Download (14Mb) - VUIR - Victoria University

with her homeland. Her parents, apart from their personal loss, were forced to manage
the farm alone and to depend more on the help of the younger children, Charlie aged
eleven and Fred eight. The boys were both students at the Hepbum school, Chariie
having first enrolled there around 1868. A new school building had been erected
around 1870,^ a symbol of the tovm's growing size and stabUity (and wdth each new
building in the Daylesford region, the ItaUan speakers were reminded of the contrast
between their new home and their ageing viUages). While at school, the Vaninas had
mixed wdth many other Italian-speaking children then living in the district, among them
being members of the Borsa and Tinetti famUies.
Apart from his sons, Carlo may have been assisted on his property by his
son-in-law Andrea who, in the early years of his marriage to Luigia, appears to have
resided in the Vanina household. This economical and practical arrangement, together
with the later parcelling out of Carlo's land to his children, gave expression to the
European patriarchal tradition of clustering round the eldest male to form a large
family estate. Luigia may have given birth to her first child in her parent's home,
naming him Giuseppe after her recently deceased brother. Though this child was to die
in infancy, Luigia would give birth to sixteen children, fourteen of whom survived to
adulthood. Her second chUd Andrew arrived in 1875, followed by Frederick in
1877.^"* These, and later offspring, were sure to have been christened in the baptismal
robe which Luigia, as a child of nine, had made on her joumey to Australia.
Carlo Vanina did not live long enough to enjoy his grandchildren and ^^^e the
growth of the Vanina clan at Hepbum, dying in the same year that Frederick was born.
282