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and only permitted the men to buy into the 1870 venture. After some time Abbondio
may have retumed to Maggia or it is possible that he died in Australia. He may also
have emigrated to the goldfields of California where other members of his family had
gone. More is known of Lorenzo, who spent a lifetime as a miner. After his arrival at
Jim Crow and his transfer to various mining sites, he eventually settied at Happy
Valley. Like Alessandro, he married an English girl, who had emigrated from London
with her parents. Jane Watson (apparently no relation to Helen Watson) gave birth to
ten children, none of whom were given Italian names ~ the decision to assign only
Anglo-Celtic names perhaps pointing to a more conscious decision, on the part of
Lorenzo, to assimilate than had been the case with Alessandro Quanchi.
At the same time, Alessandro and Lorenzo both anglicised their own names,
making them more readable and pronounceable to the wider community. By the late
1860s Lorenzo's name had been changed to Lawrence and Alessandro to Alexander.
EarUer, Alessandro's name had appeared as Alexandro on the German ship's passenger
Ust and as Alexandre during his English wife's divorce proceedings. His sumame was
also wrongly spelt as Quancki ~ which encouraged a correct pronunciation among
EngUsh speakers.^' By the end of the twentieth century, the spelling of the sumame
had been corrected at the expense of the pronunciation: Australians, including the
family's descendants, pronounced the name Quanchi with a 'ch'. This reflected not
only the lessening importance of the Italian language through the generations of the
family but also the angUcisation of their Swiss-Italian identity with the passage of time.
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