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The study concerns a group of people with similar linguistic and cultural
traditions who emigrated from a region of southern Europe to a recently established
British colony. Those from the region of Lombardy, whose people were undergoing a
process of political unification with the rest of the Italian peninsula, did not have a
strong sense of being 'Italian'. Neither did those Ticinesi, whose language and life­
style reflected those of their Lombard neighbours, regard themselves as clearly 'Swiss'.
It can more convincingly be argued for most of them that, as peasants, they identified
more v^th their villages and nearby surrounds than with the 'nations' to which they
legally belonged. Documents from as early as the sixteenth century reveal that
peasants emigrating from Mendrisio in Switzerland used only the words, // villagio
natale (the village of birth) and Italia (meaning the locality in which their villages were
situated) to signify the homeland^ while Italian men from peasant communities, who
left their homes as soldiers during the First World War, described the land which they
were defending in terms far less abstract than those of their officers: 'Per i contadini
... lapatria aveva uno spesso concreto, quotidiano, familiare e si identificava con il
propria ambiente sociale' (For the peasants ... the homeland had a concrete meaning,
the day-to-day, familiar and they identified with their own social environment).^
Similarly, a significant feature of identity formation among the Italian-speaking settlers
of Daylesford and their descendants was the appeal to their peasant culture. While it is
impossible to establish the extent to which the actions of the nineteenth century settlers
represented 'peasant attributes' ~ the ingenuity so often displayed in their new setting
is, after all, characteristic of most new settlers ~ at the level of self-identification, it is
clear that the notion of belonging to 'peasant stock', to acting in a 'peasant way', was
both real and significant to a greater or lesser extent for all the families featured in this