by Liz Harfull
Her initial sense of achievement was short-lived. She had borrowed the tractor and a disc harrow from a young lad who lived about ten kilometres away, on the understanding that she return them for the weekend. Saturday morning came and she set off down the road without raising the discs because she didn’t know how. ‘I thought it would be okay if I went slowly, but I ploughed the road up—miles and miles of disced road. It wasn’t too bad when I was on gravel, but there was one strip of bitumen that the council had just done, and I crossed over it!’ In a completely unrelated problem, a little further down the road Wendy noticed smoke coming from the tractor. She was near a spot mill, set up to process timber from the surrounding forest, so she waved her arms to draw the workers’ attention. About ten men rushed over to help. They fixed the problem which related to the battery and a loose wire, and then they noticed the discs and sorted them out, too.
Sometime later Wendy was back working in the paddock when a car pulled up alongside the fence. Two well-dressed men got out and headed towards her. They were from the council and wanted her to visit their office so they could talk about the damaged road. Anticipating what might come next, she warned them straight away that she could not afford to pay for repairs, and offered to work off the debt instead. The two men looked at the attractive young woman standing in front of them, and kindly refused. ‘Do you think we’d put you on the road gang? There wouldn’t be any work done—the men would be watching you all day,’ one of them told her. Wendy laughs now at the compliment and her own naivety. ‘He let me off,’ she says.
After months of fertilising, weeding and applying multiple chemical sprays to kill the plagues of beetles, caterpillars and grasshoppers that tried to eat her crop, Wendy finally harvested her first tobacco leaves. But her work was only half done. The leaves then had to be cured in a wood-fired kiln. Every tobacco farm had at least one of these small sheds so they could cure their own crop—a process that required considerable skill and constant attention over a period of days.
As they were picked, Wendy tied the leaves into bunches and hung them from poles. Once the kiln had been brought up to a certain temperature, the poles were suspended across beams in the kiln, carefully spaced so the hot air could penetrate the bunches evenly. The temperature then had to be raised gradually over several days, and kept steady until the webs of the leaves were dry. ‘It took about a week to cure a kiln of tobacco, and you had to get up through the night to check the thermometer. As well as doing that, you still had to get up every morning to pick the next crop. It was hard work but I was young—I could do anything then,’ Wendy says.
After the drying came the grading. ‘You had to have a bit of wet weather before you could grade the leaves because they had to be moist and a bit elastic. In dry weather they were brittle and if you touched them, they would crackle up into pieces,’ she explains. While waiting for the autumn break and the right weather conditions, Wendy would go apple picking to earn extra money.
The following August, Wendy travelled to Fremantle for her first tobacco auction. Many of the other 150 or so Western Australian growers went too, looking forward to a few days in the city and maybe even some shopping if the two-day sale went well. The year before a quarter of the bales offered up were passed in because of poor quality and had to be returned to the growers or destroyed, so there was more than the usual level of anxiety. As it turned out, the auction went well with more than 300 tonnes of tobacco sold for a gross total of £332,222. About £600 of that went to Wendy, who bought some new clothes and shared most of the rest with her family.
8
TALL TIMBER DANCING
A year before Wendy planted her first tobacco crop, Giuseppe Bonini stepped off a migrant ship from Italy. Home was a small farm just outside Castelnuovo di Garfagnana in the Tuscan province of Lucca. Dominated by a castle that dates back almost one thousand years, Castelnuovo became a thriving market town because of its location at the junction of two rivers, not far from major trading routes leading up into the Apennine mountains in northern Italy. It is a place that has seen many wars over the centuries, with rich families from Pisa, Florence and Urbino fighting for control, including the notorious Medicis. For a few years it was even part of the French Empire after Napoleon Bonaparte marched in with his army in the early 1800s.
Joe, as Guiseppe became known, was only seven or eight years old when the Germans took their turn at dominating the local population during World War II. Even though the Italians were officially on the same side, he remembers it being a period of great deprivation and fear. Quite a few local men chose to head into the mountains and join the Italian resistance movement, which was very active in the valley where Joe grew up. To discourage them the Nazis introduced a policy of reprisal, killing ten Italian villagers for every German killed by the partisans. At one stage, Joe’s mother was so frightened they would be next that she took her son into a nearby forest and hid.
The tensions and hardships became worse towards the end of the war as the Americans started to advance and the Germans chose the valley as the place to make their stand. In December 1944, it became the centre of what they called Operation Winter Storm. The day after Christmas, a combined Axis force of more than 9000 German and Italian soldiers attacked an infantry division of the United States army that was twice the size, backed by local partisan fighters. Despite the odds, after fierce fighting the Axis troops gained the upper hand and the Allies were forced to retreat. ‘They were bombing everything,’ Joe explains in halting English. ‘You don’t know if you die or live.’
One morning, he and his mother were alone when a small group of the notorious German Waffen-SS arrived in search of food. His mother warned him to be quiet as she and Joe hid inside the house. Imitating the sound of gunshots, he describes one of the Germans taking aim at the chicken run with a machine gun. The men bagged up the family’s few remaining, precious chickens and left. ‘That was all we had,’ Joe says, explaining that by then food was extremely scarce. ‘After that we had to live on chestnuts.’
As it became clear that his prospects would be limited in a country still ravaged by war, Joe decided to take advantage of an Australian immigration scheme offering assisted passage to young men over the age of eighteen who were prepared to work in allocated jobs. Accompanied by some friends from the same town, in 1952 Joe left the port of Geneva aboard the Castel Bianco, which was carrying a thousand or so young men. After the ship docked at Fremantle, they were ‘fumigated’ and loaded onto buses lined up on the docks to take them to the migrant accommodation camp at Northam, about a hundred kilometres north-east of Perth.
Capable of holding up to 4000 people a time, the camp was home to Joe and his mates for about five months. He remembers it being full, the occupants mostly men with diverse backgrounds from across Europe. They were given decent meals and were well looked after, but Joe was anxious to find work and start earning money. Initially, he was among a few men selected to spend weekdays on Rottnest Island, helping to clean up what had been a military base during the war. ‘Monday morning we would go out and Friday night we would come back to camp,’ Joe says.
Eventually, many of his friends went to Wittenoom to work in the asbestos mines. The mines were offering good money, but in hindsight Joe is very grateful he didn’t go, too, because of the health concerns that have since emerged around asbestos. Instead, Joe was sent to work in a timber mill at Walpole, in the state’s south-west. The tiny township had only been gazetted about twenty years before, and there wasn’t much in the way of facilities or community. ‘No life there,’ Joe says simply.
Just eighteen years of age, Joe missed his family and friends terribly. He was one of three Italians working in the mill, but he didn’t know the others and was trying to make do on his own for the first time in his life. ‘I used to cry every night, up in the bush there. There was nobody,’ he says. The situation was not helped by the food. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the Australia of those days olive oil could only be purc
hased in small bottles from the chemist, who sold it for medicinal purposes. Even in larger towns, continental groceries such as pasta were hard to come by.
At Walpole there was no hope of being able to source such exotic fare. A staple part of their diet was meat brought in for the mill workers on the back of a truck, covered with damp hessian bags. Joe soaked it in vinegar before he cooked it, to kill the maggots. Not surprisingly, before too long Joe decided to move on. He bought a motorbike and went in search of some Italian friends who were working in a timber mill at Yornup, about 150 kilometres away, just the other side of Manjimup.
Wendy first set eyes on Joe at a dance. It was hard to look away. Always an impeccable dresser, the handsome young man knew how to move and was sharply turned out in a well-cut suit and a pair of blue suede shoes. ‘We always went to dances, the whole family,’ says Wendy. ‘And he was dancing around with one of my sisters, and I said to Mum, “Ooo . . . I’d like to dance with him,” and Mum said, “Well, when he brings Jan back he’ll ask you,” but he didn’t.’
Wendy had to wait until the next event, at a little hall built by the employees at Oregioni’s sawmill, a few minutes’ drive north of Manjimup. A popular venue with the Italian mill workers, the dance usually featured a small band with drums, piano accordion and saxophone. Everyone brought a plate of supper to share, and Mrs Oregioni always provided a big pot of Italian-style brewed coffee.
Joe came to the dance with some friends, once again wearing his blue suede shoes. When Elvis Presley released his hit song about the fancy footwear a few years later, it took Wendy right back to that first breathless evening dancing with her future husband because, just like the lyrics in the song, she was constantly stepping on his feet. ‘I could do the barn dance and the Veleta and things like that, but I couldn’t do the modern Latin American dances,’ she confesses. ‘He taught me those—the tango, the samba, the cha-cha.’
Wendy was only sixteen when she first met Joe, and it didn’t take long for the relationship to become serious even though there were more things working against it than their youth. They came from cultures that were completely different in almost every way—language, food and religion. Joe knew very little English and Wendy didn’t speak Italian. Joe was Roman Catholic and Wendy was Protestant in an era when this was seen as an impossible obstacle by both churches.
Despite the obvious differences, Joe and Wendy fell in love. Within six weeks of their first meeting, Joe asked Ted for permission to marry his daughter. Ted wasn’t impressed. It wasn’t because Joe was Italian or Catholic. Apart from Lorna, all of Wendy’s elder sisters married people then known as New Australians. ‘Mum used to call us the League of Nations when we got together at Christmas,’ Wendy says. In fact, she recalls many marriages between people from different countries at Manjimup during the 1950s. ‘I don’t remember it being a problem. The main problem was that there was a big lack of women, so there wasn’t one woman in Manjimup that wasn’t married.’
Recalling the matchmaking efforts of a father with a large number of daughters and very little money, she says: ‘I was supposed to marry a rich farmer. Dad used to bring all these bachelors home that had big farms. Of course, they were all about Dad’s age and that was hilarious. Mum would say, “You’re not bringing that old man here again, are you, Ted?” And he’d say, “Well, one of the girls might take a fancy to him.” And then Iris married a Dutchman, and Doreen married a Dutchman, and Jan married an Estonian. That left me and Faith.
‘So Dad came home this day and he said, “I’ve met just the boy for one of you girls. I’ve talked to his mother and she’d be very happy for her son to marry one of you, and she will provide everything for the wedding. Mother, you’ll have a new hat, and one of you will have a nice brick house to live in, right in Manjimup.” This boy was younger than me because he’d gone to school with John. He was Macedonian and he would have been about fourteen, this boy, but Macedonians arrange marriages, and his mother was trying to arrange this with Dad.’
Faith settled the issue straight away. ‘He looks like a toad,’ she told her father.
‘Well, you kiss him and he might turn into a prince,’ teased her brother Peter.
Ted eventually gave up on the idea. When Joe came along, he was obviously concerned that he had very little to offer Wendy in the way of financial security, but he was more worried that his daughter was too young and might change her mind. ‘Wait until she’s twenty-one,’ Ted told the unsuitable suitor.
So Joe waited—for five whole years. ‘I gave her a chance to think about it,’ he says, with a definite twinkle in his eyes.
Having warned Joe about all her shortcomings as a potential wife, Wendy pressed Joe about why on earth he wanted to marry her. ‘I can’t live without you,’ he told her.
‘Well, okay,’ replied Wendy. So they became engaged and spent the next five years getting to know each other. They went dancing every weekend and spent as much time together as work and the distance between them allowed. Even during the week, Joe would make the thirty-minute trip from Yornup to visit Wendy at home, sometimes for just an hour before turning around and going back again so he could get up early and go to work in the morning. Meanwhile, they both saved hard and finally had enough money to pay a deposit for a small farm at Northcliffe.
Joe and Wendy eventually married on a wintry day in August 1959. There was little money to spare so it was a modest affair. Wendy bought a short-sleeved wedding dress on special, and had a local dressmaker add a beautiful lace top with long sleeves. Then she made her own bouquet by stitching fresh flowers, small pieces of fern and ribbon onto a piece of cardboard. Her sister Faith agreed to be bridesmaid and had her own dress made for the occasion.
Things didn’t go exactly according to plan, as weddings rarely do. Wendy’s brother John was supposed to be best man but he was an aspiring professional footballer and rang to say he had just been selected for the first time to play in a big game for East Perth. Iris’s husband, Gerard, stepped in at the last minute.
Then Wendy and Joe discovered the priest who was supposed to perform the ceremony had fallen sick. Ted and Doris had sold the farm at Manjimup in the mid 1950s, and bought a better one near Pemberton. The wedding was due to be held in the town’s Catholic church but when the wedding party arrived the priest was too ill. Determined that the wedding should go ahead that day, everyone trooped down the road to the Anglican church. Joe didn’t mind and the young priest who had recently taken up duties was delighted to do the honours. It would be his first wedding.
Afterwards, the reception was held at the Turners’ house. It was mainly family, but that was large enough. Eldest sister Lorna and her husband, Keith, had moved to Australia a few years before and bought a farm not too far away, and most of the other siblings were there, too, some of them married and with their own children. ‘Then we went off to Northcliffe. No honeymoon,’ says Wendy matter-of-factly. There was a tobacco crop in the ground which needed checking, so going away wasn’t an option.
With help from the rest of the family, Joe and Wendy spruced up their first home so it was ready to move into. Built from asbestos as part of a land settlement scheme for soldiers returning from World War II, it was relatively new, with two bedrooms, a lounge and a kitchen, a spacious hallway and a verandah across the front. ‘The walls were painted primrose in the kitchen, with a white ceiling, and the cupboards were different colours—charcoal, pink and pale grey. And there was beautiful lino on the floor,’ Wendy says.
The kitchen may have looked nice, but Joe was not at all pleased with how Wendy put it to use, at least initially. Having spent most of her teenage years working outside, she had never done much cooking, and what she did cook tended to be very English in style. ‘Italians don’t cook in dripping, but for the English it was all cooked in fat. You didn’t waste butter in those days, and we didn’t use oil. I used to fry up chops and eggs and tomatoes for my brothers and they were happy, so that’s what I served to Joe for my first meal.
Good job it was on a tin plate. It went straight out the door, with the salt and pepper pot behind it.’
Fortunately for the ongoing harmony of the marriage, Wendy’s sense of humour prevailed and she laughed about the incident, and then encouraged Joe to teach her how to cook things that he liked. Recognising the potential to make money supplying the large number of Italian migrants who had settled in the area, a Perth businessman was sending a truck down every week with continental groceries such as dried pasta and olive oil. So they managed to buy some spaghetti and Wendy finely chopped some beef. Unfortunately, when the time came to make the meat sauce, it was a case of the blind leading the blind. Joe wasn’t much of a cook, either. ‘He’s standing over me, and he says, “Put more salt in, you haven’t got enough salt,” so I put more salt in, but he wants more salt, so I put even more salt in, and then we couldn’t eat it. Even the dog wouldn’t eat it because there was so much salt. We had to have bread and cheese.’
Wendy persevered, learning by trial and error, and then Joe’s parents came out from Italy. Joe’s mother soon taught her how to cook pasta, and even rabbit, baked slowly with olives and tomatoes. She also tried to teach Wendy how to speak Italian, with limited success. ‘I knew some Macedonian after living with the Macedonian family for six years, and when Italian came along I used to mix the two together. I confused myself and everybody else. I could understand what they were talking about, the subject, but I didn’t know exactly what they were saying.’ One day Wendy muddled the word for meat, carne, with the word for dog, cane. Instead of saying she was going to fry the meat, she said she was going to fry the dog. Joe’s mum couldn’t stop laughing.