WHEN HE WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, my father came to Australia by boat from Sicily. Along with his mother and sister, they joined his father who was already here, building railways and cutting cane. They had no English and no context for the Antipodean metropolis of 1950s Sydney. They came from a tiny island in a Mediterranean archipelago where donkeys were the usual mode of transport and those who left were farewelled by wailing widows insisting they’d meet their end at sea.
My grandparents only ever returned in their minds. My nonno would sing out of tune, tears pooling in his blue eyes, as he gazed at a picture of Lipari’s Marina Lunga on the kitchen wall. Sipping the vino he fermented in his Ashfield garage and drumming his fingers on the Formica tabletop, he’d tell us in his lilting English of the home he once loved.
My father took us home to Lipari when we were old enough to pay attention. We recognised our own features in the faces of our lost relatives and, with language virtually useless, we spoke through food. We revelled in the regionally specific treats we all knew, even though we now came from opposite sides of the world. Throughout the decades between, the Australian diaspora of the Picone clan had diligently kept the flavours of the ancestors alive and there they were, served alongside a
