Page 14 - Comites Aboriginal Italian People in SA

A Postscript by Dr Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli AM
Of the Ship and the Shore: Aboriginal-Italians in South Australia
Several years ago, I bought a children’s book in Naarm (Melbourne), Shake A Leg, written by Boori Monti Pryor, a Birrigubba-Yarrabah storyteller, and illustrated by Anglo-Australian artist Jan Ormerod. In the inside cover was a world map with a two-headed snake connecting origins, coiling across lands and seas, linking Italy and Australia.
That illustration lifted off the page and coiled around my heart. I traced the snake’s path over and over with my fingers, from both directions. Under one head, pulsing under my forefinger, my Southern Italian parents boarded a ship after a war. Under the other head, they disembarked in so-called Australia where a war hadn’t ended, hadn’t been truthfully recognised and reckoned with.
From the Boot to Down Under ... coils of continuity and contradiction, connection and conflict, border crossings and colonial boundaries between First Peoples and Italian migrants.
The words of Wiradjuri writer and media commentator, Stan Grant, resonated with me as I swirled my finger over the map:
I live between the ship and the shore... In this troubled space we all live our lives ... that space where my ancestors black and white met, Irish convict settlers on the ship... ancestors standing on the shore.
It’s in this space Com.It.Es. SA has delved, drawing from the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021 Census data to produce this ground breaking collection: First Peoples with Italian heritage in South Australia. With care and clarity, it provides the statistical foundations for further truth-telling, truth-listening and truth- learning. These numbers, percentages and colourful columns are a portal to Recognition and Reclamation, a path to Reckoning and Reconciliation.
614 people ticked both the Aboriginal and Italian Census boxes. Each one of them declares they are a living record of histories and heritages of love and loss, prejudice and partnership, survival and strength. Each embodies the broader “glocal” forces of colonialism, assimilation, multiculturalism, and transculturalism.
Twenty-five years ago, historian Ann Curthoys wrote about the “uneasy conversations” still needing to be had by migrants who’d arrived with suitcases that couldn’t hold the heaviness of persecution, economic hardship, and post- arrival racism and rejection. But do Italians and their descendants also perpetuate racism and demonstrate a reluctance or refusal to confront our ignorance and complicity in the injustices inflicted on Aboriginal people? I was deeply disheartened and ashamed by how many Italians who voted NO in the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice to Parliament. I remain shocked when second and subsequent generations, having gained economic and educational privilege, forget their roots and direct racism toward ‘others’.