Desmond O'Grady

After Italian troops had invaded the Papal States to establish the nation’s capital in Rome in 1870, Italian Catholics were prohibited from voting in political elections. When this policy began to be relaxed in late 1918, a Sicilian priest, Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959), founded the Partitio Popolare Italiano (PPI) which was to be aconfessional but ‘inspired by Catholic principles’. It was the precursor of the Christian Democratic party that has ruled Italy for the past thirty years.

As John Sligo spent thirteen years in Rome up to 1982, he experienced vita when life was still dolce in Hollywood-by-the-Tiber where he was one of those expatriates who hobnobbed with both exiled royal families and political refugees. Now a Sydney resident and prize-winning novelist, Sligo worked in Rome for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation and also taught in English-language schools, but these tales mainly show him as a bon vivant, not only in the Italian capital but on excursions to Greece and India.

Desmond O’Grady is uniquely placed to interpret Australia for Italians and Italy for Australians. He grew up in suburban Melbourne, but as a journalist, biographer, and writer of fiction he has spent most of his working life in Rome.

The Australian colonies were much more of an ethnic mix in the middle of the last century than is nowadays imagined. In 1861 one Victorian in ten was Chinese. Germans were everywhere, not just in the Barossa: 10,000 also lived in Victoria. The folk memory of such groups was not continuous enough to preserve a sense of their collective heritage. Few material traces remain: overgrown tombstones, fading foreign surnames atop country stores, an exotic farmhouse looking quite unlike its neighbours.

The vast majority of these itinerant aliens left no mark at all. They lived in a goldfields tent, rented a room in the inner city, or built a shanty amid tall timber. Within a few years they moved on, perhaps to New Zealand or the Americas, and returned home in old age. Of Italians, for instance, probably 120,000 had come to this country by the time of the Great War, but the 1921 census counted only 8,000 of them.