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
Zoë Boccabella 