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Australia. Of Lorenzo's ten children, one died at a young age, none married Italian
speakers and they all moved away from the area of their birth.'** Only one of the
Righetti girls ever married, although intermarriage between the ItaUan-speaking
famiUes of Yandoit was relatively common, resuhing in a pool of genetic traits which
were passed from the Europeans to theu AustraUan descendants (including a condition
sometimes known as 'Mediterranean back' in which one of the spinal vertebrae is
missmg) and which, at the end of the twentieth century, a descendant of the Righettis
beUeved stUl existed in the family.'*'
The Quanchi experience of coming to Australia had been different from that of
the families featured earUer, members of whom had arrived in the early 1850s.
Vincenzo, his son and his nephews had arrived during the peak years of Ticinese
emigration to Australia and, in so doing, had entered a large and growing community
of ItaUan speakers who were both looking for work in Melboume and heading for the
Jim Crow goldfields. They had found themselves part of a large support network
which made their difficult and lonely lives a little easier: those going to the mines were
able to join partnerships or travel from town to town where they knew other
compatriots would be; friends could inform each other of new gold strikes, offer
temporary accommodation or tell about families in Ticino. When Maddalena Quanchi
arrived in AustraUa in the 1870s she settled into a large Italian-speaking community at
Yandoit where her ovm language was spoken and traditional games Uke bocce were
played. All about the Jim Crow district Italian speakers were forming communities,
often dominated by members of their own villages or regions of the Valle Maggia.
Integration into an Australian way of Ufe had become evident in the choice of marriage
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