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of the times. Desphe these racial tensions, Italians continued to arrive on AustraUan
shores in the late nineteenth century, fishermen from Italy's southem regions of Sicily
and Puglia, building up strong communities on the southem tip of Westem Australia.*'
In 1891, Italians from Lombardy and Piedmont arrived in Queensland to work the cane
fields, the last major immigrant wave from Italy that century.*"
Between 1905 and the outbreak of the First Worid War in 1914, some 390,000
new settlers arrived in Australia, principally from the British Isles.** The
Commonwealth Govemment, anxious to maintain Australia's 'racial purity',
estabUshed the mles for chizenship in the NaturaUsation Act of 1903. Under this Act,
which did not apply to natives of Asia, Africa or the Pacific Islands (except New
Zealand), all residents previously naturalised under Colonial Acts were regarded as
having been naturalised under the Commonwealth Act.** Reactions to Italian
immigration were mixed as Anglo-Australians tried to reconcile their image of Italy as
a nation of artists and musicians with that of the apparentiy ilUterate peasants then
arriving on Australian shores in search of work. (Knowledge of the ItaUan-speaking
settlement at Daylesford was still limited at that time and chiefly confined to hs
regional boundaries) Many of the wealthy, who traditionally decorated their homes
with Italian art, made a distinction between two types of Italians ~ those of the north,
who were tall, fair-skinned and educated, and those of the south, who had dark skins,
stocky buUds and were less educated. In the oft-quoted words of the 1925 report of
the Ferry Royal Commission into immigration:
[The] northern Italian is a very desirable class of immigrant. He is
thrifty and industrious, law-abiding and honest ,., and is much superior
to the southem Italians and the Mediterranean races, *'
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