become a subculture celebrating and exploiting bi-culturalism, appropriating and confounding racist language and attitudes to challenge established cultural labels. Wogs mostly occupy their unique culture not with hostility but with a joyful and 'in-your-face' style which parodies aspects of Australian (Skip) and Italian cultures.

In an essay on social identity Brown and Lundt discuss the process of the continual shifting of identity as individuals move between different social groups, pointing out that there can be problems when 'social identities are valorised as

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 230 sources of intrinsic pleasure in themselves. Here identity becomes a form of fetish, no longer a temporary resource but a thing to be invested with desires for its own sake' (Brown and Lundt, 2002: 15). Perhaps that is what is going on with wog identity. On the Woglife site there is much discussion about clothing, hair styles and accessories on the forum topic, 'The Look: what to wear and how to wear it wogstyle.'80 The language used, the long discussions about sunglasses and hair-gel and fashion accessories show a kind of fixation with looking distinctly

'wog'. The styles seem to fetishize the stereotype: big hair, big sunglasses, gold chains, thick mascara, leather jackets, costume jewellery, Gucci and other high- fashion brand name accessories.

Modes of intercultural expression such as wogness indicate an ongoing ambivalence about identity that has stretched beyond the experience of first generation immigrant experience. At first glance wogness seems to be a testament to feeling excluded from the Australian mainstream, yet Italian immigrant culture is an integral part of the Australian cultural domain. Paradoxically, Italian-

Australian wog identity, is acquired, perceived and maintained from within the bosom of Australian culture, by people formed as much by Australian education, language and way of life as by their parents' Italian culture. For example, I see fragments of Australian culture such as larrikinism echoed in wog behaviour: the flashiness, loudness, boasting and swaggering.81 It is not unlike the Skip characteristics they despise, although perhaps performed with greater panache.

Those who identify as wogs seem to over-invest in their distinct group identity, forming a territory to create a cultural comfort-zone for themselves. But this ebbs

80 Woglife 19/09/2003 81 Larrikin is a colloquial term for a mischievous and frolicsome youth, with roots going back to days of inner-city street gangs in colonial Sydney

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 231 and flows as they mix in rhizomatic relationships with multiple milieus including the mainstream cultural domain through work, education and citizenship. Wogs can have the best of both worlds; moving between cultures. As one Woglife correspondent put it:

Well, according to my sister we are OZWOGZ...The good thing about it is I can be Aussie when I want, and wog when I want...people may tease Ausies, wogs, Asians, fobs, whatever, 'n' like, on this website we tease ourselves. But by being of more than one culture, I've seen things from more than one point of view, and I've learned and taught others not to be racist and to not to take their heritage for granted. (emphasis added)82

Wogness manifest as 'self-othering', but this thinly veils its defiant statement of presence in, and significance to, Australian culture. There is a kind of double function at work in this self-proclamation; something is being declared. Wogs have created an identity beyond the dialectic of acceptance, thumbing their noses at Anglo condescension, imposing their will on the nation in their own terms and enjoying the ambiguity of a dual ethnic identity.

◊◊◊◊◊

82 Woglife 19/09/2003

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Chapter 9. Alla fine (in conclusion)

The refrain of Italianness seems to endure through many generations, sometimes on the basis of just one Italian ancestor. Catherine Dewhirst interviewed third, fourth and fifth generation descendants of Giovanni Pullè who came to Australia in 1876. His descendants in the twenty-first century continue to feel an 'affinity with Italy'. Their Italian heritage is important to them: 'it's part of my make-up'.

Some identified strongly as Italian – 'I feel predominantly and definitely Italian'

(Dewhirst, 2003: 3 in PDF printout). The people Dewhirst interviewed did not speak Italian and had not married Italians yet continued to pass on their Italian family history to their children – 'it's really important to me that my children connect with their own heritage too' (Dewhirst, 2003: 3 in PDF printout).

The Italian community's refrain enables it to live between the folds of the inside/familiar/past and the outside/strange/new as it deterritorializes and reterritorializes in a process of identity formation and reformation. There is a sense of nostalgia about some of the refrains: re-enactments of religious festivals from home towns, commemorations of Italian National Day, celebrations of

Italian foods and wines and regional customs. One could perhaps say that it is nostalgia that keeps the community together, and that Italian-Australian community identity is an identity of nostalgia. However, it is nostalgia of a happy kind – although tinged with loss – the kind of nostalgia Svetlana Boym calls reflective nostalgia, which 'lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time' (Boym, 2001: 41).

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Nostalgia

Boym puts forward two forms of nostalgia: reflective and restorative. She sees reflective nostalgia as related to individual memory. It acknowledges the passing of time without any desire to restore it. Restorative nostalgia is concerned with the present and in preserving ideal moments of the past and fixing them as permanent memorials. It is related to collective memory. While reflective nostalgia cherishes fragments the past and can be ironic and humorous, the restorative kind 'takes itself dead seriously' (Boym, 2001: 49). Collective and individual memories overlap or comingle, as do restorative and reflective nostalgias, as Boym writes:

Two kinds of nostalgia are not absolute types, but rather tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing. Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance (Boym, 2001: 41).

While some memories produce a painful longing for lost people and times, others leave positive feelings and images of the past. As Boym says, remembrance is an imperfect process and the 'lost home' we seek to rebuild may not have been as wonderful as we remember and may have many negative aspects. For example, some people want to memorialise the 1950s as a time of a simpler and more secure society, but it was also a time of intolerance and racism. On the other hand, the 'imperfect process of remembrance' can shield us from damaging memories and allow us to dwell with pleasure upon the past. I consider the nostalgia of

Italian-Australians today as of the reflective kind; they do not wish to rebuild the

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 234 lost home but to honour it through the 'imperfect process of remembrance', not to restore the past but to acknowledge its passing in a positive and joyful way.

Susan Stewart see nostalgia as a narrative looking backwards and 'spiralling in a continually inward movement rather than outward toward the future' (Stewart,

1993: 135). However, in the case of Italian-Australian community, I see nostalgic identity not as a uni-directional spiralling but as a fold between the inwardness of past-looking and the outwardness of the now-lived experience; something akin to

Paul Carter's notion of 'remembering forwards'.

'Remembering forwards' 83

Carter discusses migrants' process of remembering as mimetic and occurring in the context of 'dialogue' which seeks to mark out 'a common place of utterance'

(Carter, 2004: 130). Performances of traditional ritual in the Australian context illustrate Carter's point that 'mimicry is never merely repetition. It is always an improvisation' (Carter, 2004: 130). Religious festivals in Australia modify the old feste, inventing new forms of feasts and festivities. Similarly, Club activities have improvised on old traditions of meeting to play cards and have a drink in the village bar, playing bocce in the local park, or participating in the passegiata.

Wog culture also 'remember forwards'; the improvisations of older forms are very much 'new pasts transmuting themselves into new futures' (Carter, 2004: 135).The past cannot be replicated exactly in the Australian context, so Italian-Australians improvise, using what is to hand to create new forms from old; as Carter says,

'instead of being trapped in nostalgia for the past, these migrants improvised a

83 Title of chapter in Paul Carter's book, Material Thinking Carter, P. (2004) 'Remembering Forwards', Material Thinking. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 235 new discourse of their own' (Carter, 2004: 134). In the process of recreating old rituals, people invent new ones, and 'avoid the nostalgia of an ideal form'. Carter continues: 'instead of going over the old material, it needs, as it were, to remember forwards' (Carter, 2004: 135, original emphasis). Wogs take traces of the imaged 'old' culture and to transform their 'new' milieu; they Italianise their

Australianness. Commemorative rituals and activities change in the new country and continue to change with each repetition; each year or performance takes place in a different context, with different performers, allowing for continual improvisation. It is the ability to turn nostalgia into 'remembering forwards' that enables Italians to move between community and national identities; the national is enveloped by the communal in Italian-Australian's improvisations and adaptations of tradition to present day contexts. This ability also allows passage across the threshold of Italian cultural refrains by non-Italian-Australians who are attracted by performances and melodies they 'brush up against' (Deleuze and

Guattari, 1987: 320).

Refrain

I have used the notion of the refrain, as articulated by Deleuze and Guattari

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), throughout this thesis and now return to it as a way of understanding the way Italians and other immigrants seem to be able to retain their traditional cultures while adopting an Australian identity. Australia contains a multiplicity of ethnic and racial groups: Indigenous peoples, founding British settlers, and immigrants from all over the world. Each group contains within it other milieus distinguished by region, religion, gender or class. All perform various refrains to mark their cultural territories. Yet at the same time most

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 236 immigrants (although not all) seek to identify as Australian and participate in the larger assemblage of 'nation'. Diverse milieus join together in marking out national territory with collective refrains against perceived common threats of a different scale and timbre. Italian-Australians, with their own language and dialects, gestures, music, song, dress, demeanour and rituals, perform a territorializing refrain 'in which each pose, each movement, establishes a distance' from other milieus, but this distance has a rhythm that resonates with other groups as they brush up against each others' flexible edges (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:

320).

The noun 'refrain' refers to a repeated melody. It comes from the French/Latin word meaning 'to break'; a song is broken by the repeated melody of the refrain.

The verb 'to refrain' means to restrain or hold back from doing something. I sense

'refrain' as used by Deleuze and Guattari, signifies both a limit and a returning theme. A refrain draws a boundary around a milieu but it is a boundary marking a threshold, not a barrier; 'milieus continually pass into one another...territory itself is a place of passage' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 322-23). A threshold is a passage between the inside and the outside of the group. Italian-Australians live and move both within their own cultural tradition and adapt to the rest of the

Australian community. They negotiate between identifying as Italian and as

Australian (not that there are only two identities available). Individuals move about within and between assemblages which are not static but dissolve and congeal, brush up against each other, deviate from and flow into other assemblages. People straddle many cultural milieus, identifying with one or another, or many at the same time; As Deleuze and Guattari put it:

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 237

Sometimes one leaves the territorial assemblage for other assemblages, or for somewhere else entirely: interassemblage, components of passage or even escape. And all three at once. Forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each other and converge in the territorial refrain (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 312).

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is in this movement, in the in-between of the milieus' transcoding and transduction, that chaos has the potential to become rhythm; 'rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:

313). Perhaps there is a rhythm created when the diverse cultural milieus in

Australia 'slide in relation to one another, over one another'; the various communities creating bonds between them as they 'pass from one milieu to another...into one another...essentially communicating' and converging into a larger assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 313).

In the seeming chaos of multiple refrains of cultural milieus there flows a potential for synchronicity, a rhythm of the nation. I like to think that these processes will enable Australian national identity to slowly become infused with, and diffused among, its diverse cultures: that the multiple cultures may flow into one another; that diverse refrains may spill into each other; that elements of one milieu may seep into others and percolate back again; modifying and being modified by each other in a continual folding and unfolding of identities. It is this percolation that enables Italian-Australian youth to gather together at Club

Marconi to barrack for Italy and Australia when they played against each other in the 2006 soccer World Cup.

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 238

Fans at Club Marconi supported both Socceroos and Italian teams in the 2006 World Cup

Australian Italianicity

As they brush up against one another milieus generate new traditions and practices they can share. Communities improvise their cultural performances and appropriate what appeals to them in response to the diverse cultures around them, selecting particular foods, music and dance and adapting them for their own enjoyment. For example, Australians of many different cultural backgrounds have enthusiastically taken to many Italian ways. They eat Italian food at restaurants and cook it at home; drink wine and coffee; and enjoy the salami, prosciutto, mussels, octopus, olive oil and garlicky flavours they once eschewed. Many have adopted minor token traditions, like having bonbonniere at weddings, kissing both cheeks and using ciao commonly in greeting (originally a Veneto expression meaning 'at your service'). Australians of all ethnic backgrounds flock to Italian festivals such as those held in Norton Street , Leichhardt (Sydney), Lygon Street in Melbourne and the many Blessing of the Fleet festivals around coastal

Australia. The festivals are a kind of cultural tourism for locals; they attract people to a centre where they can sample foods, music, and commodities from other countries. They are a place of confluence where diverse refrains are

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 239 improvised and communicate new discourses that add depth to Australian national identity.

One conduit of improvisation and discourse is performed around food and drink.

Australians have become – at least in major cities – some of the most exacting coffee drinkers in the world. They know how a good espresso coffee should be made, how hot the water should be for a caffellatte, how deep the froth should be on a cappuccino and how to dribble the milk into a macchiato. Newspaper lifestyle supplements regularly features the best baristas and cafés, the best home espresso machines, the best blends, and even how to roast your own coffee.

Sydney now has an annual coffee festival: In 2006 the Festival attracted around

90,000 visitors over six hours.84 Australians consume an average of over 2.4 kg of coffee per person per year,85 it's no wonder a celebration of coffee was a big

Sydney event. Not everyone appreciates the way Italians and other diverse immigrant groups have infiltrated and enriched Australian culture: a letter-writer to the Sydney Morning Herald said he had had 'a gutful' of the 'seeping

Italianisation of our country'. The next day a respondent, apparently more

Italianised, offered: 'Chocolates and a plate of spaghetti do not an Italian make'.86

Thousands of Australians travel to Italy for holidays, and learn to speak a bit of

Italian – at least enough to know what's on the menu. Some rent villas in Tuscany to have an 'authentic' Italian experience. They love the language, countryside and the people. Italian fashion, design and economic innovation have become as valued as its antiquities and Renaissance art. All this attention and veneration of

84 Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority Annual Report 2006-07 85 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1301.0 Australian Year Book, 2003, 16.59 apparent per capita consumption of foodstuffs, 1998-99. 86 Letters to the Editor, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 and 17 February 2007

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 240

Italy has made Italians feel good about themselves. They retain elements of their traditional identity and maintain a degree of difference, but it is more as a

'subculture' than as an alien group. No longer the New Australians, they are, for the most part, accepted and valued as locals. Italians have not simply joined mainstream Australian culture but have changed it.

Reverberations

An ABC television documentary on 1 November 2007 called Ten Pound Poms was about English migrants who came to Australia on the promise of a better life.

It was a moving program with a mix of those who loved the country and did well, some who missed England and went back only to return again to Australia, and others whose homesickness was painful and everlasting. Their stories made me realise that whether you migrate to a similar culture or a foreign one, the experience is traumatic, settling into a new country is a struggle, and the loss of home and loved ones is similar.

I have been commissioned to research and write the commemorative book for the

Club Marconi and have been interviewing many of the Italians who founded the club in 1958. When I speak to older Italian-Australians who have lived here for

40 years or more, they express few, if any, regrets. Many have gone back to Italy to see relatives but happily returned. 'Australia is my home', said one of them to me.87 They have created a new home and the club is very much part of it. Some go there daily to play cards, bocce, drink coffee, have a beer or a meal. At the

Club they can speak Italian, and their own dialect, enjoy familiar food, and see old friends and compatriots; it is their place. Their children and grandchildren

87 Interview with Vicki Fontana 20/08/2007

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 241 also enjoy activities at the club; mixing with other young people from similar backgrounds, people of their own kind who understand the samenesses and differences of being multi-cultural. The Club Marconi project has given me a great opportunity to observe Italian-Australians being themselves and being at ease with their Italianness and Australianness. Their examples have helped me realise that I can be both Italian and Australian. The work has also given me recognition as a person of Italian background. Each time I am introduced, my

'pedigree' is provided so that people can place me within or at least attached to the community. After that they treated me as one of them (some of the older ones even remember going to my Nonna's place to play bocce).

Conclusion

Thinking with memory and its affects has been a productive way to explore both personal and collective identity. I have looked at how memory resides in and is mediated by objects, film, photographs, rituals and the body, and how these shape and are reshaped by identity. I have shown ways in which personal and collective memory are intertwined and affect each other, and illustrated how identity is transformed with the ever-changing nature of perception and memory. The impermanent nature of both memory and identity make it impossible to isolate a definitive affect of one upon the other or moment of transformation. However, reflecting on events in my own life, I have identified episodes where perception, memory and identity rubbed against one another, nudging and shifting each other in that continuous process of transformation.

In writing this dissertation I have encountered many memories that were uplifting and some that I would prefer to forget. I have moved through a myriad of

Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 242 emotions: joy, anger, grief, shame and longing. I have encountered the 'phantoms created by desire...the other bodies toward whom I yearn' (Young, 2002: 45).

Events laid down in memory continually resonate in our perception of the world and affect identity. Identity is an effect of memory and perception which are mutable and vary with every changing circumstance.

For many Italian-Australians life remains complex and conflicted by many concerns and struggles related to the ambiguity of their place in Australian culture. When I began this exploration of memory and cultural identity I saw my life as a series of conflicts: between the Italian open display of feelings and Anglo reserve; between Anglo independence of spirit, thought and action, and Italian obligations towards parents and family. In terms of religion there has been conflict between my Anglican upbringing, agnosticism, humanism, atheism, and the Catholic religion of my mother and her family. At the end of this personal journey through memory, the two aspects of my identity continue to engage in dialogue with each other, sometimes in conflict and sometimes enriching each other.

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Diane Powell UNSW Z3022333 PhD Thesis 243

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