The immigrants by Moreno Giovannoni

Giobannoni’s genre-defying book presents a fictional account of an Italian migrant community in rural Victoria, ‘as he remembers it’. At times like a memoir, he tells of the people around him as he grew up at 'Mitrefo' and 'Bafaloriva', but there are also times when we hear the voice of his determined mother Morena, the one who defied her mother-in-law with a broomstick. The Italian migrants came to this ‘English colony’ in the 1960’s from many different parts of Italy, each with their own dialect, to make ‘a better life’, and turned their energy and hard labour to whatever work was required to make money and build their future. For many it was the tobacco growing industry.

But for many it did not eventuate in a ‘better life’. The book is divided into seven parts, and each part prefacing Giovannoni’s childhood memories opens with a ‘grotesque’, an original account of some horrific circumstance that befell others along the way, people who were also a part of the boy’s community. The first is the shocking story of Luigi whose head is blown to pieces when the petrol drum used in the tobacco curing process explodes decapitating Luigi and scalding his coworkers. For others there is violence, murder and necrophilia, suicide, fatal gun accidents, deadly snake bites, and madness. Somehow the narrator’s family survives these challenges in the new country, but is not left unscathed, as the parents separate, leaving the boy wondering what was really happening between them.

The stories are haunting; I’m sure there will be at least one that will resonate long afterwards with each reader. These are real people’s lives that were given in an often hostile country, labouring alongside family, friends and community. Come for a better life, ‘they must die to find peace’. Their stories are glossed over in history books. Giovannoni’s book records what it was like, a truly ‘fabula mirabilis, or, a wonderful story’, one of heart-breaking beauty that can not leave you untouched.

Themes: Italian community, Migrant stories, Tobacco industry, Labour, Sacrifice, Hardship.

Helen Eddy