Dark side of migration

Press, 7 March 1987, Page 23

Dark side of migration

Luck Without Joy; A Portrayal of a Migrant. By Alfredo Strano. Translated by E. P. Burrows. Fremantle Aria Centre preaa, 1986. 151 pp. $22.95. (Reviewed by Ruth Zanker). The generation born in Australia of post-war immigrants has begun to produce its own literature. Their parents were too busy building a new life and surviving in a raw new country.

Some of the work emerging is interesting simply because it records social history of the ethnic groups "outside” the vegemite-and-meat-pie local culture. It also provides a balance to the glorious paeans to "New Australia" churned out in the documentary news-reels of the period, Alfredo Strano, born in Reggio Calabria, educated in the University of Western Australia, bridges both worlds. His "Luck without Joy: A Portrayal of an Immigrant" is the biography of Ezio Luislni who, in spite of amassing great wealth In Western Australia, never really escapes the cultural imperatives of his povertystricken childhood in Umbria, He left Umbria, In Italy, In 1908 to meet his father who had left to make his fortune years before, He found his father down and out and his compatriots despised and ill-treated. Wealth became his defence against the difficulties of immigration and the book is as much about loss as gain. It is painful for an Australian to read accounts of anti-"dago" riots in Kalgoorlie during the Depression — life was tough on the worker whatever nationality — and the record of Italian harassment and internment in the period of Mussolini's rule makes difficult reading. Certainly the history of immigration Is more complex than the planners ever dreamed.