Grollo Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing about Italians in Australia: Winner & Shortlist 2009

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

Winner

The winner of the 2009 Grollo Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing about Italians in Australia is:

• Death in the Mountains
  Lisa Clifford (Macmillan)

Shortlist

	Death in the Mountains - WINNER Lisa Clifford (Pan Macmillan) The world of the Italian peasant, hundreds of years in the making, is difficult to describe to the modern reader, as it is overlain with the memories and misconceptions that are mixed up in the migration process. In Death in the Mountains, Lisa Clifford intricately re-creates an almost forgotten world of a rural Italy, a world of peasant mezzadri (sharecroppers) governed by poverty, hard work, frugality and resourcefulness in which adversity is sometimes paradoxically mediated by both religion and superstition. The key factual events, particularly the murder of the family's paterfamilias, Artemio Bruni, are located within a vivid reconstruction of the occluded world inhabited by these mezzadri. The details are astonishingly good, based on careful interviews with the descendants of Artemio and Bruna and their contemporaries, now very old people living on the margins of an Italian region better known for its glamorous villas and majestic urbanscapes. By drawing readers into the world of the Italian mezzadro peasant the story of the Bruni family, Clifford provides insight into the values, attitudes and ways that helped define the Italian peasantry and which subsequently moulded the lives of Italians both in Australia and Italy.
	Neither Here nor There: Italians and Swiss-Italians on the Walhalla goldfield 1865-1915 Annamaria Davine (Italian Australian Institute) The bushfires of Black Saturday remind us how hard it is to make a living in the forests of Gippsland. In the 1939 bushfires the trevisani of Cooper's Creek were forced off the land and many, including the Grollos, came to Carlton. Annamaria Davine brings a closely grained understanding of this population to bear on some of the key debates in migration history. She argues that it is time to move on from the broad-brush push-and-pull analyses of an earlier generation of immigration historians and to concentrate on groups of real people, seen close up. Overall this is an excellent book that uses a specific small collectivity of Italian-speaking people on the white frontier to understand the big question of the extent to which this society was permeable for those who were not Anglo-Celts.
	And Be Home Before Dark Roland Rocchiccioli (Hardie Grant Books) An evocative autobiography/memoir of a childhood lived in the remote town of Gwalia in the goldfields of Western Australia where the Sons of Gwalia mine attracted workers from all different walks of life from around the world. Indeed the author creates an image of a place populated by an often transient population but at the same time of an inclusive community where ethnicity is itself an integral part of the landscape. Young Roland describes these people with the pop-eyed wonder of a young boy. It all ends when he goes to the city for schooling at 13. This book's open-endedness will resonate with many whose childhood contains unresolved mysteries.