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A number of Italian speakers, adopting the most common buUding method of
the Colony, built their homes entirely from timber. These houses consisted of a savm
trniber framework clad in weatherboards, horizontal overlapping timbers and a wooden
shingle roof Before the introduction of power-sawing in the 1830s,** it had been both
laborious and expensive to build these houses but with improved technology, timbers
and machine-made nails had become cheaply available. Previously the settlers had
pit-sawn an enormous quantity of wood and made every nail by hand at the forge.
Galvanised iron as a roofing material also became more popular, with many settlers
replacing their shingle roofs. The wooden shingles had been found to buckle and
shrink under Australia's hot sun and often allowed the intmsion of rain. Most Italian
speakers purchased existing timber homes, although in the 1880s Stefano Pozzi
erected his own house in Daylesford; several stone walls which surrounded his
property incorporated the Italian speakers' traditional building methods. A number of
Italian speakers, such as Maurizio Morganti at Eastem Hill, erected timber fencing,
using morticed tree tmnks with two or three levels of split timber railing. Simply
constmcted gates were swung on metal rings embedded into the ground, one of the
many items which may have been produced in the family blacksmith shop.
Along wdth the previously mentioned adaptations Italian speakers made to their
homes in Australia, some added galvanised iron verandahs to shade the house and
provide a place to sit at the end of the day. As they grew more financially secure,
famiUes also included decorative finishes on their homes, such as the omate ironwork
seen on the Righetti property at Yandoit and the neatly picketed balustrades on the
Gervasoni home. The decorative wooden eaves visible on the Morganti property
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