Creating a voice for Italian-Australians

Archie Fusillo’s story is best understood through his parents.

Migrants from the southern Italian town of Viggiano, they arrived in Melbourne in the 1950s. They arrived without knowledge of the language, the new land or its institutions, but with the determination to build a better life for themselves and their family.

Their story, and by extension Mr Fusillo’s, soon took on a local air.

“Soon after my parents arrived, they got married just up the road from the University of Melbourne – at St George’s Church in Rathdowne Street,” Mr Fusillo recalls.

“I then grew up in Carlton and North Fitzroy.”

Families like his developed a culture of hard work and sacrifice, providing their children with a hitherto undiscovered possibility – university education. 

Ambition combined with timing (the Whitlam Government abolished university fees in 1974) to make university life accessible to children of the post-War migration boom.

“I started at the University of Melbourne in 1980 and didn’t have to worry about HECS,” Mr Fusillo says.

“That was huge, because otherwise a lot of the kids of my generation wouldn’t have been able to study.”

Mr Fusillo’s connection to place strengthened thanks to his time at Melbourne. After graduation he became a teacher, while also spending a four-year stint at travel magazine Vive la vie in the early 1990s as a travel writer.

He embarked on a further career change in 1997, becoming a full-time author. 

His first novel, Sparring With Shadows was semi-autobiographical. The novel’s protagonist, David, was a first-generation Italian-Australian busy grappling with the demands of the old and new world cultures. Mr Fusillo wrote for an audience missing a complex voice that went beyond stereotypes.

“My generation never got to read about migrant kids,” Mr Fusillo says.

“It has become popular, but back then you simply didn’t read about Italian or Greek families that existed in migrant enclaves.”

Mr Fusillo is part of a vanguard of authors prepared to question certain migrant experiences.

“We have to get more depth to the conversation,” he says.

“It’s all good to laugh at ourselves and embrace the terms that were once negative and have lost their sting, but we need to move beyond that simplicity.”

He believes Melbourne’s Italian-speaking community has two responsibilities. The first is a need to embrace the ways of the new setting.

“A lot of writing has focused on various southern European communities travelling here and saying, ‘this place is so strange’,” Mr Fusillo says.

“Yet there needs to be a greater effort to integrate. There is value in looking at and embracing existing Australian culture.”

The second responsibility involves diaspora communities preserving traditions – particularly language – being lost in Italy.

“When people came to Melbourne after the World War II, they tended to move as a bunch and form a unit,” he says.

“Families socialised with people of their own region. They kept their dialects alive and passed it on to their kids, because it was the language they knew.”

While fiercely localised dialects were thriving in Australia, they withered in Italy. ‘Il miracolo ecanomico’ (‘The Economic Miracle’) of the 1950s radicalised Italian industry, with financial migration having the effect of mixing previously disparate communities.

Mr Fusillo’s upbringing preserved many of the traditions rent asunder by Italy’s economic revolution.

“Italians are fascinated by the scenario where a lot of first- and second-generation migrants have hung on to traditions and language better than they do in southern Italy,” he says.

“A quick example is that four years ago, the Viggiano authorities invited some of my generation back because they wanted to learn about the dialect.”

Connections with the past also move beyond language in Mr Fusillo’s work, focusing on ancestry and legacy, a crucial element of Italian literature, witnessed through the work of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino.

The Last of the Braves features a Melbourne teenager besotted with 15th century Roman artist, Caravaggio. Obsession with rebellion destroys the 17 year-old hero who emulates Caravaggio’s turbulent life. 

Mr Fusillo’s most successful novel, The Dons, describes the struggles an Australian boy has linking his Italian heritage to the life of his grandparents. The book looks set for Italian translation, as universal themes of death and familial love attract Italian publishers.

“Writers of young adult fiction in Australia are considered among the best in the world,” Mr Fusillo says.

“What we’re trying to do is get those authors exposed to new markets, such as Italy and the United States.”

Domestic travel however remains a priority, as Mr Fusillo focuses on speaking to school groups across Australia about writing technique. He is also a municipal ambassador for the National Year of Reading.

While Italian recognition remains important, it is the Australian journey that is dearest to him.

www.alumni.unimelb.edu.au