Licodia Eubea

Marguerita rang last week, about 7.00am one morning. Lib wasn't working that day so I hadn't been up long. I croaked my first word for the day, "Hello."

"Is that you , Mr. Williams?"

I didn't answer straight away, trying to pick the voice.

"Did I wake you up?"

"No, I've been up a while. I'm sorting some washing. How are you Marguerita?"

"I'm good, very good. Hey listen, did you get any of those plants for me?"

"What plants?"

"I can't remember their name. You know, the ones I asked you about a while back. You were going to try and get some for me."

"Oh yeah, the white iris. No, I haven't found any. But now that you've reminded me, I'll have another crack. I forget things you know."

"That's a sign of old age. It happens to me. It'd be good if you get some. Now's the time to split them up and plant. How's your wife?"

"Not bad, a little better I'd say. She's not working today so she's in bed. She still gets very tired."

"That's what I was like. She needs lots of rest. What's happening about the tumour? What are they doing about it?"

"She's booked in for another MRI in February. They want to check it to see if it's grown. You made a good recovery after your operation."

"Yeah I did, but I've had more treatment. They found more tumours, more in the head. I can't have those MRI's, because of my pacemaker. They do blood tests and other things. They bombed the tumours with chemicals and stuff. They reckon they got 'em. Do you help with the washing?"

Marguerita always asks about Lib's tumour on her pituitary. It's what she had. Lib and her have never met. Marguerita wants me to take Lib out to her place so they can talk about it, but Lib hasn't taken up on it.

"Yeah, I do most of the washing, I suppose."

"You're a good boy, that's what she needs, lots of help. And going to work is the best thing for her. She's got to keep doing that. I gotta go, it's goin' to be hot today. Bye."

I hadn't really tried to find any white iris for her, I've been so busy. Where the bloody hell was I going to find them? One of those things I'd not get around to!

A couple of days later I was at the farm and I saw a new garden bed in the front lawn that had been recently planted out with what looked like iris, and edged neatly with timber slat, reminding me of Marguerita's request, so I told mum about it. She laughed and said, "I've got lots of white iris, that new bed in the front is all white, and all them along the side of the back shed are white. There's too many there, it'd be good to take some out, do the others good. Help yourself, as many as you want." Well that was an easy one, I thought.

Before going home on Friday afternoon I dug a big bag of iris tubers in less than five minutes, happy that Marguerita would get her iris, and that it was so easy the way it evolved. On Saturday afternoon about 3 o'clock I drove out to Marguerita's farm and knocked on the door. The big shed door was open and there were two vehicles inside, but no one answered. I thought maybe Marguerita and Joe were having an afternoon nap so I took the new pair of pruning shears from the van and started on the big biotis conifer encroaching on a flower bed of petunias and pansies. I'd told Marguerita some time ago I'd be back with some shears to do it one day.

After a few minutes Joe came out the back door. "How are you my friend?" he said, coming over to shake my hand. He'd been having a sleep after working all morning in his tomato patch, before getting back into it when it cooled off a bit, he explained. I'd never had a long conversation with Joe. He's always friendly when we meet in town, he knows and appreciates I'm helpful to Marguerita, but he's not at the farm when I am, which is usually during the week. He works at Red Gem.

I showed him the bag of iris which I'd put in the shade of a big camellia and said I brought along these new sharp shears to test drive. "If you don't mind me asking Joe, when did you come to Australia? Marguerita told me she came to this farm in 1958, the year she married. Had you been out here long?"

"I came to Australia in 1954, I was 17 years old, born in 1937."

"Did you come because there wasn't work in Italy?"

"Nah, there was heaps of work, but it was all hard, a lot of people had migrated, looking for opportunity. My brother was out here, he came in 1949, so it wasn't surprising for me to follow. Would you like to come inside and have a drink and I'll tell you my family's story?"

I jumped at the chance to learn more of the Italian/Gembrook connection. I'd never been in the house before. Joe sat me at the kitchen table. He offered me a beer, although he said didn't drink alcohol himself. He went outside to the shed and came back with a can of diet coke. The kitchen walls were adorned with family photos and blow up aerial shots of the farm and an Italian village. For the next two hours he talked, and brought down photos to show me up close. His story centred on his father. The stubby of beer Joe gave me had been in his fridge a long while. It was flat as a tack and tasted odd when I finally got the cap off. I didn't mention it, out of courtesy, and drank it slowly, right down to the last cloudy sediment in the glass.

Joe's father migrated to America in the early 1900's and lived and worked 12 years in Brooklyn New York. He came back to Italy during WW1 to serve in the army. On the way back on the boat he knew he was making a big mistake and suffered severe depression. He tried to suicide by jumping overboard but this was prevented by other passengers. After army service he returned to his home village, Licodia Eubea in the provence of Catania, in Sicily. He did not speak one word to anyone for a period of time, recovering eventually to marry. Joe showed me a picture of his mother and father taken soon after they married. He was 31, tall and strikingly handsome, she was 15, tiny by comparison. They had eight children in all, six born alive. Joe was the youngest.

From their farm you can see Mt.Etna in the distance. In the winter the snow line comes well down to about halfway and in summer it remains on the peak. the land is fertile and grows everything imagineable. The farms are small, and people live in the village and travel to their farms to work, a family might own three or four, of say 10 acres each. Joe's father had 300 olive trees on one farm and cropping land elsewhere. They grew wheat, barley, broad beans and all manner of vegetables. Each year they'd trek into the mountains maybe 8 hours away by horse and cart and stay for two weeks at a time, growing share crops on bigger properties. The landowners would provide the seed which had to be paid back two or three times over before the farmer made anything. Joe said, "Just as today and always, the rich get richer while the poor do the work."

The Romans thousands of years ago prized the Sicilian farmland. The crops were prodigious and the harvest came weeks earier than the rest of Italy. There was an abundance of good clear water, as there still is, underground and easily reached by well and bore. Marguerita's family also came from Licodea Eubea. The D'Angelo's had quarries from where rock was taken and 'cooked' with big fires in a time honoured method dating way back, before being smashed manually into crushed rock and used as building material.

One of Joe's older brothers went into the army near the end of WW2. This brother had phsycic ability. When he came home he said to his father, "There's no future here for me, I want migrate to America or Australia." His father advised him to choose Australia, it was a newer nation that needed building, with more opportunity.

I told Joe that Joe Lamendola once told me a story about his father who made a huge amount of money growing spuds in 1956 and then went 'home' to Italy, only to find he was not happy there, returning again to Australia. Amazing to me, the land that Joe Lamendolas father farmed when he made his fortune was the one and same where we sat, which Marguerita's father bought with the profits he also made just over the hill in 1956. When Joe Lamendola's father went 'home' to Italy, it was to his home village of Licodia Eubea.(He came back after missing the big farms and open space.)

When Joe's brother left Italy in 1949 he came to Melbourne and worked in factories Monday to Friday and then went to Emerald/Avonsleigh on weekends working for the Falcones digging spuds, as did Joe himself later. The Falcones were also from Licodia Eubea.

I told Joe that Gay Fialla told me of her grandfather Galenti who first came to Australia in the early 1900's and you can guess, the Galentis came from the same area. Nearly all the Italian migrants to come to Gembrook came from the same village or nearby. I hope to visit one day. It has about 3000 residents. About 4-5000 of those that left, and descendants, live in the U.S. and Australia. With new technologies, Catania is now a wealthy provence from where wine and table grapes in particular are exported around the world.