Influx of 1950s Italian South Australian migrants raises policing issues via Don Dunstan on Parade at Norwood
The Parade at Adelaide's Norwood went through a 1950s reaction to the influx of Italian "New Australian" migrantson the way to making places such as Cafe Bongiourno its institutions. In 1993, Norwood placed a monument in Osmond Terrace recognising South Australia's first Italian, Antonio Giannoni (inset, right), whose son Peter was elected Norwood mayor in 1920.
Main image courtesy Adelaide Remembers When, South Australian Migration Museum and Monuments Australia
The Parade in the Adelaide inner eastern suburb of Norwood in the 1950s became a centre for reaction to the thousands of Italian migrants flowing in to form the largest non-English-speaking group in South Australia.
The Parade was the shopping street for the northeast areas of Payneham, Campbelltown, Hectorville and Newton where many Italian migrant family settled. The cultural disturbance of this large sudden post-World War II influx was reflected by the Norwood municipal council and its mayor Ron Moir in 1950.
When some names and initials were scratched into a freshly painted building in Norwood, Moir went to The Advertiser newspaper, provoking a story headlined “Police Shortage Blamed For Vandalism” and the “serious position” over “increasing larrikinism in the town” of Norwood. The subtext of those complaints was found in council reported about “[a] shopkeeper being subjected to the unnecessary attention of two New Australians on Saturday night and concern about Italian youths congregating, and “fighting on the Parade between New Australians and others…”
This also was the era of alarm over the rise of the rock’n’roll-inspired young bodgies and widgies but it was Italian names such as Filosi, Gasparini, Fantasia often appeared in reports of those ordered to move on in The Parade by police making liberal use of South Australia’s peculiar laws against loitering.
The officer in charge of Norwood police station, sergeant A.C. Fry blamed migrants for causing much of the trouble: “Practically every time an Italian is stopped and questioned he puts on the ‘No speak English, No understand’. It is impossible to do anything with them without the assistance of an interpreter.” But, aside from that prejudice, Fry had an ally in the state parliamentary member for Norwood, the young lawyer Don Dunstan, who saw the need for better policing in The Parade but with a different approach.
Besides the abuses of loitering laws by elements of the police, seeing everyday acts of discrimination were important in forming the policies of Dunstan’s future decade as premier of South Australia. Dustan’s transforming effect on South Australian lifestyle was inspired by the “cafe, coffee, and chianti” lifestyles brought to Norwood by his Italian constituents. But, besides his laws against discrimination, Dunstan also introduced consumer laws, as a result of Italian people telling him their troubles dodgy car salesmen.
