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community. It demonstrates how the Italian speakers of colonial Daylesford helped
shape the attitudes and values of eariy Australians, creating a momentum which would
be carried forward by other immigrant groups to pave the way toward a muhicultural
future.
As argued throughout this thesis, the attitudes and values which they help
create represented a unique convergence of 'tradhional' cultural frameworks and the
new contexts of the Australian location. Even the most self-consciously 'traditional'
cultural expressions were transformed by the new contexts, in terms of which meaning
was redefined by new points of reference. As this study has shown, negotiating
identity in rapidly-changing contexts was both a negative and a poshive experience for
the Italian speakers, whose taken-for-granted world was subjected to new pressures
and doubts. The new forms of identity which emerged in the process did not
necessarily contradict earlier identities. Rather they added to what Homi Bhabha has
called the repertoire of 'positions of enunciation'* available to the (former) Ticinesi,
As this study has shown, the newly available positions did not sever old positions so
much as transform them and give them a new significance (occasionally a new-found
reverence) in the Australian contexts.
The transformation began with the decision to leave their home villages,
FoUowing the land and sea joumey from their viUages, which for many had been a rite
of passage to their fiiture lives as immigrants, the Italian speakers drew upon viUage
and family links to assist them in finding work and a place to live. Newcomer^ were
met by relatives or fiiends as they stepped off the boats at Melboume ~ recall
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