by John Pilger
Under the Assisted Passage Scheme, immigrants paid a nominal £10 and agreed to stay for two years. The British, known as ‘Ten Pound Poms’, emigrated with such enthusiasm that a labour shortage threatened the home market. The Mediterranean countries sent mostly young men, and not for reasons of national altruism. Conservative and social democratic Governments in Greece and Italy, fearing the rise of left-wing movements, promoted the emigration of young men of voting age. This had happened during the 1920s when large numbers of antifascist Italians were encouraged to find work in the sugar plantations of Queensland.
There was, at the very least, an ambivalence towards southern Europeans, and only a minority received assisted passages. A Government report half a century earlier had described southern Italians as ‘the Chinese of Europe . . . scum and refuse’, while the lighter-skinned northerners were ‘thriving, highly paid and long-headed . . . the Scotchmen of Italy’ and much to be preferred.20 When they arrived in the 1950s, young Italians and Greeks were told they would be settled into a job after a brief ‘transit period’ in a camp. The reality was quite different. One of them, Giovanni Sgro, described his new life in 1952 in Bonegilla migrant camp, whose ribbons of huts stretched into the bushland of northern Victoria.21
‘We reached Bonegilla about four o’clock in the morning’, he said, ‘and got off the train on a railway track, not a proper station. At the camp we found thousands of other migrants waiting . . . Before we left Italy we understood that within seven days of our arrival we were entitled to a job . . . But seven days passed, two weeks, three, one month, two, no work. Bonegilla had been a prison camp . . . the huts had been built by Italian prisoners of war from Africa. They had tin ceilings and walls and in the day they were boiling hot, in the night freezing cold. The food . . . the poor bloody rabbits had no chance. We used to dig up their holes and kill them with sticks, and ask the cooks to prepare them.
‘After two and a half months, the ships kept bringing people. In the camp the Italians, all single men, were separated by a road from the families. We were not allowed to mix with them, not allowed to cross that road. Why? No one ever explained to us. Some of us used to cross illegally at night and visit because some of the Yugoslavs had been in Italian camps and spoke good Italian and it was good to be in the family atmosphere again . . . Some young men hanged themselves because they were demoralised being in a foreign country, in a camp without family, without money.
‘We organised a rally and a protest march to the authorities to ask for a job or be sent back to Italy. The camp manager told us there was no work and he couldn’t send us back because he had no authority . . . We started to revolt. We burned two or three huts and set fire to the church, not because we didn’t like the church, but because the Italian priest there used to say, “Have patience, God is on your side,” and we were fed up with him.
‘We marched towards the main office, then we saw four tanks with machine-guns on top in front of us. Some of us ran. I was one of them. I never saw a tank in my life. Soon after, the Italian Consul arrived and the first thing he said was, “You are fortunate to be in a country like Australia.” No sooner he finished those words than people rush on the stage and nearly killed him . . .
‘I remember a farmer who came to get a worker. He wanted only one and there were thousands unemployed. I don’t know why they do it, picking one name out of thousands. Perhaps they look in the book to find a single name, and I was the only Sgro, so they thought they call me. I was away from the centre in those hills hunting rabbits but they had loudspeakers and I heard my name called, “Giovanni Sgro, come to the office,” and I think I broke all records I run so fast.
‘When I got there I saw this big farmer, and the farmer shook his head and said something to the interpreter, but the interpreter would not tell me. Then they told me he didn’t want me because he realised I was dark, I came from the south and he wanted a northern Italian. So I taste Australia with the tanks and the farmer . . .’
For his part in the Bonegilla uprising Giovanni was refused Australian citizenship. He has been unable to return to Italy, fearful that he will be refused a re-entry visa to Australia. He was finally ‘freed’ from Bonegilla when a priest offered a job painting a nearby church and working on his ‘chook farm’.
‘The first time the priest took me to his chook farm’, he said, ‘I couldn’t speak a word of English, just “Good morning, good night”. At teatime we had roast beef, which was very nice, then we had a sort of creamy sweet, which to look at was revolting, yellow goo, like we used to stick paper on walls. I was polite, I eat it, I thought. His sister ask me if I like it and I said “yes”. So she fill up the plate again. I gulp the thing down, then I go outside and vomit. I know now what it was. Custard! I never had it in my life before.’
The ships now brought whole communities: streets and villages and islands. The village of San Fele went to Drummoyne in Sydney; the village of Canneti to nearby Five Dock; the Sicilian village of Vizzini to Melbourne. The Greek island of Castellorizia, a barren rocky outcrop four miles long and two miles wide, had long sent its men to Australia, the United States and Brazil, and now almost everybody else set out for Sydney and settled in five streets in the suburb of Kingsford.
By the late 1950s immigration officials realised that the preoccupation with numbers was making a nation of men without women. Outback communities such as the Snowy Scheme, where men had been directed to work on public works, were entirely without women. Australian officials were despatched to ‘encourage the immigration of suitable females of similar cultural background’.
One result of their efforts was the ‘bride ships’, whose spectacular arrival I covered as a reporter and will never forget. On a spring morning in 1959 I climbed up the side of the Fairsky, an Italian ship of the Sitmar line, as it lay at Sydney Heads. On board were hundreds of teenage girls married by proxy to men they had never met or could barely remember from their childhood. As the ship berthed at Pyrmont, each girl held a photograph of her husband, her only means of identifying the man she was meant to spend the rest of her life with. Down on the wharf young men in best shiny suits and winkle-picker shoes held aloft their own verities. I recall one girl sobbing at the sight of a small, fat, balding man to whom the image in her hand bore no relation. Still, she handed over her dowry of lira notes and they left on the night train to Narrabri. She had little choice.
Maria Calcagno was on the Fairsky on another of its bride deliveries, and Carlo, her proxy husband, was at Pyrmont with a box of chocolates, a bouquet of flowers and a determination to claim his beloved at the earliest opportunity. He remembers the moment as one of ‘Terrore!’ Maria and Carlo both came from neighbouring villages in Sicily. Their families worked in the local marble factory. Maria worked as a seamstress near Carlo’s house; they had seen each other, but according to custom, had never spoken, though their families were friends.
Carlo arrived in Sydney in 1951 and worked in factories and vineyards. He wanted a wife, so he wrote to his sister, who suggested Maria. But Maria was preparing to emigrate to the United States. Carlo moved quickly. He wrote to her parents asking permission to marry their daughter. Permission arrived, said Carlo, ‘by the early post’; and Maria and Carlo exchanged letters and photographs.
They were married in 1954 by proxy. Maria had a splendid church wedding with almost everybody from the two villages there, except Carlo, who was represented by the bride’s brother and a grave-looking photograph of himself pinned to the wedding cake.
‘Funny feeling I had,’ said Maria. ‘I come into the church. Nice wedding, I think. But where is the husband? In Australia, of course! But funny feeling all the same.’ After Carlo had managed to save for her fare, Maria sailed for Australia one year later with a family friend as chaperone.
I took Maria and Carlo back to the wooden wharf at Pyrmont where they met and which now stands rotting and silent. It is the equivalent of Ellis Island in New York, the immigrants’ gateway to the United States and
a national monument. As at Bennelong Point, nothing at Pyrmont records that a nation began here.
I asked Maria what it was like to be one of a consignment of young women who had never met their husbands. ‘Funny!’ she said. ‘All the time they speak about him . . . is he a young one still? Or is he an old one with wrinkles? Worry, worry . . . that’s what they do. We couldn’t dance, because we had old women look after us. All we do is play bingo . . . bingo, bingo.’
Carlo: ‘Listen, these old women were necessary. There were men on that ship.’
Maria: ‘Trouble, yeah . . . one month on that ship and some of the girls are forgetting everything!’
For Maria’s arrival in Australia Carlo had rented a room, where friends crushed to greet them and they had the wedding party he missed. There is a photograph of the two of them at that party, sitting on the edge of a bed; both have the whimsical, fragile look of happiness almost acquired. It is a glimpse of the universal heart of immigrants.
Many of the proxy marriages did not last; Maria’s and Carlo’s was an exception. Their laughter with and care for each other is infectious. In 1958 they opened an espresso bar in Sydney and introduced, claims Carlo, the first ‘real gelato’ to Australia. Like so many of their compatriots they thought nothing of working fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, year after year. The role of immigrants in small business in Australia has never been adequately appreciated. Maria brought up five children, and also cooked and served in the café. Carlo says he owes ‘everything to my wife’. Neither bears a likeness to the two people in the photograph on the edge of the bed; the hardship of their lives has extinguished that.
In 1969 they took their children to Sicily and were greeted as ‘the Australians’, as if they had been reincarnated. They were surprised to find Italy had developed and the standard of living was at least as high as in Australia. ‘Maybe’, said Carlo, ‘my life would have been easier if I had stayed . . . maybe, maybe. My children are Australians. I am here now.’
There is another side to such a story. Beneath Australia’s multi-cultural sheen there are other Marias. They can be glimpsed standing on inner city doorsteps pleading in broken English for more than a few dollars from a middle man who employs them in conditions little better than Dickensian. Sonja Abarcia was like that. I met her in Wollongong, the steel city south of Sydney. She and her family had arrived from Chile in 1974, refugees from the Pinochet regime. Her husband was seriously injured in his first job and much of the burden of the family’s provision fell on her. For ten years she worked in a tin hut little bigger than herself at the bottom of her garden, at first for less than a dollar an hour. As a result, she is handicapped with arthritis.
‘I started at seven in the morning and I finished eight or nine at night,’ she said. ‘I did this all week, sometimes with Sundays off. In the summer the temperature in the shed got up to 40 degrees, and in the winter it was so cold I had an electric radiator on all the time. When it rained I was scared, because the rain was coming in and you know what happens when these electrical industrial machines get wet.
‘A typical job would be to make up ladies’ trousers from about thirty-six pieces. It took me two days and I was paid five dollars ninety-five cents. I went up to Sydney once and saw the same trousers in a very nice shop in the Centrepoint arcades. They were charging two hundred dollars for them. That made me sad.’
Gina came from Italy in 1973. She says that if her correct name is published, she will not work again. She is a qualified nurse, but her qualifications are not recognised in Australia. Only after fourteen years of applications was she granted an interview. ‘The nursing sister was amazed at the extent of my experience,’ she said, ‘but it was too late, as my health had been damaged by years of work in the leather clothing industry.’
Gina paid several thousand dollars for her own leather-binding machine. She worked at home, beginning, like Sonja, before her children awoke. Leather work is extremely arduous as the leather first must be beaten with a hammer before it will fit into a machine. She was paid eight dollars an hour, and is now disabled in her back, shoulders, hands, arms and right leg.
Sonja and Gina are typical of thousands of Australian immigrant women known as ‘outworkers’. A report by the New South Wales Women’s Directorate found that some 30,000 outworkers in the State were getting as little as eighty cents an hour; and that the majority, like Gina, were justifiably afraid of complaining, as ‘unco-operative’ workers were inevitably replaced.22 Similarly, a confidential report by the New South Wales Government, following a two-year investigation, described as Dickensian the working conditions of 60,000 mostly immigrant women in clothing sweatshops. Less than 3 per cent received normal allowances such as sick pay.23
Rukiye Savigil, a young Turkish woman, used to work in one of these sweatshops, in Collingwood in Melbourne. ‘No one told me how to do the job,’ she said. ‘The bosses use computers to evaluate our working rate. They are counting the minutes we spend on each piece of garment. The foremen are physically standing over us and timing our rate. Sometimes they bring in people from outside to time us. Sometimes they time us secretly. Almost no one can complete the quota, which equals 495 minutes in one day. There are only 480 minutes in a working day!
‘We are not allowed to talk or ask questions. The bosses are always punishing us and then they reward us with a piece of material. They never say, “Good morning.” We brought transistors so that we could listen to our 3EA (Turkish) language programmes, but the bosses stopped us and instead put in a loudspeaker which plays only English music.
‘We have a ten-minute tea-break a day. There is no first aid or rest room. Workers who injure their hands are forced to keep working. If we get pregnant we have to tell the bosses and expect to get sacked at different stages of pregnancy. I got sacked because I didn’t finish my quota. I have since been unemployed. This is hard, because my husband was injured at work. I used to get a hundred and forty-three dollars a week. I miss it.’24
In 1987 the Australian Arbitration Commission, in an historic ruling, extended trade-union protection to outworkers, whose treatment was described as ‘a serious affront to the moral and social conscience of the community’.25 Outworkers are now entitled to union agreed wages, sick, overtime and holiday pay and pensions.
We were in a cemetery near Bendigo, left by the gold rush beyond a façade of Victorian architecture in the bush. Denis O’Hoy was preparing joss sticks, incense and rice. ‘I am very lonely coming here on my own,’ he said. ‘As a child, there would be two buses full and a dozen cars. Now it’s just my sister and me, paying respect to our ancestors. I’m even questioning now why I do it; the tradition is dying because we are one of the oldest Australian communities, and my sons, well, they are indifferent.
‘Last time I was here I saw a group of orthodox Jews . . . the Jews and the Chinese are buried together in Bendigo . . . and they were doing virtually the same thing, saying prayers and venerating those to whom we owe our existence. We looked at each other and they raised their black hats and gave a little bow. I bowed, too, or saluted or something. Jews and Chinese . . . I appreciate a courtesy of that kind when you consider everything else that has gone before.’
The cemetery contains the remains mostly of Chinese gold diggers who fell upon hard luck and could not get home. Most of the Chinese who came after the discovery of gold in 1851 had no intention of staying. To them Australia was ‘Tsin Chin Shan’, the ‘New Gold Mountain’. To the Australian diggers and much of the population, the Chinese were the Yellow Peril incarnate, plotting to seize and enslave the nation. It was a corrupt and rapacious period, which saw the transfer of much of the colonists’ bigotry and violence from the Aborigines, whom they had effectively subdued, to the Chinese who, in the 1860s, represented one in nine of the male population.
The Chinese were in the classic double bind. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, they were viewed as liars, thieves and ruffians. Whenever their good behaviour was conceded, it wa
s argued that only ‘weakness keeps them quiet’.26 When they became numerically powerful enough to form organisations not unlike trade unions, it was said they were showing their ‘true colours’ as ‘the most immoral, lying and thievish people in the world’.27 And if that was not enough, the Sydney Bulletin declared that ‘the European’s dislike of the Chinaman is not a matter of taste, but a healthy racial instinct . . . in the case of the chinkies, this out-of-date instinctive dislike has lasted long enough to be useful again as a protection against a race that is more dangerous to civilisation than a savage with a club is to a fellow savage’.28
Repelling the ‘Asiatic hordes’, Sydney Bulletin, September 28, 1901
This ‘healthy racial instinct’ was translated into savagery at Lambing Flat in New South Wales. By 1861 some 15,000 diggers had been attracted to the Lambing Flat field, where gold lay just below the surface. About 2,000 were Chinese, described by the local paper as ‘a swarm of Mongolian locusts’ and ‘moon-faced barbarians’. Although the discovery was the richest yet in the State, it came at the end of a long period of disappointments for the diggers, as individuals were replaced progressively by mining companies. The miners looked upon Lambing Flat as a ‘last resting place’ where they would make a stand against the ‘swarming’ Chinese.
The miners rallied at Tipperary Gully and marched the four miles to Lambing Flat, picking up men along the way. A Union Jack fluttered at their head, with a banner proclaiming ‘Roll up! Roll up!’ and a band played ‘Rule Britannia’, although many were Irish, German and American. They set upon several hundred Chinese, brandishing their Bowie knives and beating them with pick handles and the butt ends of whips. Tents were rifled for gold, then set on fire. ‘I noticed one man’, the Sydney Morning Herald correspondent reported, ‘with eight pigtails attached to a flag and he glorying in the work that had been done. I also saw one pigtail with part of a scalp the size of a man’s hand attached, that had literally been cut from some unfortunate creature.’