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Since the Archives Act of 1983 Australia's Second World War internees have had access to their wartime files, yet little attention has focused on whether they and their families have consulted these records, or on their responses to them. From the early 2000s historians and archivists began discussing the need for combining private oral testimony with official records as part of a wider discourse on the importance of life stories for deepening knowledge about the past. This article explores the impact of a father's official internment records on his son, through the son's sharing of memories, lived experience and his reactions to official documents, in order to provide a more complete story of his father's internment and life than either the public record or the oral testimony alone can produce. We argue that Sam Ragonesi's oral testimony, especially concerning his encounter with Salvatore Ragonesi's official records, contributes to a greater shared understanding of experiences of war on the home front by integrating social, cultural and family dimensions hidden from Salvatore's public history. In this way intergenerational experiences help both to contest the collective image of internment and create a more complex picture of the War.

This edited collection is the first of two volumes and invites the reader to enter the diverse worlds of Australia’s migrant and minority communities through the latest research on the contemporary printed press, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to our current day. With a focus on the rare, radical and foreign-language print culture of multiple and frequently concurrent minority groups’ newspaper ventures, these volumes have two overarching aims: firstly to demonstrate how the local experiences and narratives of such communities are always forged and negotiated within a context of globalising forces – the global within the local; and secondly to enrich an understanding of the complexity of Australian ‘voices’ through this medium not only as a means for appreciating how the cultural heritage of such communities were sustained, but also for exploring their contributions to the wider society.

Italian Fascism began to exert ideological demands over the communities, businesses, and newspapers of Italian migrants in Australia by the mid-1920s. In the lead up to the Second World War, the Commonwealth government enacted measures to thwart the danger of Fascist propaganda, which impacted profoundly on Italian migrant community networks and newspapers. Tracing the history of the lost Queensland newspaper, L’Italiano (1930–1941), through the official wartime files of its editors, Cesare Baucia and Cristofaro Albanese, this chapter explores how both men navigated the competing business obligations impacting on their roles, readership, and communities. L’Italiano’s anti-Fascist reputation gradually shifted towards appeasing the Fascist authorities, challenging perceptions of Italian migrant respectability and loyalty in a context of nation-building, ethnicity, and race.

The history of the printed press in Australia parallels that of other countries in building on the developments of a long chronicle of newspaper culture generally, and reflecting traditions and practices established abroad, notably from Britain and Europe. Such developments and traditions speak to the particular which, in Australia as elsewhere, was not limited to mainstream or elite enterprises. Instead, for those who launched various forms of newspaper initiatives, a myriad of cultural, Indigenous, ethnic, political, social, and often linguistic influences converged with modern innovations to serve local and minority communities. This chapter introduces the volume The Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press, and explores the foundations of Australia’s minority community newspapers and other periodicals and the scholarship which began to recognise their significance, and argues how analysis of the printed press requires a close reading, while also going beyond what is printed on the page. By approaching the histories of migrant and minority communities through the printed press, we suggest the lens of “voices” contributes to a greater appreciation of the significance of newspaper culture in the fledgling field of printed press history.

The historiography of Australian imperialism before the First World War has often neglected a context wider than the relationship with Great Britain. Yet this era also implicated non-British governments and their emigrants. Despite their small numbers, Italian settlers are significant for highlighting Italy's empire-building and Australia's struggles for national and imperial unity. Italy's foreign policies after 1901 opened commercial opportunities across its diasporic networks, which included subsidising agricultural ‘colonies’ in Australia. The contemporary discourses of sectarianism and racism voiced before Federation articulated political and popular resistance against Italian immigrants. The rhetoric shifted after Federation as state governments examined the issue of land tenure for closer settlements (small agricultural farms), appealing to an argument about serving unemployed Australians before approving foreign settler schemes. The history leading up to two Italian projects in Western Aus...

The Italian nobility has a long history tied to landownership, a dynamic example of which lies in the history of Verona from the late sixteenth century. Sweeping economic change, intellectual currents, agricultural policies, and the built heritage facilitated the rise in status of some mercantile families. Tracing the pressures facing a foreign merchant family emigrating to Venice and settling in Verona's Valpolicella reveals the importance of social integration for the family's members. Their farmhouse villa estate represents an enduring monument not only to the contemporary value of civic virtue but also to the construction of a noble identity.

Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien (edited and annotated), The internment diaries of Mario Sardi, Alphington, Vic.: Lucerne Press, 2013, ISBN 9 7806 4690 7512

This article examines the experience of Italian migrants as ‘ethnic whites’ in the period before World War I through two foreign language newspapers, L'Italo-Australiano (1905–1909) and the Oceania (1913–1915). The social history that emerges from these newspapers provides insight into Australia's national history and is complemented by views from the mainstream press. Italian community leaders used resistance and compromise to validate the whiteness of Italians, appealing to nationalistic values. The editors engaged with the polemics of Italian immigration by articulating a counter-ideology to Australia's obsession with creating a homogenous society which frequently relegated Italians to the periphery. Their attempt to promote an Italian agricultural village illustrates this ideological stance. Its failure to take hold in the manner they had envisaged suggests the contradictions inherent in the processes of nation-building, especially regarding the discourse of whiteness. Italians were central t...