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Following the influx of Ticinesi and northem Italians into Daylesford in the
1850s, no fiirther significant numbers of Italian-speaking Swdss arrived in Australia,
fiiture Italian-speaking immigrants mostly coming (after the Second Worid War) from
the southem regions of Italy, fleeing a life of poverty and poor job opportunities. The
first sizeable group of Italians arrived on Australian shores in the 1880s from the
northem region of Veneto. The survivors of a faUed New Guinean colonising
expedhion of the Marquis de Rays, they settled near Woodbum in New South Wales,
in an area which came to be known as New Italy.' By the end of the nineteenth
century many of the immigrants who had arrived in Australia during the gold msh
years had begun settling in factory jobs in the larger urban centres where a fear of
foreign labour taking work from Australians began to gather strength.* New South
Wales and Victorian politicians wamed that there would be no place for 'Asiatics or
coloureds'' in Australia, lending fuel to a fire of racial discrimination which had been
gradually building since early white settlement, both through fear of the aboriginal
population and resentment of the Chinese success on the goldfields. It culminated in
the introduction of a 'White Australia Policy' which, based upon the 'Immigration Act'
of 1901, introduced a dictation test which effectively excluded non-Europeans from
entering Australia." It was stiU finding approval in 1919, when the then Prime
Minister William Morris hailed the 'White Australia Policy' as the greatest thing the
nation had achieved.** Even at the outbreak of war with Japan, Prime Minister John
Curtin expressed hope that Australia would, 'remain for ever the home of the
descendants of those people who cai.:e here in peace in order to establish in the South
Seas an outpost of the British race',*'^ reasserting the pervading Anglo-Celtic prejudice
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