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Traditions of family cooperation also remained strong among the post-war
Italian immigrants. Women and children were a critical source of labour, their
employment on family-ovmed farms and businesses on low rates of pay, being the
factor which helped many families to prosper,'" Those Australians who recognised
that the key to the Italians' success was their strong family ties and the way in which
the family unit could be used in production, shared an insight gained by earlier Anglo-
Celtic generations at Daylesford, Like their nineteenth century counterparts, post-war
Italians were also seen as successful farmers and business people, as honest and hard­
working. Italian men were considered good workers by the majority of Australian
employers; for this reason, during the war Italian Prisoners of War (POWs) were
valued by the AustraUan govemment over Gennan POWs. Italian women, who came
to AustraUa after the tum of the century were readily absorbed into the work-force as
cooks, cleaners, boarding house managers and workers in textile factories. Similar to
the women of the goldfields, however, many experienced the pain of being displaced
from their traditional roles and of losing the support of their extended families; but like
those earlier women, many faced the prospect of settlement in a new land with courage
and determination.
Another feature which Unked the women of the gold msh years with those of
later generations was their tendency to marry from within their own ethnic community:
in 1961, only 21 per cent of men and three per cent of women wed AustraUan-bom
partners. By 1976, however, these figures had increased to 51 per cent and 23 per
cent, and by 1986 to 64 per cent and 49 per cent respectively." Between 1987 and
1990, around 49 per cent of women and 47.5 per cent of men married outside their
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