Italian migrant lives in the Western Australian goldfields before World War II

"This research team (Sharpe, Bertola, Fitzgerald) have recently collected oral history recordings of first generation Italian migrants to the Shire of Leonora in the North-Eastern Goldfields area of Western Australia and have examined documentary and photographic material on the same subject. Our research centres on the township of Gwalia which is famously linked to Herbert Hoover who was mine manager for the British company Bewick and Moreing for a brief and unhappy year in his early twenties but later progressed to bigger things. While Italian workers were employed at Gwalia from an early period of the mine’s development, Hoover introduced significant further numbers of Italian workers to the Sons of Gwalia mine as part of a labour policy designed to bring down contract rates and to challenge prevailing working conditions. At and from about the same time, Bewick Moreing, the company that employed Hoover, increasingly employed in other mines under their control in the goldfields of WA. This ‘employment policy’ was the start of a long association of Italians from the northern alpine areas of Val Seriana and Valtellina in Italy, in particular, the town of Gorno [Val Seriana] with Gwalia. The interviews with first generation migrants allow us some insight into the experience of migrancy itself. As Templeton has pointed out the Italian experience of migrants and their families is central to historicizing the relationship between country of origin and destination. Migration historians such as Donna Gabaccia have pointed out that international migration between mining areas is under-examined and has an entirely separate history from other types of migration flow. By the 1903 Royal Commission, twenty seven percent of the workforce at Gwalia was non-British. This paper will examine the migration strategies of these Italian workers. From the oral history accounts and documentary material in the files of the Mine Workers’ Relief Fund we can gain a vivid picture of the economic background in the Italian Alps that lay behind their migration decisions. Our ongoing research on Miner’s Relief fund documents, Department of Mines and Department of Health records, and Shire rate books are helping us to understand more about the nature of the migration experience. Many of the miners had shattered hopes. Many of them were part-time gold prospectors who never managed to find a nugget or stake a claim that would have taken them away from the dust and heat. Mine work was dangerous and the costs to health were enormous. Analysis of employment structure shows that the number of Italians who did skilled/trades work at the Sons of Gwalia mine was miniscule. The Italian miners faced racism/ethnocentrism and many forms of oppression. Their pay was a means to an end – they hoped to invest in property and for their wives and families to join them once their livelihood was secure or, as Templeton notes in her analysis of the sojourner experience, to supplement the domestic/family economy in Italy and perhaps to enhance its wealth in landed property. Some were more successful than others in their property-owning ambitions and we can use photographic evidence and material remains at Gwalia to understand how these processes worked for migrants. Gwalia Museum has undertaken a large scale project to preserve miner’s housing as a means to understand past lives in the area. Our research has also revealed surprising findings about the economic lives of Italian women who travelled to the Goldfields. It has also given us insights into the informal and illegal economies that developed to provide gambling, drink and domestic services of various kinds. Gaining control of these trades led to the emergence of some of the major migrant businesses in the town. This paper will present evidence collected for the time before Italians were interned in the Second World War. Sons of Gwalia mine was the largest and most productive mine in Western Australia outside of the ‘Golden Mile’ in Kalgoorlie. It was also outstanding in continuously operating for over a sixty five year time period until it closed in 1963 (although it reopened as opencast venture in the early 1980s). Italians formed the second most important group of migrants to Western Australia (second to the British) in the twentieth century. This paper demonstrates the importance of Italian immigration to the economic life of early twentieth century Australia."