Nanna Francesca with my dad (far left) and other residents at 157 Leichhardt Street, Spring Hill, inner-city Brisbane. For several years, one of the flats here was my grandparents’ home when they first started their fruit shop and milk bar. ‘Stonehenge’ – with its flats and serviced rooms where so many migrants, especially Italians, stayed ‘when they first got off the boat from Italy’.
I look at these women and their children – dressed well, hair done, shoes shined – and think of how it must’ve been for many of them at the time. Perhaps unable to speak much English, working at the cannery, a laundry, the egg board, or isolated at home, missing extended family. To me, none of the women are smiling easily and yet they’re still putting their best foot forward, there for each other. Their kids are smiling easily though, and this new generation will have more opportunities.
I have to laugh looking at my dad, as I can see why Nonno Anni used to joke that, ‘Remo had the devil in him as a kid’. This was the age Dad was when he climbed up a ladder to sit in the middle of the boarding house’s steep-pitched roof and Nonno Anni had to get him down (in the ‘Moroccan Beans’ chapter, Joe’s Fruit Shop and Milk Bar). And for those familiar with that chapter, I do wonder if the woman in the bottom photo was the sometimes exasperated ‘Mrs Simpson’ who ran the boarding house!
To see this spot in Spring Hill now, it’s like none of this ever happened. Of course, this house with its steep, chalet-style roof and walls of stone quarried by convicts is long gone, replaced with modern concrete buildings. I think that’s why I keep writing these stories (and am in the midst of another book now). They may only be small parts of our history about ‘ordinary’ people, yet perhaps it’s these parts that, in the end, are truly a part of us all and worth remembering for what may come. xxx
In 1974, Nonno Anni and Nanna Francesca received a knock at the front door by two policemen warning them a big flood was coming and the power was about to be cut off…
Today’s the day! 
1940s, Brisbane – you’re walking along a city street and suddenly a smiling photographer in a suit and tie hands you a card that reads: Your photograph has just been taken. Then he moves away to find his next mark. The following day you hand over the card at a photo kiosk to see your image and maybe order a copy…
A post script – there were too many little incidents to include them all in, 
Perhaps I was a bit too sentimental in my previous post, (I can be at the best of times!) It might’ve been because Wyandra Street features so strongly in my family history and now, little remains of how the area once was and another bit will soon vanish. But I accept life keeps going on, change happens and so it is. In the meantime, we connect and live on in our stories and I feel very blessed to be able to share these stories with you and to hear yours in return. Gentile auguri! Zoe xx
I’m so thrilled that, 
Certain places give a funny feeling when you return to them decades on. Perhaps it’s something that’s more inside yourself than in the building with its recognisable, old glimpses and smells, even if these are veiled in years of change. I found myself back at the Red Hill Skate Arena for the first time since I last roller skated there when I was 13 in the 1980s. (And in another layer of family history, my Mum and Dad had a ‘skate date’ there back in 1967!)
As you may recall from, Joe’s Fruit Shop and Milk Bar, when I went to locate the places I was writing about, it was sad to find most had disappeared beneath ash, bulldozers and high-rises – the milk bar, Astoria Café, Regent Theatre and Trocadero to name a few.
In this photograph of my family’s fruit shop and milk bar in its earlier days, it’s apparent how it began very modestly with my grandparents standing on the footpath in Ann Street selling produce from a ‘hole in the wall’ before they expanded the space to include a milk bar. Visible in the top left is some of the sign that hung over the footpath from around the early 1950s. It was white with ‘milk bar’ in red Perspex letters and lit up at night.
Official opening of Anzac Square in Brisbane on 25th April, 1930 (taken from Ann St looking towards Adelaide St).
Zoë Boccabella 