Download (14Mb) - VUIR - Victoria University

would labour on the farm, his pants tied beneath the knees with bowyangs: designed
to keep out snakes and insects, these ties were an acknowledgment of the
inappropriateness of the European dress and a small material pointer to an emerging
Australian culture. In his old age, Gaetano went for walks in the morning and rested in
the afternoon. He gave up his morning meal and ate only once a day. To some
observers, his final years were perhaps seen as having regained the regularity and
predicability of a 'peasant' existence.
The outbreak of war in 1914 however, intermpted the simpUcity of Gaetano's
life by creatmg ethnic tensions which, despite a British and Italian alliance and Swiss
neutrality, were directed at the settlers of Daylesford. When Celestino's eldest son
enlisted,*'* it was suggested that Celestino change his name from Tomasetti to avoid the
threat of anti-foreign prejudice. Celestino, who was proud of his name, refused to do
this but it was curious that, after 60 or more years in the Colony, the Italian speakers'
identity and sympathies were so little understood in the general community ~ at least
at times of such xenophobic passion. Graetano died of heart failure on 23 September
1916, after refusing to see a doctor until he was near death (possibly a reaction to the
alienation of deaUng with English-speaking doctors during his first wife's illness). He
was 85 years of age.
Since his arrival in Australia, Gaetano had seen Victoria grow from a colony of
gold miners and tent dwellers to a rich and industrialised state of a federated Australia.
He had joined his compatriots in becoming part of that Australia without, at the same
time, losing the sense of his own cultural identity. At the Swiss National Day
153