The Grollo-Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing about Italians in Australia: Shortlist 2005

Judges
Robert Pascoe (Convenor), Piero Genovesi and Adriana Nelli

Martino’s Story
Lyn Chatham
Peter Bruno
This book gives the reader an interesting insight into the life of an Italian Australian family. The fact that this volume is more interested in a fragmented collection of memories rather than in the accuracy of the stories is typical of this literary genre.

The author describes her conversations with Martino Bruno, living in Winchelsea, western Victoria. Her own background has some similarities with his, enabling her to overcome her initial shyness with him and to get to quite intimate details about life in the old Italy.

The technique in the book of trying to describe the interviews themselves – the details of his voice, what he is wearing, and what is going around them as they talk – gives this book a sense of connection with the oral culture which Martino Bruno represents. It is a spoken culture, this cultura contadina, and to transfer it onto the printed page requires attention to these ambient details. The theorist Walter J Ong elaborated on this question of how spoken and written cultures differ in their narrative styles. This book is an interesting attempt to bridge the two cultures.

Per l’Australia: The Story of Italian Migration
Julia Church
The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Publishing
This is an excellent ‘coffee table’ book, much needed and without any doubt the best ever pictorial collection produced about Italians in Australia. The emphasis is more on the dozens of splendid photographs than the text accompanying them.

The production values in this book are of the highest quality, a credit to the Miegunyah Press. The photographs have reproduced with care and an attention to their status as artefacts. The use of stipple, shading and bleeding in the printing process means that each photograph feels as if it is ‘really’ there, stuck to a community photo album. Similarly the other images are equally real, such as the Cinema Adelphi film poster, the school report card and newspaper clippings.

All the classic photographic images are here, including Domenico Trimoli cobbling his shoes at Erica, the canecutters of Halifax, Rinaldi’s Wine Hall, Bruno Grollo’s 1946 Christmas and the Mattei figurine makers. These images have passed into the historical canon, having been reproduced in previous contexts.

An unusual inclusion is the two-line obituary from the Australian in 1825 to ‘Mr Joseph Tuzo’, the Italian on the First Fleet whose identity is contested.

There is a natural bias toward Victorian images, as the book represents the best of the photographic collection of Melbourne’s Co-As-It, but the book purports to represent the entire Australian experience.

A Spoonful of Zucchero
Kate Taylor
Little Red Apple Publishing
In this book the author succeeds in presenting the reader with the human face of a document, taking us through time and space to encounter the characters of a tragedy, in a segment of life which progresses from darkness and despair into light and hope.

The work is relevant, well-written and engaging. In our opinion the ending of the story is splendid. Kate Taylor proves herself to be a fascinating storyteller.

Novels depicting the Italian experience on the North Queensland canefields have been appearing since the 1920s. There are also numerous coming-of-age stories that offer an account of the immigrant child’s adjustment to Australian life and conditions. A Spoonful of Zucchero combines these two themes and does more besides. Through the eyes of a 10-year-old we are taken into a distant and strange world that is both believable and also insightful for its depiction of the cross-cultural reality in the early years of the Commonwealth. An immigrant boy detached from his immediate family must adjust himself to the larger and chaotic world. There are many nice touches – perhaps our favourite was the farewell corroboree given to the boy and his kanaka friend, partly because it mirrors (perhaps unwittingly) the festa d’addio, which was so much a part of the emigrant experience in this period. 

In general, we wish to compliment the donors and organisers of this new section, as it will undoubtedly encourage Italo-Australians to read and write more about their heritage.