Download (14Mb) - VUIR - Victoria University

God and the saints, their distmst of the church's administrators had found expression
m such Bergamask (ref figure 2: Bergamo) sayings as 'pretti e polli non sono mai
satolir^^ (priests and poultry are never satiated).
Raising his children alone for two years, Gaetano eventually decided to
remarry. He was by then 51 years old and had met an Irish girl Catherine Fitzpatrick,
who was 22.'*^ Catherine had been bom to Irish parents in nearby Talbot on 8 August
1860 and brought up on a farm near Eastem Hill. As a child and a parishioner at St
Joseph's Church, she had been acquainted with Gaetano, but it was not until she was
working as a servant in Daylesford that the two developed a romantic interest. They
married on 25 September 1882, by which time Gaetano owned around 16 hectares of
land, a house, an established farm and was the father of three children (fourteen year
old James having died not long before). Catherine and Gaetano produced their first
child on 22 March 1885 and named him Edward John.
The south east comer of Mt Prospect where the Tomasettis lived was now
dominated by several hotels, St Joseph's Church and school and their own home.
Celestino attended the Mt Prospect school with several local Italo-Australian children
including Olimpia Lafranchi and Jo Cerini.'*^ The school was located one kilometre
towards Newlyn (ref figure 8) and had originally been estabUshed by the Presbyterian
Church in 1862 and taken over by the Education Department in 1873. It had been
built to accommodate 72 pupils ~ a substantial number for the day and an indication of
the area's population growth. Like most children of the time, Celestino Tomasetti (or
Charlie as he was then known) left school at the age of fourteen to find fuU-time
148