Liano - Fearless: My Life My Way

To Christos and Mylesmy favourite people in the world.
Thank you for giving me the best chapters of my life.

Contents

I COME FROM A large Italian family, and I remember my childhood as a time of festivities and family celebrations. I am third in line of the pecking order, with two older sisters and a younger brother.

My mother was one of eight siblings, as was my father. He came to Australia with his family in 1950 and my mothers family arrived in 1954. Like many migrants, they had an amazing work ethic and a spirit of optimism, which they instilled in their children. I grew up with a sense that life, with all its opportunities, was going to be fabulous.

I had twenty aunties and uncles so there was always a party going on; there seemed to be cousins everywhere we looked. Family and friends, but mainly family, were always around. Many of our relatives were called Frank, Joe and Billy. My brother, Ben, even inherited the name Billy for a while. Despite feeling lost in the crowd at times, I had a sense of belonging and of being loved. There was always a lot of noise, loud voices, loud TV, music and laughter. Amongst the ordered confusion there was plenty of food and an expectation that we would all contribute to the conversation. There were definitely no rules that children should be seen and not heard. We all competed to tell the best joke. Jerry Lewis was our favourite actor.

In between parties, we would sit for hours on a Sunday afternoon watching movies: The Three Stooges, The Nutty Professor and, of course, Epic Theatre, Variety Italian Style and the wrestling. I still recall the name Mario Milano, which is interesting given I tend to forget peoples names. My mother would be in the kitchen cooking pasta and schnitzel, the smell of delicious food wafting through the house. Life was good.

Mum came to Australia with her mother and siblings when she was nine. She made the journey by sea after her father had been here for two years, working to save enough money for the rest of the family to come over. My grandmother was forty-six when she arrived in Australia. I can appreciate now how much courage that journey must have taken.

My maternal grandparents had five girls and three boys. Sadly, two of the boys passed away in Italy, one from diphtheria at twelve months of age and the other of peritonitis at age twelve. Their third son died in Australia at age nineteen from rheumatic fever. I dont think my grandmother ever recovered.

She was a character, thats for sure, a bit mischievous and always on the go. She would walk for miles every day to buy groceries for the family. She separated from my grandfather in the early 1970s as she wasnt willing to stay in a marriage that clung to olden-day rules and that hadnt evolved since she left Italy in the 1950s. She lived until she was ninety-four and always remained a strong matriarch in our family.

My father came to Australia with his family when he was fifteen, also by sea. He told me about his visions of grandeur when he arrived. He knew Australia was the lucky country, compared to the devastation of post-war Italy where everyone was starving. His parents arrived here broke but ambitious and open-minded, with a plan to give their children greater opportunities in life. I never met my fathers parents; they passed away before I was born.

My fathers courage paid off. He re-invented himself many times over the years; he worked hard and was successful. Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention. He raised us with a work ethic that only develops within someone who has been in need, and he instilled in us values of humility, love and celebration.

My parents met through my paternal aunty; she and Mum were school friends. At age thirteen, Mum was betrothed to Dad, so their marriage was only a matter of time. They married when Mum was sixteen and my father twenty-seven. The arranged marriage was typical of many Europeans of the time; it was not questioned, just simply arranged, as it had been for generations in Italy.

By the time my mother was twenty-one she had four children. Her life was hectic, to say the least. My brother, Ben, was the youngest of the four siblings, with Bettina the eldest and Teresa in the middle. We were all very close growing up; also very close in age, five years between us all. My mother tells stories of us all getting sick together. She would quarantine the house for weeks on end, with one of us giving a bug to the other, and then the chain of contagious ailments would start again. At times she found herself throwing up in tandem with the rest of us.

We grew up on a large property in Brighton, a bayside suburb of Melbourne. The home had once been an orchard, so our backyard was huge and lined with fruit trees, vegetables and roses. It was set on a train line but, strangely, I cant remember the sound of the train going by. The noise was probably drowned out by the rowdy chaos inside the house. There was enough room for all the cousins to play, a vegetable plot and chickens in the back coop. We had fresh eggs every morning and chickens for Sunday lunch, which my grandmother would cook. Having loved animals from a young age, I was disturbed that my grandmother could transform the life of a chicken into a Sunday roast, and I couldnt eat chicken for many years. Moreover, the smell of a freshly plucked chicken boiling in the kitchen was not very appealingthough no-one else seemed to mind.

One day the chickens escaped from their cage. The four of us went into the backyard as usual, but this time we were met by angry chickens that chased us around. It had never happened before and we were terrified. As we climbed to safety on the swings and up in the trees, I realised wed been ambushed and now we had to work out how to get back inside. Mum came out flapping a tea-towel, shooing the chickens away, commanding us to Run!. I was impressed by her fearlessness. Mum, why are the chickens chasing us? I remember asking, but never worked it out. I was told some theory about them being fed meat, which had made them eat their own eggs and therefore become aggressive.

The next day the chickens were gone, replaced a week later by two rabbits. Perhaps my parents werent aware of the saying breeding like rabbits; needless to say, within months there were so many rabbits in our backyard that we couldnt count them. There were rabbit droppings everywhere. Rabbits everywhere. I cant recall how or when we got rid of them, but Im sure our rabbits contributed to the rabbit population of Melbourne.

We had moved into that property when I was three years old. I vaguely recall the day we moved in. I was in trouble for drawing stick-figure pictures on the wall with texta and for enthusiastically jumping on the couch with my brother and sisters. It was a game we all loved, and my mother had to replace our couches frequently; the 1970s spring system just didnt seem to hold up. I still have images of large silver springs poking out of 1970s upholstered fabric.

Our weekends were endless fun. We would go for long drives with the family, which usually meant a convoy of cars, each boot crammed with enough food to feed a village. Wed arrive at our destination, either the beach or the country, the car boot would open and fill the air with the aroma of gourmet food. It didnt matter whether you were hungry; no-one could refuse an offer of schnitzel, pasta, lasagna, stuffed peppers, stuffed eggplant, roast chickens, salads and, of course, all the desserts: cannelloni, watermelon the list goes on.