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THE EMIGRANTS
The people of northern Italy and the Italian-speaking cantons of Switzerland
emigrated to Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century as much due to
events taking place in their own countries as those taking place in Australia. The
extreme poverty of their mountain villages combined with political upheaval brought
about the need to seek drastic solutions to their problems ~ which emigration to the
Australian and American goldfields seemed to provide. This chapter will define the
group of Italian speakers who came to the goldfields, demonstrating that they were not
only northem Italians but also people from the Italian-speaking cantons of Switzerland:
Ticino and Poschiavo. The chapter will outline the particular set of circumstances
which persuaded the Italian speakers to leave their homelands and it will describe the
Australian goldfields of Jim Crow to which they looked as a temporary solution to
their problems. Finally, it will describe how the Italian-speaking immigrants,
experienced in a village culture, would be ill-equipped to cope with the inhospitable life
of the Australian goldfields.
The Jim Crow goldfields represented one of the last hopes for the Italian
speakers. It was here, in the auriferous rich central highlands of the Colony of
Victoria, that they expected to reap grand fortunes and return to their families wealthy
men. The ranges and creek around Daylesford (ref figure 6) had been named Jim
Crow for reasons still speculated upon at the end of the twentieth century: some
claimed that Captain John Hepbum, one of the area's earliest settlers, had chosen it
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