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SETTLING
While some of the Italian speakers who came to Australia in the 1850s, such as
Severino Guscetti and Carlo Vanina, maintained relative financial and social privilege,
for the majority poverty was to be their lifelong companion. Released from the hunger
and destitution of their European viUages, they were, nevertheless, confined to a Ufe of
economic stmggle and dependence on traditional peasant methods of survival. By the
1860s less than a third of ItaUan speakers had retumed to Europe* leaving the majority
to face the folly of a joumey which, instead of giving them riches, had reduced them to
further debt. It was, says Cheda:
un' awentura di disperati ingannati che non solo non si sono
arricchiti, ma che alia fine si son ritrovati piii poveri di quando
nen erano partiti.^
In their desperation, the Italian speakers tumed to the skills and occupations which had
supported them in their homelands ~ skills, for example, in farming, building,
blacksmithing and wine-making ~ and, in so doing, settled in more stable communities.
The highly mobile days of 'scouting' thus ended and a new stage began. Pascoe uses
the term 'farmers' for this stage, applying it to Itaaans arriving in Australia in the
1920s. Like Pascoe's farmers, there is evidence that the group which features in this
present study also 'advanced further into the core of Australian Ufe and culture'.' This
chapter explores the 'farming years of the Italian speakers at Daylesford: the forms of
employment to which they tumed, the growing stability of their life-styles and
re-formation into famiUes, their greater sense of ethnic identity and their interaction
with the general community which prevented them becoming an isolated enclave.
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