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By 1862, Alessandro was mining at Lucky Womans, a small goldfield near
Piggoreet. On 23 December of that year he married Helen Watson which, while not
the first such outmarriage (the Irish usually being preferred) is a rare example of
marrying outside the Catholic community. Helen Watson was an English woman then
living in Buninyong (ref figure 6). She had emigrated to Australia with her parents at
four years of age, had grovm up in the large port town of Geelong and married one Mr
Samuel Boldner. SettUng in Daylesford, where business dealings had narrowed the
divide between English and ItaUan-speaking communities, Helen had left her husband
for an ItaUan miner named BrambiUa. Obtaining work at the Manchester Hotel in
Daylesford (then owned by an Italian Joseph Basili) (ref figure 9) as a barmaid,
housemaid and dancing girl, she had later met and married Alessandro Quanchi. While
Alessandro might not have been aware that his marriage was bigamous, he did know
that his wife was non-Catholic, the couple marrying at the Buninyong Church of
England. The traditional expectation that he would marry from within his own or a
nearby village was not, therefore, met and (foreshadowing the later development of a
multi-cultural nation) he became one of the few Italian speakers to marry across both
ethnic and religious boundaries.
Following their (illegal) marriage, Alessandro and Helen settled at Springdallah,
two kilometres south of Piggoreet, where Helen gave birth to a first child, whose
arrival they did not register. On 21 September 1864, having never charged her with
bigamy, Boldner obtained a decree which dissolved his marriage to Helen. Later
Alessandro and Helen produced a second child, whom they named Serafina after her
paternal grandmother, and whose birth they did register. The certificate described
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