More than just great food – how Italian migrants helped shape the city

TWO years ago, Ballarat Italian Association president Cesare Dichiera briefed journalist Jan McGuinness to write a history of Italians in Ballarat since Eureka.

Walkley Award winning Journalist Paul Bongiorno AM launched the book La Nostra Storia – Our Story – an historical account of adventure, success and resilience last week at the Ballarat Mechanics Institute.

The story of Mr Bongiorno’s family, arriving in Ballarat in the late 1890s, prominent in expanding the culinary tastes of the broader community through their fruit shop and delicatessen is just one of the many detailed in words and photographs in the book.

Ms McGuinness managed to capture, through interviews with more than fifty members and descendants of Italian families, the personal experiences, hopes and history of the Italian community in Ballarat.

She said many of the families didn’t speak anything but regional dialect however Ms McGuinness fluent in Italian was able to get them to open up.

“Mind you, Italians love to talk,” she said. The book is presented in three parts from the gold rush to the turn of the 20th Century, from 1900 to the Second World War and lastly the influx of Italian immigrants in the 1950s to the present day.

The story of the Italians in Ballarat is interspersed with what was happening at the time in Australia, Italy and around the world.

Mr Dichiera said the purpose of the book is to recognize the major input Italians had on the economy, history and culture of Ballarat.

“Italians not only contributed pasta and pizza to Ballarat’s culinary and social development but they were also prominent in the city’s political, economic and educational development,” he said.