Polenta and Goanna

Foreword by Gaetano Rando

Polenta and Goanna and outback themes in Italian Australian writingGaetano Rando

Polenta and Goanna is the first volume of narrative published by Emilio Gabbrielli who together with his professional activity as a chemical engineer has followed an equally long and committed career as a writer, one which could potentially be brilliant were if not for the substantial institutional barriers faced by CALD (Culturally And Linguistically Diverse) writers in Australia. Some years after its initial publication, Emilio published a collection of short stories – Racconti di Fine Secolo1 – that gathered together some of his best, mostly hitherto unpublished, narrative writing. A few of the short stories in this volume, as well as a number of Emilio’s Australian poems, can be seen as significant pointers to the writing of Polenta and Goanna now available in its second edition.

Similarly to the first edition, this edition too was significantly published in Italy and not in Australia. It is the English version of the original Italian text2 which predates the SBS documentary Hoover’s Gold (2006), directed by Franco Di Chiera and narrated by Vince Colosimo. This film documents the little-known experiences of Italian migrants who were hired by an American engineer in Western Australia, J. Edgar Hoover (who was to become US President) in the early years of the 20th century to work in one of the then richest gold deposits in the world, in particular the Sons of Gwalia mine at Leonora.

Emilio, a graduate of the University of Bologna, began his writing career during his student days when alongside the study of science he found fascination in his literary studies. Most of his narrative prose, written in an elegant, captivatingly “yarning” modern literary Italian, remained unpublished until the appearance of Racconti di Fine Secolo; it quickly attracted critical interest, some short stories were awarded literary prizes, and a number were published in anthologies.

Emilio’s initial narrative work deals with post-1968 Italy, where middle-class intellectuals struggle to make sense of its complex and often contradictory economic, political and social realities.3 Travel outside Italy broadened the thematic range of his narrative – the long short story “Voglia di fare” [Where there’s a will] deals with the the traumatic impact of the poverty and deprivation endemic in South America faced by an Italian aid worker whose lack of understanding of the people leads to tragic consequences – and on migration to Australia in 1980 Emilio quickly adopted Australian themes.

What makes Emilio’s work different with respect to the themes developed in the narrative of most Italian Australian writers before him is the fascination with the outback as well as the perspective of the intellectual who has come to Australia after the main wave of Italian migration (1950-1970) and for reasons that are to some extent different. It is interesting to note in this respect that only two ‘main wave’ Italian Australian writers, Giuseppe Abiuso and Giovanni Andreoni, deal substantially with this theme while some ‘new wave’ Italian Australian writers who have been coming to Australia since 2004 have engaged with writing about the outback. One of the more relevant ‘new wave’ examples is Marco Zangari’s 600+ page Bildungsroman, Latinoaustraliana4 in which the protagonist Mattia Pascià (somewhat reminiscent of a Pirandellian Mattia Pascal) finally comes to terms with his situation of existentialist anguish as the result of an outback epiphany.

In a sense Emilio’s outback narrative can be seen as an interesting link between ‘main wave’ and ‘new wave’ writers. His first published Australian story, “Tragedia sconosciuta ad Ayers Rock” [Incident at Ayers Rock],5 relates the encounter of second-generation Italian Australian Rosa, born and bred in Melbourne, with the arcane mysteries of the Australian outback, which provokes feelings of anguished suspense and fear of the unknown. During a group tourist excursion to the famous monolith, Rosa sees a strange hitch-hiker who had joined the group plummet to his death from the summit of the rock. His body is not found and Rosa lives on doubting whether what she saw really happened, but deciding not to insist on further searches nor to report the incident to the police. However:

with the passing of time and the increasing certainty of what I had witnessed, a huge burden of guilt has remained, and for more than a year I have had this recurring nightmare in which I see that man flying free in the air and then falling to the rock below. This dream instilled such terror and anxiety . . . (p. 210)

In Polenta and Goanna, the outback takes on a completely different role, becoming a place that can promote the search for the deep and fundamental meanings of human existence and the resolution of existentialist issues. The novel grafts the historically-based story of Italians who migrated to Western Australia in the early 1900s to work in the gold mines with the ancient arcane mystique the protagonist experiences in the Australian desert, a mystique that has parallels in the protagonist’s fascination with the castle, reputedly Norman, that he came across by chance in the North African desert, which may provide a vital link with “the ‘dead hills’ in Australia, the skeleton near the high-tension pylon and my friend Nino Pezzato’s uncle”, a possible key to the unravelling of these Australian stories.

These Australian stories are imaginatively combined, providing a skillful tale of cultural adaptation and the blending that occurs with the desert environment and its original inhabitants. One significant example is the story of Angelo Bellini, whose marriage to an Aboriginal woman has led him to adopt a way of life in close contact with the desert environment. It is through his close contacts with the Aboriginal families of these Italian miners and their descendants that the protagonist, sharing a meal of spaghetti and kangaroo tail, finally comes to the realisation that:

[t]he spiritual communion I was able to have with these people, with whom I did after all have something in common, gave me a feeling of contentment . . .

… I thought I heard a human cry of recognition rising over the parched lake that night, like a challenge: a cry of solidarity with the bones turning to dust at the Norman Castle, the bones lying in the cemetery in Gwalia, the bones of Angelo Bellini soon to be laid to rest in the sand, the bones scattered in the deserts and the ‘dead hills’; even the bones of a friendly anonymous skeleton.

The engagement with the mystique of the Australian desert is a distinctive motif in Anglo-Australian literature and, in particular, constitutes a familiar archetype in the narrative produced by Aboriginal writers. To this nativistic Australian motif Emilio has added an Italian dimension and an Italian Australian myth, and has thus enlarged it beyond the geography of either Australia or Italy.

There are now approximately over one hundred active narrative writers of Italian background in Australia. These writers, along with other ethnic minority authors, have changed Australian national literature into a pluralistic one and their work represents a counter-discursive element to the extent that it functions to interrogate and destabilise hegemonic views of nation, as well as the temporal and spatial dislocations resulting from the mapping of two overlapping cultural contexts. Emilio is an integral part of this transformation. His work, together with that of other writers, contributes to the formation of a distinctive profile to Australian literary culture which like any great cultural force is never stable, never predictable and never complacent since it is always in a state of transformation and self-interrogation. In some respects it might be possible to define Australia, through the work of Italian Australian writers like Emilio, also as an Italian space, very much inscribed and described by the many voices that characterise it. This second edition of Polenta and Goanna provides a significant contribution to the ongoing discourse.

Gaetano Rando

Associate Professor, University of Wollongong