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away the summer evenings. Crippa remained only a few years in Spring Creek before
moving to Melboume in 1878.'*
Supplying most of their own needs, and rarely travelling beyond Spring Creek
or Daylesford, the Graggionis led a Ufe of material simplicity. Apart from pot nights',
and ritual occasions associated with the Church, the children created their ovm
entertainments, becoming as inventive at this as their parents were in mnning the
farm.'^ Playing among the grape-vines in the backyard (none of the boys was so old
that he would not swing along the trellises with his younger sisters), joining in the
neighbourhood games and, on Saturdays, inviting their friends over to play with an old
punching bag in the stables, were among their simple pleasures. Sometimes they
would be permitted to accompany their father down the mine to ride along on its old
trolley. Their mother, in order to call them from the mine, would blow on a Swiss
cow-horn, one of the few artefacts Pietro had brought wdth him from Gordevio. As in
other Italian speakers' homes, music played a central role, one of LeUa's most
enduring memories being of sitting in her bedroom window and singing. A childhood
of material simplicity it, nevertheless, met the expectations of the Gaggioni children ~
indeed, of most poor children growing up in Hepbum at the end of the nineteenth
century.
For their education the children all attended the local Hepburn school which
had been estabUshed in 1864. Geography classes were Leila's favourite, the
schoolmaster often calling her to the blackboard to sketch maps of Australia or the
world, or to recite by memory the states of the United States." Ironically, she was
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