by Tina Arena
Receiving such an honour from the French got me thinking. Who was I and where did I belong? I’d always considered myself Australian through and through. You wouldn’t hear me with a trans-Atlantic accent any day soon. Then there was my Italian heritage, which was such a big part of who I was. And now I had strong and binding ties to France, a nation that had become my second home, even when I was living in London and dreaming about Australia. Strongest of those ties was the fact that my nearest and dearest were both French. Vince and Gab had parents, grandparents, uncles and aunties, cousins and friends in France. In a year or so Gab would be starting school. We had to think about where would be the best place for him.
In the end we decided it was time to move to Paris. Vince was missing his homeland and Gab needed one. So we began the search for a house, somewhere not too far from the centre but with a bit of space and peace and quiet. It took a while, but eventually we found a place we both loved. Built in the early 1930s, it had a beautiful garden and was full of charm, despite the fact it had poky rooms and was unbelievably rundown. (We only discovered how run-down once we moved in.) It would need more than a makeover, but Vince and I spotted its potential immediately. On our second visit I could see Vince was already knocking down walls in his mind to open up the rooms and bring the outdoors in (during summer, at least!).
When we told friends and associates that we were moving back to France, people thought we were mad – it can be such an administrative nightmare over there. Even my French accountant counselled against it. But we weren’t moving for tax reasons or anything like that. We were moving for family. It was an easy decision.
Another thing happened around that time that got me thinking again about identity. Bruce was contacted by someone from the SBS television show Who Do You Think You Are?, enquiring whether I’d be interested in being the subject of an episode. Who Do You Think You Are? explores a person’s family history. The show is a journey of discovery, often literally, as they take a person back to the place their ancestors lived or worked. The subjects of the show are regularly surprised, amazed or even shocked by what is revealed. An underlying theme of the show is that most of us are probably not who we think we are, and that when you scratch the surface most of us have multicultural heritage. For example, we may think we’re bog Irish, only to find out we have Spanish blood. Or we think we’re Arabic until we find out our great-grandmother was Jewish. It can make for some gripping television. Before they commit to have you on the show, however, they research your family to determine whether there’s actually a story there to tell.
I said yes straight away. Then I wondered whether I’d done the right thing. There was no doubt I had a lot of questions about my heritage that remained unanswered. I knew very little about my grandparents, or any of my ancestors, in fact. Having grown up so far from my parents’ homeland, we Arena girls knew only snippets of family stories. Mum and Dad never talked much about the old days. Now I questioned why. Was it just because our immediate extended family was already enough to keep up with? And maybe, having left Sicily, Mum and Dad were simply more focused on making a new life in Australia. But I couldn’t help wondering: could there be skeletons in the closet that might be better left alone? In any case, it was too late. I’d already given the show the go-ahead.
I didn’t hear anything from the show for months. When I finally heard from them, I was informed the researchers had hit a dead end. In the meantime, we moved house. Silvana, who was still working for Sharon Osbourne and had moved to LA, began dating our darling friend Matt, the hair stylist who had tried so valiantly to cut Gab’s hair. As well, through necessity, I had to release the demos of my fourth Sony album, the one they’d rejected. It wasn’t something I’d ever planned to do. But a fan announced on my website that she’d bought the demos from a private seller in the UK for quite a large sum of money. She was offering to burn copies on request for other fans.
I was shocked. Bruce contacted her and asked her not to make any copies as the rights belonged to me. In the end, we decided I’d have to release the material myself through my website. Called The Peel Me Sessions 2003, it was a little piece of history that I knew the fans would enjoy.
Two more albums came out in 2009: my French best-of, called The Best and le Meilleur (The Best and the Best) and a live CD and DVD from the Songs of Love and Loss 2 tour called The Onstage Collection.
We finally moved into the house in Paris around the end of the year. The wiring in the place was horrendous and the first time it rained we had to stock up on buckets to catch the leaks. But at least the boys were back where they belonged.
Not long after, I had a third miscarriage. By then I’d heard from Who Do You Think You Are? again. They’d found enough information to make a show and were ready when I was. Soon some of my questions about my family and my identity would be answered. So why was I so scared?
CHAPTER 31
The Man With the Child In His Eyes
The people from Who Do You Think You Are? told me they’d be flying me to Rome, but not much more. I may as well have been blindfolded – I had no idea what would happen or what I’d find out.
In Rome, I met the researcher Anthea Bulloch, who had done all the legwork in Italy for my episode, and Jane Manning, who was the show’s director. We spent just a night in Rome. The next day we flew to Catania in Sicily.
I had expected to go to Sicily, but I was still nervous. I realised I didn’t know much about my family at all and now I was about to bust open the vault. Who knew what was in there?
But I had to admit I was deeply curious, too. I’d been named Filippina after my grandmother Filippa, and yet I knew almost nothing about her. It wasn’t until we began work on the show that Mum revealed that she thought Nonna was an orphan. Mum said she knew nothing more. When it came to Nonno, my grandfather, whose name was Francesco Catalfamo, all Mum had was a piece of paper a relative had sent her that said the Catalfamos had been traced back to Sicilian nobility of the fourteenth century.
When Mum showed me this document I couldn’t believe it. I also couldn’t understand why she’d never told us. Then she revealed that her grandfather had come from a place called Santa Lucia, which was also news to me. Mum hadn’t told us, she said, because she genuinely didn’t think we’d be interested. When I thought about it some more, I could see her point. Often it’s not until you reach a certain age – when you have children of your own, perhaps – that you become interested in your ancestry. If she’d tried to talk to me about it when I was a teenager I probably would have swiftly nodded off. When you’re a kid all you’re interested in is the now.
Mum’s document intrigued me, not so much because it suggested we were related to nobility, but because I thought it might help explain something about the Catalfamos. We always had the sense that the Catalfamos were aloof – a complex, darker breed. I have a dark side too, and I’d always wondered about it. Nonno, in particular, was a severe, brooding character. As I mentioned previously, when I met him as a little girl I thought he was very grumpy indeed. Now, at last, we might find out why.
When we arrived in Sicily we drove to Valguarnera, the little town in the middle of Sicily where both my parents grew up. We were standing in front of the church where my parents were married in 1957 when Anthea revealed that it was in fact my parents’ fifty-third wedding anniversary that day. My parents’ wedding had been unusual by most standards, because my father was not actually present. He was in Australia, having travelled to the other end of the world two years earlier. So Mum and Dad were wed by proxy. It was actually quite common among young Sicilians at the time, due to the number of people emigrating.
Dad had come out to Australia to cut cane in the far north, thanks to an agreement between the Australian and Italian governments. World War II had wreaked devastation and disruption on Italy, and poverty and overcrowding were rife. To ease the problem, the government of Italy actively encouraged its citizens to emigrate. Meanwhile, Australia was looking for new citi
zens, in the belief that the nation needed to ‘populate or perish’. Australia didn’t want just anyone, though. At first, the government intended that nine out of ten immigrants be British. It very quickly became clear, however, that this was unrealistic, so the policy was broadened to take in ‘northern Europeans’. When still not enough immigrants applied, the policy had to be revised again, to finally allow southern Europeans to emigrate. The plan was that southern Europeans would preferably work in the tropics up north. Those were different times, but the only name for it is racism. The funny thing is, it never worked, anyway, and now the southern city of Melbourne is home to Australia’s largest Italian and Greek communities.
There was a mass exodus of southern Italians from their homeland during that time. Originally, my dad travelled to Australia with the plan to make some money and then return to Italy. He worked hard in the cane fields but found that the pay was extremely poor. One thing led to another and soon he was working for General Motors in Melbourne. By then Dad realised he could make a good life in Australia, and that’s when he suggested that Mum come out too.
Mum’s move to Australia changed the course of history for the Catalfamo family, because she was later followed by six of her siblings, leaving just two behind in Sicily.
So who were the Catalfamos? In Palermo, the capital of Sicily, I learnt that the document tracing the family back to Sicilian aristocracy was fake. We were not related to nobility. Not that it bothered me. What did was the fact that we still didn’t know any more about that side of the family.
In Palermo I also met Joe Manusia, a retired American detective who researched Sicilian genealogy. He’d found out a lot about the Arenas – so much, in fact, that in one day I gained 427 new relatives. That cracked me up.
He’d managed to trace Dad’s family back more than 300 years. When we looked at the family tree, there was one constant: contadino, or farmer. Most of the Arenas were farmers. That hardly came as a shock. Dad and his brothers have the most wonderful gardens. The Arenas all live from their gardens, still, and have always been salt-of-the-earth kind of people. Clearly it was in the blood. Joe also found that at least some of them had been very successful and well-to-do.
But what about those complex Catalfamos? It turned out Joe Manusia had discovered something interesting about my great-great-grandmother, Carmela Catalfamo. I would have to travel to Santa Lucia, where the Catalfamos originally came from, to hear more. So off we went to the north-east corner of Sicily.
In Santa Lucia I visited the city archives, where the records showed that Carmela had adopted six foundlings, babies that had been abandoned in ‘foundling wheels’. Poverty was so widespread in Italy at the time that nearly 40,000 babies were abandoned every year by parents too poor to look after them. By roadsides all over Italy the authorities set up foundling wheels, small wheel-shaped shelters where people could leave their babies to be cared for by others.
In fact, Carmela had not only taken in six foundlings to be reared alongside her own five children, but had given those foundlings her own family name, going against accepted custom. Usually foundlings were given a made-up name by authorities. By giving her own name to her ‘foster’ children, Carmela ensured they could not be discriminated against. According to the show’s researchers, Carmela was the only person historians had ever come across to do this. It was just never done.
Hearing this information touched me. To know that your great-great-grandmother was the kind of person who not only took in orphans but made sure they were treated like her own children was gratifying and inspiring.
But what struck me even more powerfully was that history was again repeating itself. Because, just like Carmela, my own mother had been taking in strangers – the old people in the nursing home. I had to admit that sometimes I’d resented the fact that Mum was so committed to her elderly clients. Why she felt such a powerful commitment to them, I never really understood, and it was a question that had nagged me over the years. To be honest, sometimes I’d felt that Mum put her clients before us. Of course she never did. Mum was trying to look after everyone, juggling her responsibilities and commitments to the best of her ability. Out of compassion and a sense of duty she had dedicated herself to a community as well as her own family, putting others first above herself. In these times of individualism and fracturing communities, Mum could teach us a thing or two about what it meant to be part of a community and to give of yourself. She’d done an extraordinary job caring for the elderly, who are so often neglected in our society. It made me very proud.
Carmela had later moved her family to Valguarnera, where my grandfather, her grandson, was born. In Valguarnera I met my mother’s cousin, Pippo, who remembered my grandfather well.
‘I remember he was very strict,’ I said to Pippo. ‘I didn’t like the way he spoke to my mum.’
Pippo agreed. ‘He was strict. He was a hardworking man.’ Then he dropped a bombshell. ‘You see, Pina,’ he said, ‘your nonno worked in a sulphur mine from the age of six.’
Apparently, Nonno’s father had died when he and his brother, Pippo’s father, were very young. After their father’s death, the two little boys were sent to work in the sulphur mines. It was likely that, in return, their mother had received a loan from a miner for whom the boys then worked. That was extremely common. The interest rate charged was often so high, the children were indentured to the miner for years. This is what had happened to my grandfather and his brother.
If you google ‘sulphur mining in Sicily’ you’ll be directed to websites on child slavery. The fact was, until as late as the 1930s, the sulphur mines in Sicily were filled with child labourers who were effectively slaves. They worked eighteen-hour days and slept in the mines with the rats. (Pippo explained that the rats were actually the miners’ friends, because rats knew well before humans when danger was imminent, so if the rats were making a run for it, you did too.)
But it got worse. The mines were horrifically hot, and so the miners and the children worked naked. Salvatore Di Vito, the mining historian who showed me around the ruins of the sulphur mine, explained that men and boys working naked in such close contact resulted in a ‘somewhat uncertain’ morality, as he put it. Salvatore said that, with the miners working for sometimes months away from women, there were undoubtedly cases of abuse and pederasty.
As a child, my grandfather had been handed a platter of pain, his childhood an unimaginable living hell.
It explained a lot about the man I’d never understood. He’d suffered horrifically and of course it had shaped his character.
Back in town, I was invited to visit the house that Nonno had lived in with my grandmother. I still remember when we stayed there – it had seemed dark and creepy, although I recalled there was a lovely terrace on the roof. This was where I’d had my fifth birthday, when Nonno had seemed so grumpy as I blew out the candles.
The house’s new owner welcomed me in and showed me around. Then he led me to the roof. When he bought the house he was told that the previous owner – my nonno – had regularly taken his gramophone up onto the terrace and played opera records to the whole town. He’d stood up there soaking in the music. Nonno was a huge Rossini fan, my mother told me later. In fact, he adored music, especially opera.
I always knew I had a connection with Nonno. Even though I thought he was grouchy, I was drawn to him in a way I never understood as a child. And now I knew for sure that one of those connections was music. Nonno and I not only loved music, we needed music. Music healed us, both of us.
Another connection was work. Like Nonno, I’d worked from a very young age. Of course, unlike him, my work had been wonderful, exciting, fun. And yet, we shared that common bond. Neither of us had what might be called a normal childhood.
At last I felt that I understood Nonno. But my grandmother, my nonna, was still a mystery. I’d met her during that trip to Sicily when I was little, but had not seen her again before her death in March 1993. Ultimately, we discovered she’d been a
foundling, an abandoned child. Nonna had initially been placed with an unmarried woman but sadly, when Nonna was around eight years old, that woman had died. My grandmother spent the next ten years of her life in the care of the nuns. Believe it or not, I always had a sense of abandonment around Nonna and that her origins were unknown.
Who Do You Think You Are? answered many questions about exactly that – who I was. I discovered things about my family I never knew. In fact, my whole family benefited from the knowledge that emerged from the making of that show, and we owe so much to all those involved. Thanks to their work, I better understood my grandfather and my own mother. I also understood why my parents left Sicily for Australia and why they never returned. I’d heard so many stories, many involving my own family, of struggle, poverty, even slavery. Australia had given our family freedom and a life we could have never had in my parents’ homeland. We Arenas would be forever grateful for those opportunities. I realised that was why I would always be Australian first and foremost, whatever had happened or would happen, wherever I was and whatever I did. Because that’s who I am.
I know now why I can sing.
It’s where I come from,
This past within.
A land so rich, its beauty rare,
Where souls survived
But wept despair.
I pray we all can move along
But take with us
What made us strong,
To show the world it can be done.
This beautiful song,
Let it be sung.
CHAPTER 32