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In 1957, a young woman from a small village in Calabria, Italy, boards a plane to Australia. She has never been on a plane and speaks not a word of English. There are no Italians on her flight, but there’s a young Frenchman sitting next to her. He doesn’t speak Italian, but with her smattering of French they attempt a conversation. He asks how old she is and where she is going. She signals with her hands that she is 17 and says “Australia”. He is shocked and asks “why?”. She holds up her hand and points to her wedding ring.
The young woman is Carmela Rocca, one of the thousands of Italian proxy brides who migrated to Australia in the postwar years to join husbands they knew only from photographs. Because Rocca can’t arrive as a single woman, she has already “married” her proxy husband – in her case, her brother – in a formal wedding ceremony in Italy. By the end of her flight, she has gone from being a carefree teenager who had planned to become a teacher, to being a wife in a new country.
“Thinking about it today, it seems a strange madness,” Rocca, now 85, tells me by phone from her home in Melbourne’s north-west. “But, in those days I didn’t think about all these things, because I was too young. I didn’t think about how my husband thinks, or what kind of habits he has. I didn’t think about any of this. I married adventure.”
During Carmela Rocco’s Italian wedding, her brother stood in for the man she was heading to Australia to meet.
Sixty-eight years later, she is still married to Vincenzo, and they have six children. Many proxy marriages crumbled when the women arrived in Australia to find that their husbands were much older than their photos suggested. Rocca was one of the lucky ones – her husband was just as he appeared in the photo with which she had fallen in love.
Australian suburbia, however, was another thing altogether: “I imagined a beautiful city like in Italy, and instead when I arrived in Brunswick I didn’t like it at all. It made me feel so nostalgic, so melancholy. All the doors were closed. The Australians stuck to themselves, and we stuck to ourselves.”
Rocca is one of a succession of Italian women who feature in the documentary Signorinella: Little Miss, screening across Australia as part of the upcoming Italian Film Festival. The documentary pays tribute to these women who helped shape contemporary Australia, doing the grunt work on farms and in factories, with subsequent generations launching businesses in fashion and hospitality, and entering the worlds of media and politics. With immigration again in the spotlight, the film is a timely reminder of migrants’ significant contributions to Australia’s economy and culture, and the prejudice and hardships they have endured.
The documentary is written, directed and produced by the same filmmaking trio who brought the box-office hit Lygon Street: Si Parla Italiano to Australian screens 12 years ago – Jason McFadyen, Angelo Pricolo and Shannon Swan. Signorinella is another self-funded labour of love, made on a shoestring budget of $250,000, which the Italian community helped to raise.
“I’ve had many films that have gone through the Screen Australia system,” says Swan. “But when you have a community that gets behind you, and you can have the money almost instantly, it means you can start instantly, and in some ways, we were up against the clock. These women were getting older ...”
I wonder though whether there’s an expectation to tell a story in a more positive way when a community is funding it? (Lygon Street, which featured a charming Mick Gatto, reputed boss of the notorious Carlton Crew, was criticised by some for appearing soft in its portrayal of Melbourne’s underworld.)
Swan counters: “As a filmmaker, I’ve always wanted to tell positive stories whatever the subject. I also think they’re a lot more entertaining, to tell you the truth.“
As for criticisms of the earlier film, Pricolo says: “You can’t predict how Mick Gatto’s going to act … he was charming, it’s not something that we orchestrated, and we weren’t going to distort it for the film.”
In Lygon Street, a certain male bravado prevailed, including a hilarious squabble over who was responsible for importing the first coffee machine into Australia. The macho humour and swagger made for entertaining viewing, but in Signorinella the women’s humility and honesty bring emotional force to their stories.
The documentary is geographically broader in scope too, telling a larger story of Italian migration, stretching from the sugarcane fields of Far North Queensland to Melbourne’s bridal-wear hub of Sydney Road, Brunswick. Famous names pop up, including politician Franca Arena, who helped found the Sydney radio station 2EA (the EA stood for “Ethnic Australia”), a precursor to SBS; singer and performer Tina Arena; the late fashion designer Carla Zampatti, and her daughter, independent MP Allegra Spender; and wedding dress designer Mariana Hardwick, whose eponymous building still stands in Sydney Road.
As an “ethnic Australian” who grew up coveting a Mariana Hardwick bridal gown, I was surprised to learn that Hardwick was in fact born Mariana Boggio, and duly christened “bog face” at school.
Carmela Rocca and Mariana Hardwick on Sydney Road, Brunswick, home to Hardwick’s bridal-wear empire.Credit: Justin McManus
But it’s the “neighbourhood heroes”, as Swan calls them, who leave the deepest impressions, women such as Mary Marino, the film’s incredibly youthful 99-year-old, who is now 100. Marino arrived in Australia in 1934 to join her father and three uncles on the sugarcane farms of Innisfail, and wanted to turn right back.
Italian women on their way to postwar Australia.
“The young Australians didn’t treat us very nicely. They called us dagos and threw stones at us. It was very hard, because we were coming from a place where we were loved,” Marino says, in one of the film’s most heart-rending lines.
The situation worsened when Britain went to war against Germany and its ally Italy, then under the control of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Italians living in Australia were automatically deemed enemies and fascists. Marino’s father and three uncles were among the thousands of Italian men who were interned.
“They didn’t even know what fascism meant,” Marino says in the film, stumbling over the very pronunciation of the word. “They had no idea why they were being interned. They did nothing else but work and look after their families.”
With the men in internment camps, the women had to take over the farms. And so, the 14-year-old Marino began driving an eight-tonne truck, without a licence. “I tell you, I bumped into a few trees,” she says.
Italian women worked in Queensland’s sugarcane fields after their men were interned during World War II.
Italian-born, UK-based actor Greta Scacchi narrates Signorinella in her distinctively melodic tones. Her voiceover creates a neat link to Lygon Street, which was narrated by Anthony LaPaglia, Scacchi’s co-star in the popular Australian film Looking for Alibrandi, based on the novel by Melina Marchetta.
Greta Scacchi, Pia Miranda and Anthony LaPaglia in Looking for Alibrandi.
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Speaking from her home in Sussex, Scacchi admits that when the filmmakers approached her, she wasn’t convinced she was the right person for the role.
“I’m not really an Italian immigrant of the Signorinella kind,” Scacchi says. “I know a lot, and I’m curious and fascinated and in awe of the courage of these people, but I came along in a much more privileged way.” Scacchi, the daughter of the late Italian artist and art dealer Luca Scacchi, migrated to Australia from England in 1975, with her mother Pamela Risbey, a dancer, and her stepfather Giovanni Carsaniga, who had been appointed Visiting Professor of Italian at the University of Western Australia for two years (he went on to work at La Trobe University and Sydney University).
Expecting a world of Skippy, sharks, and Barry McKenzie, they arrived to find thriving markets with big bunches of fresh basil and vegetables called by their Italian names – melanzane and zucchini; Italian cheeses such as mozzarella, ricotta and pecorino were readily available.
In England, Scacchi had always felt “foreign”, but in Australia, she felt at last that she could belong.
“I arrived in Australia at 15, and apart from the first days of being teased mercilessly at my school in Perth for being a ‘bloody Pom and dingbat’ – can’t get worse than that – I just felt very much as if we all had an otherness,” Scacchi says.
Italians changed Australia cuisine for the better, but their children sometimes struggled with schoolyard intolerance.
I ask which story in the documentary moved her the most, and Scacchi points to Celestina Mammone, 94, who recounts how she would dump her thick Italian sandwiches into the bushes on her way to school to avoid being mocked for the contents of her lunchbox.
“When I was growing up in England and had my girlfriend come over to play, it got to the stage where she would never want to stay at mealtimes, because we didn’t have fish fingers, we had a whole fish, with eyes and a mouth and a tail and bits and bones and she was absolutely terrified,” Scacchi says. “And when we had soup, it wasn’t Heinz soup out of tin, it was a proper minestrone with some spinach in it that look like flying rags … girlfriends were just completely freaked by what we ate. So, I was nearly in tears when that lady was describing how she was throwing her doorstep sandwiches in the bushes.”
The Australia Mammone migrated to in 1937 was a very different country to the one Scacchi encountered almost 40 years later. When Mammone arrived, the White Australia policy was still in place, favouring fair-skinned migrants from Britain. In the film, Mammone (who died in July) recounts how the taunts she faced at school chipped away at her self-esteem: “I didn’t like my skin, I didn’t like my black hair, I didn’t like my name, I didn’t like anything. I thought I was awful.”
It’s a terribly moving moment. Even so, the film’s over-arching mood is one of resilience.
“It’s almost as if the women didn’t want to harp on about the hard times,” says Pricolo. “They were actually being quite stoic, and that’s the story they wanted to tell, of working through the barriers, breaking down the barriers, and look where we are now.”
Signorinella: Little Miss charts the impact of Italian women on postwar Australia.
Some emotional wounds, though, took decades to heal. When she was in her late 40s, Carmela Rocca returned to Italy to address an emptiness she had felt for 30 years.
“I needed to go to sort myself out,” she tells me.
After three months in Italy, she realised that what she was searching for no longer existed: “I returned with a sense of peace, and I accepted my life in Australia.”
I ask Rocca how she would feel if one of her own daughters had told her that she was off to a foreign land as a proxy bride. She laughs heartily and says, “No, no, no, absolutely not!”
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Signorinella: Little Miss screens as part of the Italian Film Festival, Sydney, September 18-October 15, Melbourne, September 19-October 15. The festival also includes a 4K restoration of Looking For Alibrandi. italianfilmfestival.com.au
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