Joe Saffigna
In the sugar cane fields of tropical north Queensland in the early 1930s, men were dropping dead at an alarming rate from Weil’s Disease, or leptospirosis.
The disease, spread by infected rats, killed 19 men in 1933-34 alone, and left many others far too ill to work.
Cane cutters were convinced the outbreak could be contained by burning the undergrowth in the cane fields where the rats were thriving.
The cane farmers strongly resisted, arguing they would need to reduce the wages of the cutters to cover the cost.
The burning would eventually become standard practice across Queensland, and the incidence of Weil’s Disease dropped dramatically, but not without a long struggle by the cutters against the farmers, and even against their own trade union.
Prominent in a series of unofficial Communist-led strikes were hundreds of cutters from Italy – among them Gioacchino (Gio) or Joe Saffigna.
It was perhaps the first of many actions in which Saffigna was involved for better working conditions that would earn him the ire of Australian authorities and eventually make him an “Unwanted Australian”.
Joe Saffigna was born in1902 in Canebola, north-east Italy, near the border with Slovenia.
He was aged 22, having just completed compulsory military service when he decided to migrate to Australia in 1924, leaving behind his newly-married pregnant wife, Maria, to join him later.
His daughter, Esta Ziviani, says he had to borrow money to make the trip.
“There was no work. There was no money. You had to leave Italy to find work. Part of his family went to Italy. Some went to Switzerland, wherever there was work. And he said he was walking down the street in one of the towns close by, the larger town, and he saw this sign that said ‘Come to Australia. Work and housing available’. And he thought ‘Wow, that sounds good!’ and went into inquire and they were recruiting people for the cane fields. And he signed up. He had no money. They borrowed money from his father-in-law, my mother’s father, and that was the beginning of the story.”
Saffigna had gone straight to the sugar country in north-east Queensland, to cut cane.
In the non-cutting season, he chopped wood used to power the boilers driving the steam engines that crushed the cane in the mills.
“He just reveled in the fact that there was work here. He said ‘Australia is a wonderful country’. He had a job immediately cutting cane and after that various other jobs until he settled. In the cane cutting season he would cut cane, and in what they called the ‘slack season’ he had this job providing timber for the sugar mill, cutting timber, and then it would dry out in time for the next cane cutting season. And he thought he found Heaven here. He said ‘Don’t talk to me about Italy any more. They can’t look after their own people’. He just absolutely loved being here.”
Esta was 18 months old, when she and her mother were able to join Saffigna at Christmas in 1926 at Cleveland near Brisbane, where he’d become part-owner of a small farm.
The family briefly moved to run a potato farm at Koo Wee Rup in Victoria, but soon returned to Queensland, and he resumed cutting cane and timber.
It was an itinerant life for the Saffignas, living in a succession of corrugated iron shacks in rough bush camps in the Innisfail area as the 1930s Depression set in.
Despite the tough times, they managed to save enough money for Maria and Esta to make their first trip back to Italy in 1935.
But while they were there, the Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, decided to invade Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), between the small Italian colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland.
Back in Australia, a distraught Saffigna panicked, thinking war would strand Maria and Esta in the Mediterranean, so he sent a two-word telegram to Canebola with the simple plea: “Torna subito!” (“Return immediately!”).
Maria obliged, and not long afterwards, at a ceremony in December 1935, she, Joe and Esta became Australian citizens.
While Maria and Esta had been away, Saffigna and other Italian cane cutters had been on strike for several months over the Weil’s Disease issue – in defiance of their right-wing Australian Workers’ Union, which was urging a return to work.
“We have not only the bosses to fight but also, incredible though it may appear, the organization to which we could naturally be expected to look for assistance, the AWU, the union to which we all belong. But they have lined themselves on the side of the bosses, and the union officials are touring the sugar areas in cars accompanied by police and are attempting to drive men back to work by intimidation,” said an appeal for support by the strikers.[i]
In any event, Saffigna was destined to continue cane cutting only until the beginning of the 1938 season – when he happened to be accidentally hit by a car in Innisfail driven by a sugar mill manager.
As compensation, he was given a considerable sum of money – and a much easier job at the mill as a gardener.
In 1940, Maria suddenly died, and the mill owner arranged for Saffigna to be transferred to Sydney to work at the CSR sugar refinery, while Esta worked in an underwear factory.
WW2 was a time of upheaval and rapid changes for many – and certainly for Saffigna.
A second marriage while he was in Sydney soon failed, and towards the end of the war, he was back in Queensland with a third wife, Daphne Smith, a nurse at the Royal Brisbane Hospital who was a fellow member of the Communist Party.
The newlyweds set up a vegetable farm at Wellington Point, south-east of Brisbane, and by early 1947 had two sons – Paul and Karl.
While he worked hard to improve his own knowledge of English – reading detective novels being a favourite – he helped many new Italian migrants with interpreting, and finding housing and jobs.
He helped to organize a club in Brisbane that aimed to encourage Italian migrants and Australian-born people to socialize together, and was involved in an Italian-Australian Association that wanted to set up a Queensland branch.
“Members of a branch to be formed here soon will meet all Italian immigrants arriving in the state, arrange accommodation, and transport to their jobs, and provide funds if needed. The association will take over some of the work of the Immigration Department in welcoming migrants,” Saffigna told Brisbane’s “Courier Mail” newspaper.[ii]
In late 1950, Daphne encouraged Saffigna to make his first trip back to Italy since his 1924, while his brother, Camillo, who had just arrived, helped to look after the farm.
He was supposed to collect a share of an inheritance left to him by his mother, Maria, when she died in 1945, and bring it home, but ended up squandering it all partying with old and new friends in Canebola, and when he returned home in 1951, he was broke.
Whatever negative reaction Saffigna may face from Daphne back in Australia over his extravagance in Italy, unbeknown to him, questions were about to be raised by the Immigration Department over his right to stay in Australia at all because he was allegedly “a Communist agitator”.
According to a Department document produced in 1952, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation had “secret information” that Saffigna had been given a mission by the Communist Party of Italy: to provide it with as much information as possible about unemployed Italians in Australia.
Immigration documents, released by the National Archives of Australia, do not reveal how ASIO came to this conclusion – though at the time it had strong links with security agencies in Italy who helped to screen out prospective migrants with Communist leanings.
The documents say Saffigna had been closely associated with unemployed Italian migrants in Queensland, and he’d reportedly told some to refuse to accept work allocated to them outside Brisbane by the Commonwealth Employment Service because they’d have “no proper accommodation”.
The Department’s secretary, Tasman Heyes, sought advice whether it would be possible to take the unprecedented step of trying to cancel Saffigna’s Australian citizenship, and deport him.
Kenneth Bailey, who served both as secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, and as Solicitor-General of the Commonwealth, told Heyes that the information he’d supplied about Saffigna fell short of what was needed to take action under the relevant section of the Nationality and Citizenship Act.
Bailey pointed out to have his citizenship cancelled, Saffigna would have “shown himself by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected” towards the Queen, as Australia’s Head of State, and it was doubtful that this had occurred.
Further, Bailey said, Saffigna would have the right to appeal to a public committee of inquiry, where the evidence could at best show that Saffigna was “a trouble-maker” who may not be going beyond “legitimate political activity in the interests of his fellow countrymen in Australia”.
“For the foregoing reasons I am of the opinion that the Minister would not be justified in referring the matter to a committee for inquiry,” Bailey concluded.[iii]
Bailey’s advice was apparently accepted, as Saffigna’s daughter, Esta Ziviani, does not recall any action against him – and she did not even learn of the proposal to cancel his citizenship until long after his death.
Esta says her father was always trying to help improve the working conditions of cane cutters and other workers in north Queensland, especially fellow Italian migrants.
“A lot of the migrants, the Italians, they looked to him, because he made it his business to learn English as soon as he could and a lot of the others didn’t. And he wasn’t a leader but he was among the ones who were agitating for better conditions. He had a sense of, what do you call it? Of social justice? Because in Italy, he remembered going for jobs and there’d be about 20 or 30 people going for one or two jobs and the ones who were recruiting would say ‘Oh, who will work for less wages, less pay?’ And, you know, the young single men would stand back, mostly, and say, oh, they knew there were married men with families there, and let them. And he just thought that was wrong, that sort of thing. He just felt there were so many others who thought like him, men he admired, and you had to stand up for yourself and for your mates.”
Esta points out her father did not arrive in Australia with any knowledge of Communism, and that he eventually lost faith in it.
“He just knew that fascism wasn’t any good because that’s what he’d left behind and later on, it was much later, that they became allied with the Communists because they were the only ones that were offering any support, and of course, you know, they were looking for support. And the news we got here from what had happened in Russia, it sounded all good, that, you know, Communism was good. It was good for the working people. They spread the money around. They didn’t have just have the rich at the top and the absolute slaves at the bottom. And then eventually, very slowly, he became a bit disillusioned with the idea of Communism but that was, you know, way down the track.”
Joe Saffigna’s son, Carl, says his father, who later became a tobacco farmer, gradually lost faith in Communism and for many years was an active Labor Party supporter instead.
“He had been with the Communist Party and that was seen as a bad thing, and I think he was trying to avoid people pointing the finger at the family because I know as a kid it kind of got out that Dad was a ‘Commo’ and we were picked on a bit at school. It was fairly low-key, but we’re talking about, sort of the 50s, and there was still that post-War thing. People had come back from World War and they felt they’d been fighting Germany and Italy. The Italians were on the wrong side, so there was a bit of slagging off at people, and if they thought you were Communist, then that was possibly even worse because by that stage all the things that had gone on with Stalin were coming to the fore, and they were realizing that Communism wasn’t the panacea for the ills of the world, that there were actually bad things done under the name of Communism. So Dad was actually deflated by that whole idea. He used to go to rallies to support Communists, but then he switched to Labor. And when they had polling booths he would work giving out leaflets, talking to people, particularly trying to influence Italians. I suppose they said ‘We’ll gain more from you talking to Italians and trying to influence them to vote’. And by then it wasn’t voting for Communists, but it was voting for Labor candidates.”
Carl Saffigna agrees with his sister that his father didn’t know about the idea of cancelling his citizenship, and probably didn’t even know he’d been under ASIO surveillance.
“I don’t think he would have had any inkling. He may have been proud in hindsight to go ‘Yeah, the buggers didn’t get me’ kind of attitude because he wasn’t here to bring the country down. His thing was to try and make the country the best possible thing for the most possible people. There was no way he was going to try to turn Australia back into something like he’d seen in Italy, where it was run by people who were really just self-serving. And he would have been really amazed that he was under surveillance for what he saw as perfectly legitimate activities. He was just trying to help people, and in particular Italian people, in any way he could – find them housing, try and find them work, try and get them to a position where they could buy a property. There was an old chap who talked to me and he said ‘It wasn’t until 20 years later that I realized when I went to sell my farm that I had to go through your father because he was the person who had gone guarantor or something like that’. He said ‘Your Dad had to sign the papers or I wouldn’t have been able to buy the property’. So he was just trying every way he could to try to make the country better and then the country was kind of looking at him as if he was an evil person.”
Saffigna and his wife remained active in community affairs, both for example serving on the Parents and Citizens Committee of the Cleveland District High School – he as president.
As long as he could, Saffigna kept working – mainly growing tobacco, then passionfruit, interspersed with stints as a labourer.
Esta Ziviani says her father always worked hard.
“When he became of pensionable age, he said ‘if you’re able to work you should work, and not bludge on the government’. He lied about his age. We never knew his age until he died and we had his papers. He kept lying about his age. He kept working until he was 75, and then finally he agreed to accept the pension.”
Joe Saffigna died in 1990, aged 87, leaving behind numerous children, grand-children and great-grandchildren in a country that had once come close to trying to throw him out.
This is a modified version of a story originally published by SBS with interviews given by Esta Ziviani and Carl Saffigna as part of a series called ‘Unwanted Australians’, produced by Kristina Kukolja and Lindsey Arkley
[i] Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser, 14 Sept, 1935
[ii] Courier Mail, 1 March 1950
[iii] NAA: A432, 1952/2204
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