Download (14Mb) - VUIR - Victoria University

meaning. This meaning informed their way of relating to other Italian-speakers, to
other inhabitants of Australia and to social change.
Drawing upon the oral testimony of immigrants and their descendants, this
thesis attempts to provide otherwise unobtainable perspectives on the past ~
perspectives which are not necessarily transmitted via conventional literate evidence.
Some of the problems faced in dealing with such oral testimony have been discussed by
Walter Ong, who claims that we are now so literate that it is difficult for us to conceive
of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate
universe. ^^ In differentiating oral and literate universes of meaning, he states that in
contrast to writing, which has the effect of reifying words, oral tradition gives meaning
to words by their performance.'^^ The difference, he maintains, is not only a difference
between modes of expression, but of actual thought processes. When people tell a
story, observes Ong, their utterances occur in a 'normal full existential context'^"
which includes gestures, vocal inflections and facial expressions. One implication of
this is that to understand oral stories independently of their contexts is not only to miss
their meaning but also to impose on them a different meaning. The imposed meaning
reflects the more analytical thought and speech stmctured by writing and characterised
by abstractions which separate the knower from the known, rather than the 'aggregate'
thought and speech of oral cultures.
It is not possible to resurrect the 'normal full existential context' in which the
Italian speakers of Daylesford invested their lives with meaning. But to be sensitive to
its role enables an appreciation of the significance of the small-scale social interaction
11