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VANZETTA
On 27 November 1964, Ferdinando Dionigi Vanzetta celebrated his 100th
birthday in the Daylesford hospital. He and his brother Osvaldo had arrived in Australia
over 70 years earlier, two of only nine Ticinesi to emigrate to the Colony during the
1880s.* The decade brought to an end the chain of emigration which had foUowed the
gold msh exodus ~ a chain which had united families and reinforced the strength of
immigrant communities in Australia and America, Among the last of the immigrants to
arrive at Jim Crow, the Vanzettas reaped the benefits of the 'scouting' and 'settling
years during which their compatriots had stmggled to make a living. They found
well-established, if informal, networks of support and a community bolstered by the
strength of its village and kinship ties. Most of the immigrants (including some
previously considered in this study) were married and raising large numbers of
offspring. They were well established in businesses or supporting families in a
'traditional' life-style which still shared many peasant attributes. The Vanzetta story is
interesting in that by this time Italian speakers were entering a community created by
their immigrant compatriots: a community adapted to the demands of a foreign culture
but clinging to its own language and traditional ways. At the end of the nineteenth
century, it was a 'melting-pot' of newly arrived immigrant, well established settler and
second generation Italo-Australian ~ in short, the Italian-speaking community as it
entered the twentieth century ,
Ferdinando Vanzetta was bom in Biasca in 1864, the eldest of seven boys and
one girl, several of whom died at an early age,"^ His father Aquilino was a contadino
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