Italian Market Gardeners

There will be a presentation on February 3 from writer and oral historian Madeleine Regan, on a project which has grown from a single idea to a substantial archive of interviews held at the State Library and a website with audio, transcripts and photos. In more than 70 hours of recorded interviews, Regan has traced the stories of a group of northern Italians, and their descendants, who came to Adelaide from the Veneto region and took up land in adjoining 10 acre allotments near the River Torrens in the Frogmore and Findon Rd areas in the city’s west. As Regan says, until she began work on the project, she, like me, believed that the Italian community who worked the market gardens here in Adelaide and elsewhere across Australia were post-Word War II migrants who joined the great wave of European-born “new Australians” who had such a profound effect on our Anglocentric culture.  For full story click here.