Interview with Silvano Ballestrin [sound recording] / Interviewer: Madeleine Regan, Part 1 of 2

Silvano provides detailed memories of growing up in a Veneto market gardener family in the 1950s in the now Kidman Park/Flinders Park area. He begins with his family background, the story of his parents' migration to Australia and the circumstances that meant that they arrived separately in 1938 and 1940 respectively. Silvano's mother arrived with Silvano's brother who was one year old. He speaks about his own family, his wife Aurora, three children and grandchildren. Other areas covered by Silvano include: crops of vegetables that the family grew; going to market with his father; range of jobs he undertook in the market gardens as a child; the amount of work his mother undertook including on the land and for the household; schooling and his dislike of a particular nun at the primary school and the strict discipline of the religious brothers when he went to St Michael's, a boys' school in the western suburbs of Adelaide; celebrations in the family; the family had boarders- usually young men who had arrived from the same parts of the Italy that his parents had come from and this was a way to assist them make a start in life in Adelaide; his parents' social life and fiò - the ritual of visiting other Veneto families in the area after dinner two or three nights a week which was a tradition; Identity as an Australian, Italian, Veneto; family history and origins; connections with members of other Italian market gardeners who lived in the Kidman Park, Flinders Park area; experience of listening to the oral history interviews of members of the Veneto market gardener families. Silvano also speaks about: the paese or the small village that the Veneto market gardeners formed in the Kidman Park and Flinders Park area; his respect for his parents, relatives and the other market gardeners and their courage in migrating to Australia; and discrimination towards Italians during the war.

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