Mending… so out comes the sewing box Nanna Francesca gave me for my 8th birthday. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to receive this as a present at that age, though I put on a happy face so not to hurt her feelings. Afterwards, I told Mum she could have it and the sewing box sat in her linen press for years. Yet, once I moved into my own house, I went and retrieved it and it has stayed with me.
I’m not much of a sewer like my grandmothers and great-uncle were. I can only mend hems or sew on buttons by hand. In first year high school, when all us girls had to do ‘Home Economics’, I liked the cooking (we made scones and shepherd’s pie) but didn’t take to sewing. I think I lacked the patience and neatness needed. It was Mum, in exasperation – ‘You should at least be able to mend a hem and sew on a button!’ – who showed me.
The white thread I’m using was hers. All the other spools also Mum’s or my grandmothers’. The scissors, a bit blunt now, were Nanna Francesca’s, and Quality Street chocolates I’ll always associate with having at her house. I know I’m terribly sentimental but it’s nice to be reminded of these connections on the odd occasion I get out this old, sewing box.
Even this sundress I’m mending is old and faded but its cool cotton is perfect as a ‘house dress’ in summer. I recall women in Italy sitting on chairs outside their doorsteps, mending clothes or linens (to me, a comforting sight). Partly, such mending stems from necessity, especially in poorer areas, however in Italian folklore there’s also an awareness and valuing of the fleeting nature of certain earthly materials we use. Like linens or timbers that bear the effects of sun, wind, human treatment, rain, marks, stretches and shrinks in their histories of use and misuse. Things that may not be financially worth much, but worth being mended for as long as they may be used.
Once I would’ve been too self-conscious, but I think if I was in Italy, I’d now drag a chair outside the door while I sit and hem, catching the breeze and perhaps a chat if someone happened to stroll by… 💚🧵
Tonight is Epiphany Eve and in Italy many children will be waiting to see what they receive from La Befana, ‘the witch’ – sweets if they’ve been good, coal if they’ve been naughty. As I wrote in, Mezza Italiana, I was chosen as La Befana for my school play, being ‘an Italian kid’, and as you can see from the first photo, I wasn’t too thrilled about it! 😄 Although, I’d warmed up to the idea by the second photo when I got to climb through a window. (As you can also see, being summer, I’m already a bit burnt from swimming at the local pool!)
A part of my Italian-Australian life in two photos… the first one – Nanna Francesca (centre) taking her visiting cousins from Sydney to Qld’s Big Pineapple. To me, there’s something about seeing these three Italian migrant women standing in front of something so Australian, knowing how my nonna loved going there and knowing how it was a world away from their stone villages in Italy. Nanna Francesca brought me back an enormous Big Pineapple pencil with a pineapple on the end of it. I was about five (and still have it!) She also bought herself a Big Pineapple tea-towel and salt and pepper shakers.
These shakers – in the second photo – sat, never used, behind glass in her ‘good’ cabinet, for decades. Then, after my grandparents had both died and the family was packing up their house of more than fifty years, I found myself standing in front of this cabinet looking at those two pineapples. Yes, they were kitschy but I couldn’t let them end up lost, so now they sit on a bookshelf in my kitchen, a little reminder of Nanna Francesca that makes me smile.
I never expected to end up with a collection of linens that span four generations of women on both sides of my family. Especially since, as a teenager, I’d hope for the latest record for my birthday only to be disappointed when Nanna Francesca gave me tablecloths ‘for my Glory box’. Again. For years these sat unused along with the tea towels, doilies and other items I also had no interest in then.
This old photo is pretty faded and scratched but the main reason I chose to share it with you on Mother’s Day is that it’s a rare one showing together in a row three generations of women in my family who were mothers to me – Mum, Nanna Francesca and Great-Granny Maddalena.
It was actually Nonno Anni who originally gave me the idea for, The Proxy Bride. When I was talking to him about his life for Joe’s, he mentioned by chance that during WW2 when he and other Italian men were taken from farms around Stanthorpe and sent to internment camps, the women and children suddenly left alone did it very tough. He later heard they were given no assistance and with curfews and restrictions weren’t allowed to drive, many didn’t know how to use the farm equipment or ride a horse and faced poverty and starvation. He mentioned this group of women who banded together to keep their farms going. That really struck me and I felt I’d come back and write about it. When I learnt that some of these women were also proxy brides, it opened up more to the story.
Also, since I mentioned in my last post that Nanna Francesca would’ve been especially happy to see, The Proxy Bride in the Australian Women’s Weekly, I thought I should mention the same might’ve been for Nonno Anni regarding a recent article about my books appearing in the Italian Australian newspapers, Il Globo and La Fiamma (full article in Italian online). I have lovely memories of him at the kitchen table often reading one of these newspapers with a morning coffee (International Roast boiled on the stove in the enamel pot, of course!)
On the kitchen table today… roses and lemons from a friend’s garden. (With glorious fresh, crisp and sweet musky scents!) The vase came from Nanna Francesca’s ‘good cabinet’ and was a bonbonniere from a 1970s or 80s Italian wedding. (Some will remember those!) It’s 
Bisnonna Francesca… a companion post to the previous on Bisnonno Domenico. Likewise, I didn’t get to meet her yet each photo has a little to reveal and brings the past somewhat closer in that moment. A rare photo, circa 1930 (bottom right) shows Francesca in Palmi, Calabria with her mother, Soccorsa, the baker and her daughter (Nanna Francesca). The three who lived together for years after Domenico was in Australia. And then (top left), just Francesca and her daughter, soon to leave to join him in 1934. She and her mother had worked hard to help raise the ship fares, determined as she was to be reunited.
In his work clothes (top left), one knee patched, behind him his Applethorpe orchards on land he’d hand-cleared, long before he could afford the horse.
Spaghetti squash… a sunny winter vegetable. It grows on a vine like pumpkin and has yellow, star-shaped blossoms that only open for one day. Love how, once tender, you can gently fork the strands from the sides to create spaghetti in its own bowl.
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
The Proxy Bride is a novel inspired by true stories and set between the 1940s and the 1980s in Italy and Australia. There will be angry spaghetti, mixed grills, mixed tapes, Dean Martin on the 1950s stereogram and plastic on the lounge suite and, above all, hopefully characters you may come to love who band together amid tough times for a new life.
I have this one treasured photo with three generations of the Boccabella men in my life – Dad, Nonno Anni, Bisnonno Vitale (and my zio).
Polpette and peas in gravy, such an ‘Australitaliano’ combination – meatballs and peas in tomato sauce. Comfort food at its best. Nanna Francesca cooked this a lot (and when I was a kid, I found it a bit confusing that, being southern Italian, she called the tomato passata or sugo – ‘gravy’ considering my Australian Mum called gravy a deep-brown liquid accompanying a roast). Nanna Francesca would’ve been 95 today so it seems fitting to cook her polpette e piselli in gravy. We always celebrated her birthday on the 12th, the day she was born though the official date on her birth certificate was the 19th (lodged late as her parents argued who to name her after). Tradition won, as did her father, and being the first-born, Francesca was named after her paternal grandmother.
“On Boxing Day, Annibale, Francesca and the others loaded the back of the Chevrolet with cold drinks, some roast chickens and a couple of large watermelons. After several years of keeping the fruit shop and milk bar open almost every day, Annibale had decided they’d close for a couple of days over Christmas and the family would head to the beach for the day…
Nonno Anni told me when he received an orange for Christmas during his childhood in the 1920s, he treasured it. I knew he and his Mum were poor and village life in Italy was hard at that time, especially with his father far away in Australia to seek work, but an orange… I couldn’t quite believe it when I found this out as a child in the 1970s and oranges were so easy to get then. But fresh oranges were considered treasures before refrigeration and faster transport. Especially at Christmas considering that since ancient times, oranges have been said to bring joy, good luck and to ward off evil. (What must Nonno Anni have thought once he had a whole display of oranges at his fruit shop and milk bar!)
If I’m honest, Christmas isn’t always the easiest time for me as it feels bittersweet with the happiness of those present mingled with the quiet of those unable to be or now gone. But food is so special in that certain dishes can trigger those lovely memories of people dear to us no matter how long it may be since we’ve seen them and this year, I feel happy that oranges can bring that little bit of sunshine.
Warmest wishes and thank you for your lovely support and messages throughout the year. May 2020 be filled with light and some happiness no matter what else it may bring! Wishing you tante belle cose – many beautiful things, Zoe xx
Doing things like an Italian you’d never have thought you would when growing up… 
Zoë Boccabella 