The Immigrants

The poverty of postwar Europe encouraged thousands of migrants to try their luck in Australia. Italians formed a large cohort of these migrants, but many of them didn’t see their migration as permanent, rather as a chance to make some money and then return home to build a better life. The area around Myrtleford in Victoria attracted many Italians to work as tobacco growers, sharecropping, or later, farming their own plots. For many, their dreams were never fulfilled and their lives were ‘founded on homesickness, disappointment and failure’.

Moreno Giovannoni’s father, Ugo, was one of them. At his home in Tuscany, there was little prospect of making a decent living and in 1957, at the age of 30, he left his home and his young wife and son to try his luck in the ‘English Colony’. In the 1950s, it was possible to make good money growing tobacco, providing the weather was good and you could keep the bugs down. Yet for many of these lonely men, Australia never felt like home; often when they had a little money they sent for their wives and children or fiancées to join them, but the goal of returning for good was always there.

When Ugo’s wife, Morena, arrived a few years later with their son, Moreno, she found the new world harsh and lonely. Moreno went to the local school and quickly picked up English, but he mourns his Italian. Twice the family returned to Italy and twice they were pulled back to Australia. Ugo and Morena separate and their alienation is compounded.

The Immigrants is a moving and fascinating fictionalised account of the experience of migration, written with great love and compassion by the author of the extraordinary The Fireflies of Autumn. The happy story of the immigrant who arrives and finds a home and place in their new country is not necessarily always the true one.