Books
Moreno Giovannoni
The Immigrants
The Immigrants is a work that shares with Edward Said a sense that exile is a condition that may be overcome for a time through strenuous, heroic effort but ultimately has no cure. Said called it “an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home”.
The delivery device for this bitter knowledge is a fictionalised account of the author’s parents, Tuscans who migrated to Australia in the postwar decades searching for a better life. It is a novel that serves as a pendant to Giovannoni’s well-received 2018 debut, The Fireflies of Autumn, whose linked tales centred on the village of San Ginese, where his parents hailed from and where the author was born.
The romance of elsewhere is inverted in these pages. The author telegraphs that Ugo and Morena Giovannoni’s life in Australia will be an epic of disenchantment. We know, almost from the outset, that the couple will separate after 24 years of marriage and Ugo’s dreams of bettering his circumstances through dogged labour will be thwarted. That much of this account will be filtered through the naive perspective of the author as a child only adds sting to the family’s circumstance.
Giovannoni leavens the darkness of his account with descriptions of the rural idyll in north-eastern Victoria to which the newly arrived family – having abandoned efforts to be “wogs at the cogs” in Melbourne’s factories or New South Wales’s steelworks – move in hopes of becoming tobacco sharefarmers.
Readers may be unaware of the significant Italian community that grew up in the pre- and postwar decades around Myrtleford in the Ovens Valley. The Giovannoni family joined a diaspora that was large enough to sustain a proper European cafe, dances and Italian film nights. The author is at his warmest in describing the natural beauty of the surrounding world, the intense and complicated labour that surrounds tobacco cultivation and those cultural mores the migrants maintained.
Yet these happy or paradisal moments are interrupted by facts on the ground. The author’s mother lives in rustic isolation with a heavy domestic load, while her husband’s superhuman efforts to make a living from tobacco are often foiled by drought or business chicanery. Though the Giovannoni family survives these difficulties, the novel’s interstitial chapters describe other migrants who do not. Several of these “grotesques”, as the author calls them, have their stories told via real transcripts but all describe people broken by their experiences.
One Italian is murdered then raped by a local man. Another kills his wife and then himself. A migrant boy is bitten by a snake, but local hospital authorities fail to administer antivenene in time to save him. A man is torn apart by an exploding drum attached to a tobacco kiln. The author’s intention in furnishing these stories is obscure at first but becomes clearer over time: madness, cruelty and hatred are intrinsic outcomes of the colonial project. This is the area where white goldminers drove their Chinese counterparts into a river in an 1850s race riot, after all. Before that it was the place where Pangerang, Minjambuta, Duduroa and Jaitmathang peoples were expelled from their ancestral lands.
This is where the personal and the political meet in Giovannoni’s account. The author explicitly uses “colony” as a label for the white world that surrounds the Italian community. These are the people who “always” fail to get the newcomers’ names right, who fetishise and appropriate Italian culture while maintaining an unspoken colour bar. The immigrant stories they do relay “are never told with love and charity. Always with humour and ridicule”. There are scant instances in The Immigrants where any neighbourly kindness or decency is shown by those of the colony. The narrator describes his childish first love as a girl whom he liked so much he almost “forgot” she was Australian. The best friend of his early years “is not like an Australian boy at all”.
This implicit critique of white Australian culture has, as its mirror, a celebration of the Tuscan. The region from which Morena and Ugo come is deep-rooted and rich. Poor country folk they may have been, but they spoke the language of Dante. Giovannoni’s loving depictions of San Ginese and his parents’ early years at home serve to highlight the arid and deracinated world – a “Sahara Desert” of cement and asbestos farm shacks with linoleum on the floors and vinyl chairs in front of the television – into which they have fallen.
All of which makes it even sadder when, after 11 years away, the family briefly returns home – and the same narrator who has observed all of the flaws of the “colony” finds himself unmoored, homesick, alienated from the ease and sociability of Tuscan village life. He will carry this sense of double exile into his second repatriation, years later, to study at the University of Pisa. It will colour the rest of his life.
Giovannoni has furnished the “love and clarity” missing from earlier immigrant stories in these pages. His parents emerge as proud, driven, hopeful characters, though damaged and finally sundered by their time in Australia. The “watchful” boy who eventually moves to the centre of the narrative describes his own, inherited hurt with precision.
Still, the vision he paints in The Immigrants, for all its eloquent retrospection, is bleak. The author gives us an almost V. S. Naipaul-like picture of a colony that is destined to always be a pallid copy of its imperial parent: a place that could only ever offer a crimped version of human potential to those who migrate there. “After all,” wrote Naipaul, “we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”
Black Inc, 304pp, $36.99
Black Inc is a Schwartz company
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "The Immigrants".
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