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The home on Italian Hill was sold many times during the depression years, at
one stage coming into the hands of the town mayor. Later owners restored the
property's beautiful garden, renewing its Unks with Ticino. Of the Pozzis who had
remained in Europe, Celestino produced two sons, one of whom is reputed to have
compiled a family tree dating back to 1618 '^ ~ a symboUc reuniting of the family
across continents and time. Annamaria, who lived to 93 years was, no doubt, his
greatest source of information.
The Pozzis were among the first of the Ticinese families to settle in Australia
and, as such, entered a largely Anglo-Celtic environment. Despite the pressures this
imposed, they were able, as shown in this chapter, both in their early years on the
goldfields and in their later years as business people, to maintain their cultural
traditions. They spoke in their own language, they set up support networks, they
diversified their income in a 'peasant' manner, they adapted their homes to incorporate
familiar elements and they established self-sufficient life-styles. Stefano retumed to
Ticino to find an Italian-speaking wife. For the many hundreds of Swiss and Italian
immigrants who were to come to Australia, the Pozzis helped establish an Italian-
speaking community at Jim Crow. Though life in the Colony resulted in important
changes to their traditional ways, the Pozzis continued to identify with the Ticinese
peasantry. In the section which follows, where the Morganti family is introduced,
fiirther evidence will emerge that the Italian-speaking immigrants of colonial Australia ,
in establishing their own way of life within a prevailing Anglo-Celtic society, continued
to draw from what Gramsci describes as 'a sediment of understanding about the ways
in which the past permanently marks the present'.'^
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