Egidio Della Franca

Dad always used to say, “Boys, go to Australia”…He would say there was no place like Australia...You were alright [in Italy], but I didn’t see a future...Instead when I arrived here...I had half a mind to...if it was close enough that I could have walked there, I would have gone home, you know.

Date and place of birth

Born 1927, Baruffini, prov. Sondrio, Lombardy

Date and place of arrival in Australia

August 1949, Fremantle aboard the Ugolino Vivaldi ship

Type of migration

Sponsored by brother

Life in Italy

Egidio Della Franca was born on 5 January 1927 in Baruffini, a small village near the town of Tirano in the province of Sondrio in the Lombardy region. Baruffini is near the border of Switzerland and Egidio’s family would take their livestock to mountain pastures in Switzerland during the warmer months in a practice known as transhumance. Egidio completed five years of primary schooling but he did not like school very much. After school, Egidio and his five siblings used to work on the family land, and sometimes on other properties to earn extra money.

You lived from the land…After school you would go to the property to help with things like collecting chestnuts, making bundles of the wood cut from the vine…That was our work when we were 7 or 8 years old…I wanted to be a farmer from a young age.

Like many boys his age during the 1930s when Italy was governed by the Fascist regime, Egidio took part in the Balilla, or Fascist scout movement for boys.

To earn extra money to help their family, Egidio and his mother, along with others, used to smuggle tobacco and sugar across the Swiss border to sell in Italy. These goods could be bought cheaply in Switzerland, as you did not have to pay any duty taxes, and then sold illegally in Italy to make a profit.

It was a dangerous life but you did it because there wasn’t much work at all.

Egidio later worked as a labourer constructing tunnels to supply hydroelectricity to the area. He had to stop this work to help his father on the family land when Egidio’s brothers migrated to Australia.

Life in Australia

People from the province of Sondrio in the Valtellina valley had long been travelling for seasonal work across the border into Northern Europe or further afield to North and South America. The gold rushes of the 1890s attracted more migrants from the Valtellina to Western Australia.

Egidio’s father had migrated to WA in the early 1900s when he was 17 years old. He worked on construction of the rabbit proof fence and also cut timber for the mines in Kalgoorlie. Like many of the Italians who came to Australia during this period, he worked hard in Australia for several years then returned to Italy to buy land with the money he had saved.

Inspired by their father’s experience, Egidio’s brother Matteo migrated to Western Australia in the mid-1930s, establishing a sawmill near Diamond Tree in Pemberton. Like many other Italian migrants, Matteo was considered an ‘enemy alien’ during the Second World War and was interned in the nearby town of Harvey. After his release, he sponsored his brothers Enrico and Pietro (Peter) to join him in Pemberton. Egidio had also applied to migrate but he had to complete ten months of compulsory military service before he was allowed to leave Italy. In 1949, 22 year-old Egidio left Genoa for Fremantle on the Ugolino Vivaldi ship. As his sponsor, his brother Matteo agreed to provide him with work upon his arrival in Australia.

As Egidio was sailing to Australia, Matteo died in an accident at his sawmill. Egidio, Enrico, Peter and one of their cousins bought the sawmill from Matteo’s widow, Elsie, and ran it together. The Diamond Tree Mill was one of several mills in Pemberton at the time. At its largest, the sawmill employed nine workers as well as Egidio and his three co-owners. Daily life was hard working nine-hour days and also on weekends. There was no electricity in the area when Egidio first migrated, they only got to shower once a week and there were very few pastimes. Most of Egidio’s fellow sawmill workers were Italian.

It was dangerous in those days and you had to watch what you were doing. Now it’s different, it’s all at the press of a button, but back then it was all lifting, pulling, pushing…it was heavy work, but you were young and did it…In the evenings, the workers, my brothers and I would make a fire with wood and when we had finished [our meeting] we would have sausages and a bottle of wine…It was like a little Italy.

Egidio knew very little English when he first arrived in Australia. The only words he knew were the swear words that his father had taught him! Understanding and speaking English was a great challenge.

Another challenge was fitting into life in a small country town. Egidio felt he did not experience much discrimination from Australians when he arrived because he had blonde hair and blue eyes.

They reckoned all Italians are all black or dark. When we came they couldn’t believe it!

In December 1951, Egidio married Elsie, his brother Matteo’s widow. Elsie (née Omodei) was born in Pemberton to Italian parents, and she and Matteo had had one son. Egidio and Elsie had another three children. In 1973, after working at the sawmill for 23 years, Egidio moved to the farm he had bought earlier in 1960. Egidio continues to work on his farm today and enjoys it. Egidio and Elsie now have 14 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Egidio became a naturalised Australian citizen so that Elsie could get her Australian citizenship back, which had been taken away from her when they married. However, Egidio still considers himself to be Italian. He made his first return visit to Italy with his brothers in 1986 after 37 years living in Australia. At home today, Egidio speaks a mix of Valtellino dialect and English.

I like my own traditions…Here we make plonk, we make sausages, but when we go out I’ll behave like an Aussie…I put in 20-30 years of my life, I’ve got all my kids here…I’m still Italian, even if I’m naturalised…but if I go back there now I don’t fit in there and I don’t fit here.