SYDNEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR From Pasta to Pavlova

Press, 2 June 1977, Page 7

SYDNEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR From Pasta to Pavlova

For a year Mrs Rina Huber, a surgeon’s wife living in the well-to-do area of Point Piper in Sydney’s generally well-to-do Eastern Suburbs, travelled to Leichhardt a rather lessfashionable suburb in the inner west.

In eight Italian homes there she would help with the washing up and cleaning, the shopping, picking up the children from school, going to the hospital and the general daily round. Then she decided she must go to Griffith. Sydney Italians, she said, talked so much about Griffith that she had to see what was so wonderful about it.

She spent four months there living on farms with four Italian families — and found what she calls “a warm active community

where everybody interacted.” “And naturally I used to go to all the weddings, parties and christenings,” she says.

Altogether Mrs Huber spent two years and a half in “participant observation”

studying Italian settlers in ! Australia for her master’s degree in anthropology. She [is sociology lecturer at the New South Wales Institute of Technology’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Her thesis completed she decided to change it a little and make it more readable.

Now it has just been published as a book, launched by the N.S.W. Minister for

Education (Mr Bedford) who described it as “a valuable contribution to sociological I literature.”

Mrs Huber was born in

’ Palestine, lived in Italy for > three years and came to - Australia as a 10-year-old. i She speaks fluent Italian — otherwise, she says, she

could not have done the study. As a book the study has a

title that would never have found its way to the top of a scholarly thesis. She has called it “From Pasta to Pavlova” a title, she explains, that is meant to be neither smart nor flippant. It came from something

an Italian woman said to her and struck her as the best illustration of how migrant

expectations and lifestyle change in a new country. “In the early days,” said

the Italian woman, “we were glad to just have pasta and minestrone. Now our girls go in for pavlova competitions.”