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del distacco." ^ So keen were the young men to leave the poverty and degradation of
their homelands that it was impossible to hide the elation and joy of going to a new
land. 'Veniva via se fosse anche per fare il mare apiedi' ^ was the pithy exclamation
of Giovanna Filippina, one of the few women who came to the Jim Crow mines in the
1850s. In this typically epigrammatic way she summed up the sheer determination of
her generation. The young adventurers from Ticino and northem Italy could not have
hnagined the suffering and deprivation they would endure on the joumey to Australia,
their main concem being to arrive as quickly and as cheaply as possible. For the many
Italian speakers who left their homelands in search of a better life in Australia, the
joumey was only to be the first of many trials to awaken them to the bmtality and
harshness of the path they had chosen.
It has already been noted that, in order to persuade their young men to
emigrate to Austraha, the comuni (councUs) of some of the villages of Ticino made
available loans to assist in the travel costs. This money was raised by allowing a
wholesale clearance of the forest and selling of the timber to the same speculators from
other cantons who were promoting the emigration. The travellers were advanced
several hundred francs which were to be paid back later with interest. A few of the
more wealthy Ticinesi also lent money for the passage to Australia after the promise of
a good share in the profits of all future gold sales from their borrowers.^ The travellers
thus felt well financed for their joumey and confident of finding work or gold not long
after their arrival in Australia. These loans and the duty to repay them soon weighed
heavily upon the emigrants, however, their doubts and worries finding expression in
their letters home. FiUppo Pasqualini from the Swiss viUage, Cerentino, wrote in 1859:
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