Values

Joe's parents, he told me, recently celabrated their 60th wedding anniversary. It was a simple, happy family day which typified their married life. An uncomplicated life of hard physical work growing spuds and farming, beginning before mechanization.

Shortly after marrying, they left Italy and migrated to Australia, where Joe's father's brother had, for some years, grown spuds at Gembrook. Out of poverty stricken post war Italy, they were undaunted by their lack of English and set about their new life together, starting a family in their new land and enjoying hard won rewards of home grown food and the prospect of a profit. With the vagaries of the market price of spuds, there were lean times.

In 1956, Joe's father and his brother had a record crop in the year of a record market price. A bag of spuds was worth a man's wages for a week. At the end of the season, they banked forty-two thousand pounds between them, twenty one thousand each. This was an enormous sum for the time. A basic house could be bought outright for 700 pounds, a swish one for 1000. If you equate this to today's house prices, twenty-one houses at say $350,000 each, you are looking at the equivalent of $7 million dollars.

Such success changed Joe's father's view of life, for a time. Nostalgia consumed him. He said to his wife, "We really don't have to work any more. It has all been hard and in truth I don't really like it here. Ausralians talk funny and I can't understand what they say. We could go back to Italy now and buy a farm and live easy forever."

It was the dream of many immigrants to make their fortune and go home proud to the old country. Joe's parents returned to their home town and bought a farm a few km away. Joe's father travelled to his farm every day taking with him his working donkey. The donkey did not want to work and he had to pull it the whole way while it resisted. On the way home the donkey pulled the other way and he had to pull back on it the the entire trip. Tiring of this, he said to his wife one day, "We've come all this way and have all that we ever wanted, but I don't feel I'm home. Australia is home. I miss the gum trees and the birds."

They came back to Australia and resumed growing spuds at Gembrook. They couldn't sell the farm in Italy for a long time, costing them much money. The profit from 1956 disappeared but Joe's parents were happy, growing spuds till their retirement.

I was picking up a box of spuds from Joe's home. From January till September I buy spuds from him. After that they are are soft and shooting and I have to wait till the next harvest. I asked him was the price the same as last time.

"Yes, we look after the locals, if I haven't made my millions by now I'm not going to." I thanked him and said how good it was to buy good food straight out the ground in my local town, from a paddock on a hill I drive past everyday. It was worth much more to me than the money.

It was then that Joey told me about his parent's happy 60 years.