The Italian Girl

By Rebecca Huntley

A true story of love, loss, and the mother-daughter relationship across generations, this biography describes Rebecca Huntley’s search for her maternal grandmother’s story. Following the death of her Italian Nonna, Huntley discovers that there was much unknown about the kind-hearted, quiet individual she thought she knew. With evocative stories and tender honesty, Huntley explores the young life of the woman who cooked masterfully and embroidered daily and those of the men and women in her family from Northern Queensland during World War II. In the process, old issues with her own mother are awakened and the concept of what it really means to be a mother is contemplated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780702248047

Book preview

Dr Rebecca Huntley is a researcher and author with a background in publishing, academia and politics. She holds degrees in law and film studies and a PhD in gender studies. Rebecca is the executive director of The Ipsos Mackay Report and the author of two books, The World According to Y: Inside the new adult generation and Eating Between the Lines: Food and equality in Australia.

Rebecca is a regular contributor to essay collections, magazines, newspapers and online publications and is a feature writer for Vogue Australia. She is also a sought-after commentator on social trends on radio, in print and on television, is married with a young daughter and lives in Sydney.

Contents

‘Australia’ by Mariano Coreno

Family tree

Map of Innisfail

Prologue

Part One

1 The Train North

2 A Migrant Town

3 Rite of Passage

4 A Different Light

Part Two

5 Uncovering

6 Time Out

7 Returning North

8 A Family Affair

9 Preserving the Truth

Part Three

10 Dividing Lines

11 Recording History

12 Camps Divided

13 Luigi’s Release

14 A Bribe for a Groom

Part Four

15 Dreams and Ghosts

16 The Left-hand Curve

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

To my nonna, my mother, my sister, my daughter . . .

Australia

Australia

young smiling land

circled by the oceans

are you listening to me?

I have broken my heart

to understand you, to know

the blood in your veins,

to draw new things

from the gardens of your poetry.

You know, this voluntary exile

now is a sweet fusion

between past and present

between reality and a dream

between grass and dirt.

With the passing of time

something in me has been extinguished

and then it has risen to enlighten me

in the dusk of the evening.

Integration

is discovered little by little

like the words

of a great love

Australia of my heart

Mariano Coreno

‘When this war is finished, if the story [of internment] is ever published, it will astound decent honest Australian people.’

The Hon. Cecil ‘Nugget’ Jesson

Labor Party Queensland parliamentary representative for Kennedy (1935–50) and Hinchinbrook (1950–60)

Prologue

February 2011

I am sitting at my kitchen table with my mother on a humid summer’s day. I am talking to Mum about the past – asking her questions about her childhood, everything she remembers about her relationship with her mother and grandmother. But she is not listening to me. Her attention is on my three-year-old daughter Sofia, who is busy twirling around on the polished wooden floorboards in new cotton socks. Sofia stops her ballerina dance abruptly and disappears into her room, emerging half a minute later with some soft toys that she piles onto her grandmother’s lap.

‘Grazie carina! Bella bambina!’ my mother says in a high-pitched, affectionate voice. ‘Voi un biscotto? Si? Ecco-la!’ Mum takes a sweet biscuit from the plate on the table and gives it to Sofia, who immediately shoves it into her cherubic mouth.

‘Di grazie Nonna, grazie Nonna.’

‘Grazie Nonna’, Sofia says in singsong Italian, spitting crumbs on the floor. I watch this interaction and try to stifle a small surge of resentment. In just a few seconds Mum has spoken more Italian with Sofia than she has with me in forty years. I think back to the time when I was taking lessons to improve my Italian language skills, how my mother rebuffed all my requests to get her to talk to me in her first language. Yet she speaks happily without prompting to my daughter.

The little surge subsides when I realise that talking to Sofia must be easier than talking to me. The love between grandparent and grandchild is a joyful thing, clean and uncomplicated. Mum can speak Italian to Sofia and it can be fun, a game between them. She can be a nonna and all nonnas speak Italian to their grandchildren. There is no sadness or regret, just love and biscotti.

My mother’s mother – my nonna – spoke Italian to us from time to time when we were children. I recall she was a different person when she spoke Italian – more confident, opinionated, and vivacious – than when she spoke English. I wonder whether, if I had been able to really talk with her in her first language, I might have got to know her better. I wonder whether I could have asked more questions about her life and understood the answers.

Growing up, I always saw Nonna as a relatively uncomplicated person, content in her role as housewife, with no greater aspirations than to support her husband, raise a happy daughter and help that daughter raise even happier daughters. When my nonna died I found out she was a different person than I assumed, with a history full of moments of heartache and bravery. In my attempts to find out about her life, I found out more than I could have anticipated about love, loss, identity, family and the unbelievable things people do in times of war.

1

The Train North

August 2000

The Canberra train station looks almost deserted when my taxi pulls in to the rank. As I emerge from the back seat, the cold morning air has the effect of the first coffee of the day. Suddenly I am awake and ready for the challenge of getting from Canberra to Innisfail in north Queensland in time to see my grandmother. Inside the passenger waiting room there are a number of travellers already assembled, despite the fact the train to Sydney won’t be leaving for another forty-five minutes. A few people are lined up in front of the Country Link office and so I join them in the queue, shifting my weight from foot to foot with nervous impatience.

When it is my turn to sit down at the booking desk I am in a confessional mood. I tell the Country Link lady opposite me that my grandmother – my nonna – is unwell; in fact, we believe she is dying and I need to see her as soon as possible. I want a ticket home to Sydney as well as a return ticket from Sydney to Innisfail. The Country Link lady doesn’t comment on my revelation. Perhaps she thinks I am looking for a discounted fare, like the airlines give for emergencies and bereavements. She repeats the name of my destination to confirm she has it right – Innisfail – and then starts tapping away on the keyboard, her face turned intently towards the static and glow of the computer screen.

In the minute or so she spends typing I offer up another confession, namely that while the situation with my nonna is urgent, I’m not one for plane travel. I tell her about my fear of flying, a phobia I developed in my mid twenties despite a childhood and adolescence spent in planes travelling around the country and the world. I am pouring my heart out but she says nothing. She just keeps typing, her only response the sound of the clicks of her varnished nails on the plastic keys. Who can blame her? There is a crazy person sitting in front of her who is desperate to get to her dying grandmother three thousand kilometres away and she is taking a train.

After a minute or two, the Country Link lady turns away from her screen to give me the computer’s diagnosis. I can get an overnight train from Sydney to Brisbane this evening. There is a sleeper available but I will have to share with another female.

‘That’s fine’, I tell her. I will have a few hours’ wait in Brisbane and then I can catch The Sunlander, which travels from Brisbane to Cairns, stopping off at Innisfail. There are no sleepers but there are lots of first-class seats left. The good news is that on the trip back there is a single sleeper free from Innisfail to Brisbane. After another short stay in Brisbane and a bus ride over the border, I will be able to have a sleeper to myself again and I will arrive in Sydney the next morning. I will be on trains almost as long as I will be in Innisfail.

I pay for my ticket on my only, almost exhausted, credit card. I tense my shoulders and hold my breath during that five-second pause before the machine confirms you have enough money to proceed with the sale. The train ticket costs nearly twice as much as a return flight to Cairns – further evidence of my insanity. Mum has kindly offered to pay for the ticket and I make a mental note to get the cash from her as soon as I return from the north.

I had rung Mum from Canberra the night before to say hello and to report on how my thesis research in the National Archives was going. She told me Nonna had been admitted to hospital and a feeling of panic rose and spread its heat through my chest. The tone of Mum’s voice was even. She was almost matter-of-fact, like an experienced nurse talking to a doctor: ‘Teresa Ballini, widow, aged ninety, weight thirty-nine kilograms.’ Nonna is dying is what she was really saying. I needed to get to Nonna right away.

When my tickets are confirmed, I take the blue-and-white paper envelope from the Country Link lady and sit down on one of the few uncomfortable seats left in the waiting room. Then the panic of the previous night returns. I can’t remember the last time I saw my nonna. It has been so long since we were in the same room together – three years, maybe four. If Nonna had kept a diary – or if I had – I might have been able to pinpoint that final, ordinary moment of contact.

While I can’t remember the timing of our last moment together, I can confidently imagine what would have happened at the end of that final visit. Nonna would have packed her twenty-year-old navy blue suitcase early in the morning, perhaps even the night before, as her daughter and granddaughters slept and our cats patrolled the kitchen floor. She would have had a breakfast of milky coffee and plain toast topped with butter, the same thing she had served her husband almost every morning during their fifty-plus years of marriage. She would have been sitting, fully made-up and dressed in her travelling clothes, at the table in our kitchen when I woke. She would have wished me a good morning and offered to fix me something to eat, despite knowing I would want a simple bowl of muesli.

She would have been eager to get to the airport as the morning wore on, but reluctant to leave us at the same time. I would not have gone with my mother and sister to the airport to say goodbye, giving the usual weak excuse that I was too busy. Nonna would not have insisted that I come with them or sulked because I wasn’t. Instead we would have kissed and hugged on the threshold of our house and waved to each other as she sat in the back seat of our secondhand Saab. And she would have seen me turn away, too quickly, from the departing car.

*

The Canberra to Sydney train trip is outrageously slow, and when you are in a hurry it sometimes feels as if more progress could be made if you got out and jogged. I decide not to go over and see my mother and sister Emily at their place; instead I’ll spend my few hours in Sydney at home unpacking my Canberra bag full of jumpers and jeans and packing my Innisfail bag full of short-sleeved cotton shirts and lightweight pants. I’ll also need to gather together enough reading material to justify to my thesis supervisor that I’m not taking a break from my studies.

The train from Canberra pulls into Central Station late and I splurge on a taxi to get home as quickly as possible. The one-bedroom apartment I share with my partner is close to the seaside suburb of Coogee. I spend the day packing and unpacking, sending emails, making phone calls and doing laundry – all the comforting little tasks that keep you from thinking too much about anything important. Then I look through the photos I have of Nonna, wondering whether to take some with me. There is one particularly important photo I consider for quite some time. It was taken in the mid 1970s with my parents’ treasured single-lens Pentax camera and now sits in a wooden frame on my bookshelf near my desk.

The photo is from the time we all lived in Adelaide. Four of us – Mum, Nonna, Emily and me – are on the front lawn of my grandparents’ house on the Esplanade at Glenelg. The photo must have been taken in winter, judging by the blue and chocolate brown skivvies we are wearing. It is a square photo, matt and faded, as if covered with a layer of dust that can’t be wiped away. It’s the kind of photo that wouldn’t exist today, that would have been deleted almost as soon as it was taken because you can’t see my face and Nonna isn’t looking towards the camera. And yet it is perfect.

In the foreground to the left, my sister Emily smiles broadly. She is advancing with toddler steps towards the person behind the camera. My father? My grandfather? No one can remember who it was. She is planning, I expect, to grab the camera out of the hands of the forgotten photographer. Sitting a few metres behind her, in the centre of the frame, is my mother. Over her brown skivvy she is wearing a chambray dress and a wide-brimmed blue hat. Her black hair is long and straight. She looks happy to be in the photo, which is surprising given she hates being photographed. I am sitting next to her in a light blue skivvy that is covering my chubby, four-year-old chest. I am looking towards the ground, my arms outstretched as if I am pretending to be a plane, but I am clearly about to launch myself up and towards my sister, racing her to get to the camera first. Then there is Nonna, kneeling behind me, her face lit up by her smile, not for the camera’s sake but for ours. She is looking at Emily, perhaps anticipating the humour of the contest between her granddaughters for centre stage and possession of the camera. This is the truest photo I have of my family, four sides of a square, all members loving each other equally in their own way.

In the end I don’t pack this or any other photos. It occurs to me that being forced to think about the past may be upsetting or tiring for Nonna. It may not be the best way for us to spend our last moments together. Instead, I take the time to walk up to the local shops to buy rosewater hand lotion from the pharmacy. I remember seeing some in Nonna’s vanity drawer once when I was a child, a tube that was almost full but didn’t look new. I guess it was a gift she thought was too fancy to use regularly. Now I want her to have something luxurious that we can share, and we can use the tube up completely in a few days if we want to.

With my chores complete, I ring my partner at his work to tell him about my train trip north. After a moment’s pause he suggests I take a plane because Nonna may die before I get there. I tell him he is wrong; the train, however slow, will get me there in time. Also, Nonna knows I am coming and she will hold on until I arrive. He thinks I should reconsider my plans given what’s at stake. I end the conversation abruptly, slamming the phone down in anger, overreacting because he may well be right.

*

The woman sharing my Sydney to Brisbane sleeper happens to be an Italian woman. She is a few years older than me, attractive, with long dark hair. In Australia on a working holiday, she has been living in Bondi, only a few suburbs away from me. She is on one of her regular mini-trips to discover different parts of the country. She tells me she loves Australia, especially the climate and the beaches. The men, though, are another matter.

‘Why do Australian men have such trouble talking to women?’ she asks me. ‘They can only talk when they are drunk.’ I laugh in agreement. She is eager to keep me engaged in an in-depth discussion about the mysteries of the Australian male but I’m not much help. I am still working them out myself, with little success. I eat my takeaway dinner of cold salad and sushi while she chats away. Then we retire early, her to the upper berth and me to the lower one.

I find it hard to sleep. As I lie on my back under stiff white sheets and rough blankets I recall childhood trips on The Overland from Melbourne to Adelaide, in which I relished the rhythm and rock of the train. It was as if the sleeper was one giant mechanised hammock. Tonight, though, I don’t sleep well at all. The train lurches and bumps at the precise moment I am nodding off, like a hand jerking me awake to deal with some emergency. Electric lights keep penetrating the cabin through gaps in the blue curtains as we speed past country towns and crossings. I start off the night feeling too cold and then end up feeling too warm, then return to feeling cold again. I don’t think much about Nonna. Instead I mourn the death of my romantic view of overnight train travel.

We arrive in Brisbane very early in the morning, that time reserved for joggers and garbos and long-distance commuters. My companion says only