Polenta and Goanna

Author’s Preface

Author’s PrefaceAfter emigrating to Australia at the beginning of the 1980s, I was fascinated by a chance encounter with several middle-aged Aboriginal people living in remote parts of Western Australia who spoke very good Italian. They had learned the language from their Italian fathers, who were part of an early wave of Italian migration to Australia in the first decades of the twentieth century. Some of these Italian migrants had lived in the desert and set up families with local Aboriginal women, and the Italian-speaking Aboriginal people I met were the children of these unions.

Polenta and Goanna is the fictionalised result of my attempts between 1986 and 1991 to explore this little-known slice of Australian history, recounted through the life of Italian migrant Gino Minozzi and the parallel narrative of an Italian writer who discovers his story. The novel is based on dozens of interviews and documents I collected, and I have tried as far as possible to use only elements I know to be based on historical fact.

After coming to Australia I became deeply interested in Aboriginal culture and history, and aware of the injustices perpetrated against the country’s original inhabitants. I remember finding it strange that so many white Australians seemed to be sympathetic to the plight of black South Africans in the 1980s, and later during Mandela’s visit to Australia in 1994, yet so apparently oblivious to the problems black people in their own country were facing at the same time.

While this book was made possible by that chance meeting, I have long been fascinated by the cultural differences I have observed in many parts of the world. In the mid-twentieth century my father, who was from Florence, still needed an interpreter to talk to my mother’s grandmother from the countryside outside Modena, only 100 km away. Thus in reality my parents’ marriage was one between ‘foreigners’. Our individual identities are profoundly shaped by our own distinct culture and language, so it is not surprising that meetings between radically different cultures often produce an emotionally charged cultural clash, which can result in either total rejection of the culture of the other, or a deep attraction to it.

In my work in many different parts of the world I have often found myself trying to discern a common humanity beneath the surface of what are at times radical cultural differences. I am no academic sociologist, but I found while studying at the University of Bologna that I could best explore these kinds of cultural reflections by writing about them in stories.

Although I met many Aboriginal people during my research for this book, I certainly do not have expert knowledge of their extraordinary and unique culture, nor can I claim to have come close to understanding it. Polenta and Goanna thus reflects the view of an Italian outsider, the fictional writer. In telling Gino Minozzi’s story, the narrator at times describes Gino’s thoughts and experiences using language that reflects the prejudices and racism of the time. I trust the reader will not confuse this with the views of this writer.

In order to recreate the overall picture of the times in which Gino’s story is set, I have only used facts I have read about or heard as personal testimonies from that period. There is love and understanding in this story, but there are also many distressing instances of injustice and violence perpetrated by European colonisers against the Aboriginal population, and there is the social degradation in which Aboriginal people were forced to live. This is likely to make difficult reading for many, especially Aboriginal Australians. I hope the overall picture is a faithful reconstruction of this fragment of Australian history, and that it will make some small contribution to the painful and necessary process of coming to terms with the realities of a colonial past which Australia shares with so many other countries.

However, my main reason for writing the book is that the simple meeting between Aboriginal and Italian people depicted in this novel confirms for me the fact that different cultures can come together in harmony, understanding and respect rather than in a destructive clash of cultures. Against all odds, it is possible for human beings to recognise their own essential humanity in the other. At a time when intercultural conflict rather than harmony appears to be the order of the day, the imperfect relationships established last century in the harsh Australian desert between people of such different races and cultures seem to me to contain a universal message of hope for the possibility of human relatedness.

Sydney, December 2007

I have not felt the need to update the preface to the first edition of Polenta and Goanna and have made only a few minor changes. What I expressed then is still what I would like to say today. Nevertheless, one sad reflection that comes to mind reading it again is that intercultural conflicts overall have worsened worldwide since then and are pushing people apart rather than together. In this context I believe that the message of the book that human togetherness and love can prosper against all odds is still current and probably will be for many years to come. This is the main reason for this new edition of Polenta and Goanna, which had recently become unavailable to new readers due to the closure of IPOC press.

Considering the current relevance of the story and the fact that I am still regularly contacted by readers who use it for research, I felt that a new edition should be published so the book becomes available again. My translator, Barbara McGilvray, supported this view, and Angelo Pontecorboli, who published the original version in Italian, offered to publish a new English edition. Thanks to him you have a new copy of Polenta and Goanna in your hands.

There is one reflection I wish to add to my original preface. I am pleased that from the time I was researching the material that became the subject of Polenta and Goanna, and since the publication of the first editions, significant steps have been made in progressing the rights of Aboriginal Australians, even if there is a long way to go. It is also an exciting development for all Australians that knowledge of the unique civilisation of the Aboriginal people, deliberately obliterated by the colonising power to justify the occupation of the land, is slowly being recovered. Their sustainable use of the land through their unique agriculture, fishing and fire control techniques is remarkable, and shows how much we have lost in not recognising and safeguarding these customs. I am in debt to Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe for my own progress in this understanding. I am also confident that the subject matter of this book will become part of any school curriculum.

In this context I hope that the negative connotation which for a long time was associated with the term ‘Aboriginal’ is firmly relegated to past history and that the beauty and profound meaning of the term is recuperated to proudly indicate the First Peoples of Australia. As a European who still had to study Latin every day, the word ‘aboriginal’ has always sounded to me beautiful and profound. What a great and beautiful thing it is to be recognised as the inhabitants of a place ‘from the origins’. Indeed, it is the one word which fully contains in itself and epitomises the rights of the First Peoples of Australia, in stating that they lived here from the very beginning and whoever came later should and could have been a welcome guest.

Sydney, November 2020

Polenta and Goanna