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Australia, where he found employment making wheels for buggies. He married Alice
Warner in nearby Bunbury before settling permanently in Collie. James Luigi, who
remained part-owner oiLocamo, worked for a time at Hepbum Springs becoming one
of the founding members of the Hepbum Progressive Association. When he later
moved to Hamilton, his departure was much regretted by the membership who spoke
of his generous help and tireless support he had given his community. Married to
Frances Cleary in 1921 he finally settled in Melboume where he opened a grocery shop
as his father had done many years before at Spring Creek. Naming his home Locarno,
he kept alive the memory of his Swiss heritage.*"
WiUiam Perini, before he married in 1924, performed active service in the First
World War. As had occurred during the Boer War, the comradeship which developed
between the Australian fighters helped overcome barriers of ethnic diversity. Upon his
retum to Victoria, WilUam became president of the Daylesford District Diggers, an
association for the retumed servicemen, and in 1928 was invited to perform at one of
its evening 'smoke nights'.*^ With him on the stage was his friend Emest Zelman,
whose father Albert had emigrated from Trieste in 1870 ~ long before the region
became part of Italy in 1918. Albert had come to AustraUa as the conductor of an
opera company. He raised four sons, one of whom became a violinist and later
founder of the Melboume Symphony Orchestra, and another who became a respected
landscape artist, some of whose works are hung in the National Gallery of Victoria.*^
It would seem that those Italians (like Ticino, even before the war, Trieste's cultural
traditions were strongly linked to Italy) whose works represented the antiquity and
traditions of a glorious civilisation, were readily accepted into Australia's artistic and
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