Polenta and Goanna

By Emilio Gabbrielli

In a mysterious castle in Libya, the narrator stumbles on some unexpected vestiges of the past which inspire him to recount his extraordinary experiences in Australia. The result is the story of a meeting of two cultures — Italian and Aboriginal — and of the emotions aroused by his chance encounters with people and places that are the vivid, but fragile, proof of that meeting.
In the search for a distant reality, which resonates strongly with present day issues, magical storytelling is interwoven with sociological curiosity, historical reconstruction and notes on a journey. The reader is swept up in an engrossing narrative that explores fascinating truths about Italian migrants to Australia during the last Gold Rush, from the close of the 19th century across the first decades of the 20th.

Polenta and Goanna is a brave and unflinching portrayal of a controversial and highly sensitive topic. [...] The book reflects an honest and sincere attempt by an Italian writer to imaginatively explore the experience of intimacy and love between members of two radically different cultures. Stephen Bennetts, anthropologist 

The engagement with the mystique of the Australian desert is a distinctive motif in Anglo-Australian literature and, in particular, constitutes a familiar archetype in the narrative produced by Aboriginal writers. To this nativistic Australian motif Emilio has added an Italian dimension and an Italian Australian myth, and has thus enlarged it beyond the geography of either Australia or Italy. Gaetano Rando, University of Wollongong

With two important introductory essays, this revised translation of Polenta and Goanna reminds us of the complex layers of language and culture present in human society. Gabbrielli treads delicately in this creative exploration of interlocking worlds that are both ancient and contemporary. Nerida Newbigin, University of Sydney

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angelo Pontecorboli Editore
• Release date: Mar 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9788833840987

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Wollongong

Author’s Preface

After emigrating to Australia at the beginning of the 1980s, I was fascinated by a chance encounter with several middle-aged Aboriginal people living in remote parts of Western Australia who spoke very good Italian. They had learned the language from their Italian fathers, who were part of an early wave of Italian migration to Australia in the first decades of the twentieth century. Some of these Italian migrants had lived in the desert and set up families with local Aboriginal women, and the Italian-speaking Aboriginal people I met were the children of these unions.

Polenta and Goanna is the fictionalised result of my attempts between 1986 and 1991 to explore this little-known slice of Australian history, recounted through the life of Italian migrant Gino Minozzi and the parallel narrative of an Italian writer who discovers his story. The novel is based on dozens of interviews and documents I collected, and I have tried as far as possible to use only elements I know to be based on historical fact.

After coming to Australia I became deeply interested in Aboriginal culture and history, and aware of the injustices perpetrated against the country’s original inhabitants. I remember finding it strange that so many white Australians seemed to be sympathetic to the plight of black South Africans in the 1980s, and later during Mandela’s visit to Australia in 1994, yet so apparently oblivious to the problems black people in their own country were facing at the same time.

While this book was made possible by that chance meeting, I have long been fascinated by the cultural differences I have observed in many parts of the world. In the mid-twentieth century my father, who was from Florence, still needed an interpreter to talk to my mother’s grandmother from the countryside outside Modena, only 100 km away. Thus in reality my parents’ marriage was one between ‘foreigners’. Our individual identities are profoundly shaped by our own distinct culture and language, so it is not surprising that meetings between radically different cultures often produce an emotionally charged cultural clash, which can result in either total rejection of the culture of the other, or a deep attraction to it.

In my work in many different parts of the world I have often found myself trying to discern a common humanity beneath the surface of what are at times radical cultural differences. I am no academic sociologist, but I found while studying at the University of Bologna that I could best explore these kinds of cultural reflections by writing about them in stories.

Although I met many Aboriginal people during my research for this book, I certainly do not have expert knowledge of their extraordinary and unique culture, nor can I claim to have come close to understanding it. Polenta and Goanna thus reflects the view of an Italian outsider, the fictional writer. In telling Gino Minozzi’s story, the narrator at times describes Gino’s thoughts and experiences using language that reflects the prejudices and racism of the time. I trust the reader will not confuse this with the views of this writer.

In order to recreate the overall picture of the times in which Gino’s story is set, I have only used facts I have read about or heard as personal testimonies from that period. There is love and understanding in this story, but there are also many distressing instances of injustice and violence perpetrated by European colonisers against the Aboriginal population, and there is the social degradation in which Aboriginal people were forced to live. This is likely to make difficult reading for many, especially Aboriginal Australians. I hope the overall picture is a faithful reconstruction of this fragment of Australian history, and that it will make some small contribution to the painful and necessary process of coming to terms with the realities of a colonial past which Australia shares with so many other countries.

However, my main reason for writing the book is that the simple meeting between Aboriginal and Italian people depicted in this novel confirms for me the fact that different cultures can come together in harmony, understanding and respect rather than in a destructive clash of cultures. Against all odds, it is possible for human beings to recognise their own essential humanity in the other. At a time when intercultural conflict rather than harmony appears to be the order of the day, the imperfect relationships established last century in the harsh Australian desert between people of such different races and cultures seem to me to contain a universal message of hope for the possibility of human relatedness.

Sydney, December 2007

I have not felt the need to update the preface to the first edition of Polenta and Goanna and have made only a few minor changes. What I expressed then is still what I would like to say today. Nevertheless, one sad reflection that comes to mind reading it again is that intercultural conflicts overall have worsened worldwide since then and are pushing people apart rather than together. In this context I believe that the message of the book that human togetherness and love can prosper against all odds is still current and probably will be for many years to come. This is the main reason for this new edition of Polenta and Goanna, which had recently become unavailable to new readers due to the closure of IPOC press.

Considering the current relevance of the story and the fact that I am still regularly contacted by readers who use it for research, I felt that a new edition should be published so the book becomes available again. My translator, Barbara McGilvray, supported this view, and Angelo Pontecorboli, who published the original version in Italian, offered to publish a new English edition. Thanks to him you have a new copy of Polenta and Goanna in your hands.

There is one reflection I wish to add to my original preface. I am pleased that from the time I was researching the material that became the subject of Polenta and Goanna, and since the publication of the first editions, significant steps have been made in progressing the rights of Aboriginal Australians, even if there is a long way to go. It is also an exciting development for all Australians that knowledge of the unique civilisation of the Aboriginal people, deliberately obliterated by the colonising power to justify the occupation of the land, is slowly being recovered. Their sustainable use of the land through their unique agriculture, fishing and fire control techniques is remarkable, and shows how much we have lost in not recognising and safeguarding these customs. I am in debt to Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe for my own progress in this understanding. I am also confident that the subject matter of this book will become part of any school curriculum.

In this context I hope that the negative connotation which for a long time was associated with the term ‘Aboriginal’ is firmly relegated to past history and that the beauty and profound meaning of the term is recuperated to proudly indicate the First Peoples of Australia. As a European who still had to study Latin every day, the word ‘aboriginal’ has always sounded to me beautiful and profound. What a great and beautiful thing it is to be recognised as the inhabitants of a place ‘from the origins’. Indeed, it is the one word which fully contains in itself and epitomises the rights of the First Peoples of Australia, in stating that they lived here from the very beginning and whoever came later should and could have been a welcome guest.

Sydney, November 2020

Polenta and Goanna

I

My Norman Castle

Christmas Day 1989

I’ve done it! So often we promise ourselves we’ll do something ‘sooner or later’, when the right moment comes, but it never happens. Travellers make a note of out-of-the-way places they want to return to, but more often than not they don’t. Well, I resolved more than a decade ago to come back to this remote castle in the middle of the Libyan Sahara, and here I am, with fresh motivation and a project I can’t wait to get started.

Incredibly, the echoes of the Australian desert are clearer and more urgent now, as if the continuity of the oceans were flowing on to a continuity of deserts. There’s a deep connection too between my Australian adventure and the Sahara. My own story, fundamental to the telling of the other biographical tale in these pages – as true and meaningful as it is improbable and nearing oblivion – and the death, or crime, intertwined with my travels, both seem to connect with the Sahara in ways that go beyond my perception. It’s as if I were at the centre of some ultimately indefinable universal plan.

But let’s take things in their proper order: I’m like a vessel under too much pressure, and the danger is that the safety valve will go off so that everything spills out and the energy is dissipated.

From the moment the idea of this book came to me a few weeks ago, in Australia, at the time the Berlin Wall was coming down, I knew it could only take shape in my Norman Castle. So, let me first explain who and where I am, and then try to explain what I’m doing here.

I’m 41, a surveyor from the province of Lecco in Italy. In the early 1970s I worked for a company in Milan that set up electrical transmission lines all over the world. My apprenticeship was served in the office working on the plans, positioning the metal pylons to carry the cables. Then I found myself doing the geological surveys for lines to be built in the Andes, and subsequently, as often happens, I became involved in the actual construction work. Some of those transmission lines are at an altitude of more than five thousand metres, and the unforeseen technical problems were a killer. There aren’t too many places like that where I could have cut my teeth on the job.

In 1979, after moving around various sites, I ended up in Libya, where the company was managing the construction of several airports. With another Italian, Nino Pezzato from Abruzzo, I was working on a project in Misurata when we were called urgently to the Fezzan capital of Seba, where an influential general needed help with surveying the Tibesti area. There would be an extra loading on our salary as the area was considered off-limits and dangerous, due to guerilla warfare in Chad. Nino was looking for the quickest route to buying a house in Udine and immediately accepted the offer, so I did too. It was at the completion of these surveys, returning from Seba, that we discovered the castle I’ve now retreated to – where in a sense I’m hiding.

We had left for Misurata in the early morning, hoping to avoid the gibleh that blew up every afternoon in that season and brought work to a halt for the day. The parched yellow hills of the desert contrasted starkly with the blue sky. On some stretches the road followed the dry bed of a wadi, where many of the rock faces were decorated with drawings from prehistoric times.

As we were driving through this lifeless landscape Nino told me about another Nino Pezzato, an uncle of his father’s after whom he’d been named. This Nino had gone to Western Australia in the 1920s in search of gold. The family heard that he had arrived and ended up working in the desert, by all accounts a terrible environment where life was hard. After that they heard nothing more from him. Listening to this story, I wondered whether the desolate place we were passing through might have witnessed similar stories: perhaps over the centuries there had been lone goldseekers hoping to find in these wadis the kind of easily-extracted alluvial gold discovered over the last hundred years in the Western Australian desert.

There was very little traffic – just a few lorries. After several hours of driving, when our only distraction was the unexpected appearance of a herd of stray camels crossing the road, we were suddenly hit by a furious gibleh, though it was not yet midday. It came from behind, so we hadn’t even seen it coming. Visibility was now down to about fifty metres, so we proceeded slowly, with the sand seeping into the car’s interior by some unknown tortuous route. Then suddenly we were forced to pull up sharply behind a stationary road train. In the midst of the sandstorm we could make out a wandering dune that had invaded the road and was creeping across it with exasperating slowness. Out in front of the dune spectral figures were moving about, but for us at the moment there was nothing to be done. Our way was blocked.

We had been in this situation for a while when a figure climbed down from the cabin of the lorry in front, and we watched as it made its way slowly but determinedly towards us. It stopped in front of the car and signalled to us to move over to the left side of the road. We were surprised and puzzled, and when the figure saw we were not reacting, it came around to the window on my side of the car and brought its face up against the glass. Through the haze I could make out the penetrating eyes of a desert nomad in a blue turban, just a few centimetres from me. His eyes were wide open in the swirling storm of sand, while the rest of his face was completely covered. Then he straightened up and moved a couple of metres from the car, motioning to me with the commanding air of a traffic policeman to proceed towards the left. We were incapable of speaking. The man, who was very tall and not much more than a shadow even though he was only two or three metres from us, showed no sign of impatience but became more and more imperious as he continued to insist that we follow him.

Finding ourselves in a situation we were unable to master, in the space of a split second we went from paralysis to desperate acquiescence, putting the car into gear and proceeding in the direction indicated by the figure ahead of us. We didn’t have to start the engine, because up to that moment we hadn’t dared turn it off – as if it would somehow give us courage or we feared that once switched off it would never start again.

As soon as we began to move, the man set off in the same direction with the simplicity of the inevitable. We followed him for several minutes without pausing to consider that we didn’t have four wheels propelling us, and soon we lost sight of the road, the dune and the lorry. All we could see was sand and the figure striding out ahead of us, turning every now and then to confirm the direction we were to take. Neither of us spoke: we were locked in a sort of trance; had the figure stepped quickly to one side we would have lost every point of reference within a couple of seconds.

Every few metres a small sandhill appeared ahead of us. I expected the car to become bogged in the sand at any moment, and would have stopped but for our irrational and hypnotic pursuit of the figure in the turban. But despite a few wheelspins – at which our guide turned and signalled to us to slow down – the car was making incredibly sure progress. Every now and then he made us change direction, gradually and smoothly, although we couldn’t see any kind of interruption that might have made this necessary.

We were sinking ever deeper into mute despair when there was a sudden jolt and the car was back on the asphalt. At the same moment a dark shadow loomed to our right, and Nino and I turned simultaneously. We could just make out the back of a road train with two red triangles marking its position, and we realised this was the tail end of the line of trucks on the other side of the dune from where we had started. When we turned back again, our guide had vanished. Still hesitant, we looked around us but didn’t move, until Nino coughed and that seemed to wake me up. I realised the danger we would be in if another vehicle arrived. So I steered the car back onto the right side of the road and we resumed our slow progress, following the ribbon of asphalt that was almost obliterated by the continuous strip of sand blown across it by the wind.

After a few minutes of driving in silence we suddenly emerged from the sandbar. We were in a wide valley surrounded by barren, rocky hills, drenched in a sunlight that seemed more dazzling than ever. It was like emerging from a nightmare and I had a strange feeling of excitement. I switched off the headlights and we began talking about the incredible kindness and skill of our friend in the blue turban. But soon I broke off in mid-sentence:

Hey, there’s the Norman Castle! I’d almost forgotten about it. Listen, after all that’s happened we’ve got to go and explore it. This is like getting to the Promised Land!

The castle had appeared out of nowhere, rising in the distance to mark the tip of the right angle formed by the valley at that point. We had seen it dominating the landscape as we drove inland from the coast, and now here it was again, discreetly but inexorably dominating our retreat from the