Italy

In October 2005, Monash University hosted a workshop on Australians in Italy at its Centre in the Palazzo Vaj in Prato. Australians in Italy were certainly visible in the week of the conference. Wall posters in Rome advertised the Macquarie Bank and an exhibition, Viaggio nella Provincia di Roma di una pittrice australiana, the paintings of the expatriate artist Janet Venn-Brown. In Florence, the invitation to the opening of an international exhibition of Women’s Art bore the image of Tracey Moffatt’s photograph Something More 1 (1989). The workshop in Prato included papers on artists, writers, returned migrants, the Catholic clergy – and a vignette on the best-known Australian in contemporary Italy, the supermodel Megan Gale. Also on the programme was the contribution of Australian scholars to Italian Renaissance studies. Now extending to three generations, their work is no longer subsumed under ‘British’, and references are to ‘American–British–Australian’ approaches and research. A member of the first generation, Bill Kent, through his own writing and his training of PhD students, is the crucial figure in the ‘piccola scuola australiana’ (‘piccola’ only when confronted with the North American Renaissance industry), just as he was in the establishment of the Monash Centre in Prato.

Posthumously and handsomely published, this book is a poignant tribute to its author’s ‘magnificent obsession’. For a decade before her sudden death in April 2000, the Melbourne historian Jacqueline Templeton had pursued her interest in the migrations to Australia of Italians from the Valtellina, a province of Sondrio in Lombardy, high up in the Alpine and pre-alpine zones of northern Italy, close to the present-day border with Switzerland. On the day following the completion of her manuscript, Templeton was diagnosed with a terminal illness and told that she had only months to live. That night she suffered a severe stroke; three days later she was dead. Family and friends grieved for the loss of a vibrant and charming woman.

Cresciani’s very readable revised edition of The Italians is particularly informative on the early history of Italo-Australia. First published in 1985 with ABC Enterprises, based on the excellent television series of the same name, this new edition promises to provide ‘the definitive account’ of Italian life in Australia ‘into the twenty-first century’. Cresciani’s treatment of certain aspects of Italian migration to Australia is worthy of such a bold claim. He is especially good at weaving together the histories of both countries to provide an instructive account of how the vicissitudes of one indelibly affected the other. His treatment of contemporary immigrant life, however, is rather dated.

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.