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Felix Reitano arrived in Sydney, Australia from Naples, Italy in 1896 as a young teenager. He quickly learned to speak English after a chance meeting with an equally young aristocrat from England. Felix travelled to Queensland, first to the sugarcane town of Mossman and then to Halifax, a small cane farming settlement about 100km north of Townsville. In Halifax he met and fell in love with a Scottish lass, Sarah Livingstone.
Sarah’s journey to Australia in 1911 at the age of nineteen, having grown up in a small poverty-stricken village in Scotland with limited knowledge to prepare her for what lay ahead, was also truly remarkable and was only matched in true pioneering spirit by the man she married.
The couple worked hard on their cane farm to make a good life together and they prospered over the years, rearing half a dozen children and going into various other businesses. Felix became an interpreter for the Italian community in Ingham and Halifax and he and Sarah appeared set for a long and comfortable retirement, but the Second World War broke out and Mussolini’s Fascism reared its ugly head.
Felix and Sarah’s story would have been similar to that of many pioneering families and therefore tremendously admirable, but not independently productive in the retelling. What set them apart, however, was their unusual (at that time) inter-racial marriage and the unique complications they were confronted with due to the events of the Second World War.
