Beyond exile
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Christine Zorzi
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Christine Zorzi's biography and other articles by this writer
She, poor lady, hath by sad experience learnt how good a thing it is never to quit one's native land.
– Euripides
Exiles feed on hope.
– Aeschylus
My grandfather came to Australia because he was sick of eating polenta and cheese, Zio Tony told me. My mother tells me he argued with his father. My brother tells me he was opposed to Mussolini. Whatever his motivation, my grandfather never set eyes on Veneto again.
Nonno came to Far North Queensland to cut sugar cane. My grandmother, Antonietta, followed from Venice with their little girl, Speranza, and my father, Graziano, was born two years later in Ingham. Nonna couldn't get used to the tropical heat, so my grandfather got in a car with a compatriot and drove for days until he found a place whose epic granite sculpture and benign climate reminded him of home. I can imagine him: long trousers and rolled-up shirt sleeves, an elegant tilt to his felt hat. He is standing beside the overheated car, smoking a cigarette, and thinking to himself, "Yes, we will make a life here." He opened a bakery in Poziers, near Stanthorpe, and gave some land to the Church where a little tongue-and-groove chapel now stands. Italians belong by building. Through work and prayer, he dedicated himself to his new home.
Zio Tony followed, then Zio Edoardo. They went where the work took them, south to the Snowy River hydro scheme. The family grew. They worked on the land. They planted orchards and vineyards. Their hands thickened with their labour and their eyes creased with the white glare of the Australian sun. My father's sister married a man from Treviso and lived in a large house attached to another where her husband's brother and his wife lived. There was coffee brewing on the stove, the radio on the fridge tuned to light popular music. Minnie Ripperton crooned as Aunty Sperry made brodo con tortellini. My other aunt also married a man from Veneto. Only my father "married out": my mother, from five generations of Queensland graziers.
One uncle went south to work on the building sites in Canberra's CBD. "Your uncle nearly wore a hole in Civic," my aunt told me, he was so amazed by concrete. He liked to dress in his best suit and hat and walk a passagiata around the city centre. Zio Eddie poured concrete and made mosaics as he went. My aunt tells me they are still there, beautiful tile patterns laid into the foundations of our nation's capital.
It was not always an easy life. Zio Bruno was shot in the hand during a hold-up of the family winery. Nonno had stones thrown at his door during wartime. Credit extended at the bakery was deliberately left unpaid. They suffered illness from backbreaking work and isolation. They bore their hardships with dignity, for they had chosen this life in Australia.
When I went to Venice for the first time, pieces fell into my family puzzle that I didn't even realise were missing. I went to the church in Treviso where my grandmother and grandfather were married. I was given a fur coat, and a cultural context for it by my great-aunt. When we met, she held my hands in hers for a long time and her blue eyes shone with tears. She had not seen her brother since his temper, his politics, and his stomach drove him to Far North Queensland so many years before. My great-aunt looked uncannily like my sister: her expression, an indefinable gesture. Click, click, the puzzle came together. So that's why Aunty Sperry makes coffee that way. Oh yes, brodo. Yes, squid-ink pasta. Italian names that start with Z are from Veneto. Marino Zorzi was a doge of Venice. I visited the Palazzo Zorzi. Another Zorzi was spiritual adviser to Henry VIII. "He can't have done a very good job," my mother said with a smile.
I visited aunts and uncles in Musano. This branch of the family had moved to Australia to work on the hydro scheme and returned 15 years later when the project was complete. In Australia, my family uses words of the Venetian dialect no longer common in Venice. In Musano, my family has kangaroo skins and speaks Australian-accented English.
Zia Maria and I spent every day together for a month. She embraced me with her routine as if I had always been sleeping in the bed with the aqua cotton coverlet. She missed the freedom of Australia. "In Italy, you have to dress up just to go to market." She resented the constraints of Italian society and remembered as the best days of her life raising her two boys in the beauty and freedom of Canberra. A light snow fell outside as my uncle Alfredo talked of how he used to fish for barramundi in the Mary River. On the bank, in the hot Maryborough sun, you tie a freshly trapped hare to an overhanging bough. A day or two later, barramundi arrive in abundance. "You can just walk in and pick them up," he told me.
The puzzle was coming together, the secrets of the émigré unfolding on two continents. Stories of place and displacement. The little things spoken of daily. It took me many years to get a sense of their lives. One day, while teaching me the timeless skill of hand washing (the water must not be too hot or too soapy), Zia Maria told me, "It's a curse to have two homelands. You'll never belong to either."
Nothing is more sweet than country and parents, even when far away one lives in a fertile place
– Homer, Odyssey, Book IX