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Along with the support which the Catholic Church offered its post-war
unmigrants, the Italian speakers established private clubs ~ each representing a
different region of Italy ~ and other associations catering to their needs," More highly
organised and better financed than the informal networks of the goldfields, they
nevertheless reflected a similar pattem of adjustment to a new environment. In
adapting to this new environment, the post-war immigrants also sought security
through familiar pattems of behaviour and peasant survival mechanisms. Like the
colonial settlers, they had a low regard for institutionalised leaming which threatened
the basis of their cooperative family work stmctures; and the attitude which viewed
literacy among the women folk or the children as unnecessary or undesirable saw
children being encouraged to stay at home and work in the family business. In later
years, however, the Italians, especially the women, expected more for their children
and saved to enrol them in tertiary colleges. By the second generation of the post-war
immigrant (as compared with the third and fourth generation of the Daylesford settler)
Italo-Australians were graduating from universities and, during the 1980s and 1990s,
going on to highly paid professional careers or distinguishing themselves in the arts or
business. More aware of their growing influence and power whhin the community, the
Italians also sought political roles and a more active involvement in local, state and
national affairs'* ~ mirroring the community involvement of Daylesford settlers years
before.
As a resuh of the ridicule leveUed at them after the war by Anglo-Australian
workers, who felt their jobs threatened, many Italian immigrants were more diffident
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