Sweet 'n Sour

Oil lamp brought to North Queensland by Genoeffa Barbera in 1915
Jennie Di Blasi at age three, Tatura Internment Camp Group, Vic., 1942
Turtle-shaped trinket box carved from mallee root by Carmelo at Loveday
Trinket box made for Jennie from scrap wood by Carmelo, about 1943
Jennie Di Blasi, 1999
Plaster of Paris head of Jennie, aged three years, sculptured by Giovanni Fontanella at Tatura, about 1943
Giovanni Fontanella and Jennie Di Blasi become acquainted again in 1999
Giovanni Fontanella in 1999, re-united with the sculptured head of Jennie Di Blasi which he created while interned

Carmelo Barbera from Fiumfreddo, Italy, had no experience of the land or of growing cane when he leased his first piece of land in Mossman in 1915. He had migrated to Australia in 1913. Carmelo worked as a barber and cane-cutter in Halifax for two years, before sending for his wife Genoeffa and their four-year old daughter, Venera Carmela (Enna). The family settled in North Queensland and Carmelo struggled to farm for 10 years.

Genoeffa and Enna lived with Carmelo in a corrugated iron farmhouse. Amongst the belongings they had brought with them were vegetable seeds and they busied themselves planting the seeds and keeping fowls. Enna’s memoirs describe a different lifestyle to the insular village life they had left behind in Italy:

There were two seasons – the wet and the dry. The corrugated iron roofs leaked in the tropical downpour, the floors were made of earth with sugar bags for mats, the furniture was made of kerosene boxes hidden under frilly cotton covers.

Due to the inexperience of Carmelo and his partner, Mario Rivecchione, the Mossman farm did not adequately support the family. Carmelo soon bought a small sugar farm in Ramleh, again in a partnership. The ground was infested with cane grubs and the first harvest only produced 30 tonnes of cane. Carmelo sold his share and the family spent the next 20 months living in cane barracks while Carmelo worked as a labourer. They learned to cope with floods, cyclones and isolation. Enna’s memoirs describe the cyclone in March of 1918:

I was seven years old and terrified … [we] took refuge under the floor of the main house. It stood about three and a half feet off the ground. We listened to the wind roaring around us. The rain poured down in sheets. We stood in a foot of water with more rain coming through the floorboards. It was pitch dark relieved only by the occasional flash of the torch of one of the men. We stayed there huddled together in the cold, the dark and the wet all night not knowing if we would be swept away by the wind or washed away in the flood.

When dawn broke we saw a flattened landscape. Nothing was left standing. No houses, no trees, no cane. The whole of the Innisfail district was like this … When the water receded we started to search for what we could find. Because my hands were small I was able to dig into tiny crevices and drag things out…

By 1927 the family was successfully farming their property in Moresby on Daru Creek.

In 1932 Enna married Francesco Di Blasi, a recent immigrant. Their two daughters were born in North Queensland – Josephine in 1933 and Jennie in 1939.

Between 1940 and 1942, co-inciding with Italy’s entry into World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbour, many Italians from North Queensland were interned. Forty-three percent of the state’s resident male ‘enemy aliens’ were interned compared to only three percent in Victoria. Naturalisation offered little protection because naturalised British subjects of enemy origin could be subject to the same orders as ‘enemy aliens’. Any respect and acceptance Italians had earned through 50 years in North Queensland was ignored.

Carmelo, naturalised in 1915 and a resident of 27 years, was interned at Loveday, South Australia, in November 1940.

In early 1942, Francesco, Enna, Josephine and Jennie were interned at Tatura, Victoria. Jennie was three years old. Carmelo joined them there in 1943. He made many artefacts while interned in Loveday. The trinket box with the horseshoe-shaped lid has a carved inscription A Gene Dal Nonno that translates as To Jennie from Grandpa.

Genoeffa, old and infirm, was left alone not knowing for some time where her family had been taken or what was happening to them. She never recovered from the experience.

The family returned from Tatura at Christmas 1943 to an unattended and overgrown farm. They had to start all over again. On their retirement, Carmelo and his wife Genoeffa handed this property to their daughter, Enna, and her husband, Francesco. The Di Blasis continued to work this farm until they retired to Brisbane in the late 1950s.