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to AustraUa, at least twelve Gaggionis arrived here from Gordevio during the peak
years of the 1850s.* Fourteen or fifteen years of age at the time of the exodus (and
hence old enough to have accompanied his compatriots) Pietro, a farmer, did not
emigrate untU several years later.* By this time six of his compatriots, including family
member Giovan Giacomo Graggioni, had retumed with news of the Colony's prospects
and its growing Italian-speaking community. Encouraged more by these kinship ties
than by desperate financial need, in 1860, at 21 years of age, Pietro had boarded the
Swiftsure bound for Australia.' Departing London on 5 March, he was accompanied
by seventeen Ticinesi passengers, two of whom were from Gordevio. Although several
members of the Graggioni clan eventually retumed to Gordevio, Pietro's kinship and
community links enabled him to integrate easily into the immigrant community and to
begin to accept Australia as his permanent home.
There is little documentary evidence of Pietro's early years in the Colony,
though he is Ukely to have headed directly for Hepbum to begin mining with his
countrymen. Having little apparent success, by 1862 he had taken up two blocks of
land along the creek there, near to where he eventually buih a small hut and began
planting grape-vines.* The earUest existing rates books indicate that in 1871 Pietro
was paying ten shiUings per annum on a house and land in Hepbum, assets which by
1875 had grovm to include a vineyard.' Maintaining his interest in the mines, he had
also begun working a turmel close to the main road in Hepbum — on land which would
eventually become the site of his new and bigger home. In 1875, fifteen years after his
arrival in Australia, Pietro considered himself sufficiently financially secure for
marriage and a family.
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