The Grollo Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing about Italians in Australia: Shortlist 2007

In this the third year of this Prize we had more wonderful books than ever before to consider. The production values of several books were outstanding, including a new biography of Melbourne’s personaggio, Gualtiero Vaccari, and an elegant biography-cum-cookbook of Sydney’s iconic restaurateur, Beppi Polese. An entertaining mix of life and food, the latter book could be described as an example of casalinghitudine, to coin a term. The Vaccari and Polese books, in particular, reflect the growing sophistication of Australian book publication, and we congratulate the publishing houses involved.

This Prize is designed to encourage Australian writers to take more interest in our Italian heritage, and we were delighted to witness the variety of responses, fictional and non-fiction, to this invitation.

The 2007 short-listed books, as in 2006, include a work of fiction that powerfully reconstructs the lives of distant emigrants, plus a non-fictional historical story, but also take in a well-written account of a childhood in Italy as told to an Australian with no Italian background.
 
In view of recent calls by Peter Craven and others to see more of our Australian stories in feature films, we should report that this year’s short-listed books would all make excellent film scripts. They are three strong stories, deftly told.

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

Shortlist

	Chewing Gum in Holy Water: Mario Valentini’s Childhood in the Abruzzo Mountains Cheryl Hardacre & Mario Valentini (Allen & Unwin) Despite the considerable volume of Abruzzese migration to Australia - notably from the town of San Marco in Lamis - this central region has not as yet been well served by Australian writers and historians. So it is a particular pleasure to have this volume of childhood reminiscences from the Abruzzo. Young Mario is the nephew of an itinerant priest, and through his zio learns a good deal about life in the Italy of the 1950s. It was a good time, spared the horrors of war and preceding the industrialisation of Italy after 1961. Viewed from today, la cultura contadina in the 1950s appears positively collectivist. Of course, this peasant culture was an oral rather than a written culture, so this book well reflects that disappearing way of life. Ironically the appearance of comic books in some of the stories is a harbinger of what was about to happen once Italy began to industrialise in the 1960s. But for a moment in time, the 1950s represented the last flourish of Italian storytelling. The folk tales collected by Italo Calvino (1956) have given us a sense of storytelling in Italian peasant culture - these stories reawaken that oral culture. Cheryl Hardacre has put her partner’s stories in the present tense and added the agonistic element that is important to story-telling, so we get the strong sense that Mario Valentini is telling us his childhood stories personally. An excellent book and very well written, it is all the more impressive for being written by an author who herself has no Italian ancestry. She has managed to listen and learn from a partner whom she has encouraged to open up with stories of his childhood.
	The Grand Experiment: Two Boys, Two Cultures Anouk Ride (Hachette Livre Australia) The story has been told before, but it is worth the re-telling. The missionary who best understood the Aborigines of Australia, Rosendo Salvado, decided to take two Aboriginal boys back to Europe with him. The results were catastrophic. The story takes on new poignancy with the Stolen Generation controversy, and so will inform new readers about the dangers in removing young Indigenous people from their kith and kin. Salvado deserves recognition as the progressive man he was, so this book is particularly welcome at a time when once again we stumble on the path to Reconciliation. It is an interesting piece of research, well documented and offering a particular insight into the work of Father Salvado and the community of New Norcia. The story of the two young Aborigines Dirimera and Conaci is noteworthy. The book is very much an everyday account of the lives of the two boys, with little or no reference to the surrounding Italian world and culture. We are left wondering what the effect of Italy on these boys might have been.
	Madonna of the Eucalypts Karen Sparnon (Text Publishing) This is an interesting work of fiction with a lot of drama, melodrama and some suspense. The author achieves an excellent balance between the best of Italian tradition regarding 19th-century trans-oceanic migration, popular stories (see, for example, the famous song 'Mamma mia dammi cento lire') and fairy-tales, set always against a very strong religious background. In fact, the entire concept underlining the plot concerns the mysterious ways in which divine providence operates. It is about drama and destiny, how, at the end, after the most dangerous and troublesome journey, humans reach 'home'. The novel is firmly based in historical fact - there is indeed a church on the Aeolian island of Salina called Madonna del Terzito. However, no Australian copy was erected - the statue of the Madonna was not brought to Mildura, as this novel describes, but in 1929 to the Sydney suburb of Gladesville. There are other minor blemishes, such as the supposition that Italian playing cards are the same as the English, but the novel rises above such pedantry. It tells a providential story in the style of Manzoni, and its characters have real depth. Delfina astounds us with her combination of passivity and determination. Madonna of the Eucalypts astonishes us with its accurate descriptions of both the sea-girted Aeolian islands, never quite so well described in the English language, and the desert country around Mildura, the land of the block farms. The figures of the characters carry these two landscapes in their everyday walking, dreaming and talking. This is a signal fictional achievement.