Cloudland, Stronzoland, Brisbane: urban and ethnic development in Little Italy [1]

Jessica Carniel

A throng of coffee-fragrant and garlic-wafting enterprises showed that even Brisbane had discovered café society.  Suits and beautiful people were everywhere.  Yet somehow amongst all of them Gothics fitted in, greasy-haired hippies in sandals, tottering drunks, and lost tourists like me.  Things had changed (Armanno 2001, p. 37; first published 1994).

Brisbane has experienced an important transformation over the last decade.  According to some commentators, it was during the 1980s that Brisbane finally shed its ramshackle, sleepy town image and ‘came of age’ (Caulfield & Wanna 1995, p. x).

A significant presence in Venero Armanno's books is the evolving urban landscape of Brisbane, Queensland, as an alternative site of Italian migration to Australia, separate from the more often documented sites of Sydney, Melbourne and the Queensland cane fields.  The use of Brisbane as the setting for Armanno's novels is significant; this city, like the characters Armanno creates within it, is often seen as being in search of its own culture and identity, having 'grown up' in the shadow of the reputedly more cosmopolitan cities of Sydney and Melbourne.  In contemporary Australian literature and film the large cities of Sydney and Melbourne are undoubtedly more familiar settings for most audiences, regardless of the location or point of origin of the audience.  Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland characterised in David Malouf's Johnno (1975, p. 9) as an 'overgrown country town', is less publicised and less romanticised and thus less familiar to the Australian (and international) imagination.  The city has occasionally been used as a cheap alternative for film and television productions set elsewhere – I remember the solitary double-decker bus that wended its way through the few Victorian era buildings in the city in an attempt to make it look like London for the filming of the Mission Impossible television series in the early 1990s.  It has, however, also been rejected as the location for its own filming in Sydney.  Even Armanno considered transferring the setting of his novel Firehead (1999) from Brisbane to New York for a possible film version.  Although such transfers of setting indicate the universality of the stories involved, what is lost is the way in which the authors use certain cityscapes as more than backdrops, and as characters in themselves.

Of Armanno's six published novels, three are set predominantly in Brisbane.  An analysis of these three narrative, Romeo of the Underworld (1994), The Volcano (2001) and Firehead (1999), reveals how Armanno has captured the changing face of Brisbane, from the 'unlovely' (Malouf 1975, p. 51) town to the garlic- and coffee-scented cosmopolitan city.  Brisbane's recovery from a somewhat shady past in the 1970s and 1980s, involving corrupt governments and law enforcement, echoes the journey upon which Armanno's protagonists embark in his various novels.  Furthermore Brisbane, and more specifically the inner-city suburbs of New Farm and Fortitude Valley, act in Armanno's work as a symbolic Little Italy to which the protagonists might retreat in search of their ethnic beginnings.

Introducing Brisbane and its Little Italy

Italian settlement in Brisbane was particularly concentrated in the inner-city suburbs of New Farm and Fortitude Valley, both of which feature prominently in Armanno’s fiction.  These areas remained a popular site for Italian settlement well into the 1970s, after which Italian migration to Australia began to wane and those who had settled there began to relocate to the outer suburbs.  In ‘If you had your time again, would you migrate to Australia?’ A study of long-settled Italo-Australians in Brisbane, Ellie Vasta (1985, p. 67) argues that while Brisbane’s Italian Australians formed a cohesive community at the level of communication, language and culture, they were at the time ‘too fragmented to be in a position to develop their own support networks’.  Combined with the movement of Italian migrants into the outer suburbs, and the systematic urban development instigated by the Queensland State government throughout the 1970s and 1980s (discussed below in relation to the landmark known as Cloudland), this fragmentation of the Italian community is perhaps amongst the best explanations for the early demise of Brisbane’s Little Italy. [2]

Although some remnants of an Italian presence remain in various cafés, restaurants, specialty stores and delicatessens, the inner-city and increasingly gentrified areas of New Farm and Fortitude Valley have not been maintained or cultivated as a Little Italy in the same manner as Sydney’s Norton Street in Leichhardt or Lygon Street in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton.  Given such, it is important to consider these Brisbane suburbs not as a physical Little Italy but as a symbolic Little Italy.  Aiming to construct San Diego’s Little Italy as a third space, Teresa Fiore (1999, p. 93) suggests that we look at Little Italy:

as a spatial laboratory of ideas, dreams, and practices that defy any binary or exclusionary conception of space (historical preservation vs. utilitarian adaptation), and allow for a more flexible definition of urban space, especially in consideration of the complex ethnic history of the area.

Welcome to Stronzoland: imagining a space for (lost) community and (found) identity

In Armanno’s novels, Brisbane plays the same role as the Little Italies of Italian American literature, as well as featuring a specific inner-city space that is remembered as a Little Italy even if it has since disintegrated.  We see in these novels – which are best read through the framework of the ethnic bildungsroman, or novel of development that centres upon ethnic identity formation [3] – the return of the characters to the sites of their youth for personal and ethnic catharsis, and memories of a strong Italian Australian presence in these locations.  In Romeo of the Underworld, for example, Romeo Costanzo’s Sicilian Australian ethnicity and identity are more strongly played out in Brisbane than they were in The Lonely Hunter (1993), which is set in Sydney.  Armanno’s three novels The Lonely Hunter, Romeo of the Underworld and The Volcano are commonly referred to as the ‘Romeo trilogy’.  These novels do not constitute a single cohesive narrative, as the label of trilogy would suggest, but are loosely interconnected through shared characters and themes.  As noted above, The Lonely Hunter is set in Sydney but this city and its sites of Italian Australian community and settlement do not assume the prominent role in the narrative that Brisbane does in Romeo of the Underworld, The Volcano and the unrelated novel, Firehead.  The scenes from Romeo’s Brisbane youth in Romeo of the Underworld serve to explain his reluctance to be a ‘good Italian son’ in The Lonely Hunter.  Romeo must return to Brisbane, specifically to Fortitude Valley and New Farm, in order to resolve his past and facilitate his personal and ethnic development.  In Firehead, Sam Capistrano does not leave Brisbane but does move away to the other side of the city, and must return to his childhood neighbourhood of New Farm in his attempt to resolve his lingering obsession with Gabriella Zazò.

References to delicatessens, to family gatherings and to the large number of Sicilians living in the neighbourhood combine to create a sense of a Little Italy or, given the focus upon the specific Sicilian identities of the main characters, a Little Sicily in Armanno’s novels.  When stacks of newspapers from the local shop disappear in Firehead, Sam and Gabriella develop creative theories to explain their little local mystery, including ‘a plot by some racist political group to keep New Farm Sicilians ignorant of the world and Australian events and hence out of the greater running of the country’ (Armanno 1999, p. 12).  The children’s imagined victimisation of the local Sicilian population indicates both the significance of this population and their perception that there existed a sense of community and cohesion, further supported by their construction of the ‘Australian’ population as ‘other’.  In Romeo of the Underworld, Michele Aquila remembers his restaurant, Il Vulcano, as a hub of the Italian Australian community in Brisbane throughout the 1950s and 1960s: ‘when we had money and courage enough we made our own place, a place the friends Gloria made came to eat pasta and meet Italian and Sicilian migrants just like themselves’ (Armanno 2001a, p. 168; original italics).  After Michele has been ousted from his family and his business by his wife, Gloria, and her second husband, Il Vulcano is moved to a prominent riverside location outside of New Farm and Fortitude Valley.  Thus it is removed from Little Italy and gentrified in the process, signalling its diminished role as a gathering place for the local Italian community but also signalling the commercial and mainstream success of Italian food and culture in Australia.

While The Volcano also evokes a sense of Italian community in New Farm during the 1950s, Emilio Aquila wryly suggests that it was somewhat affected: ‘All the Sicilians in Brisbane were calling one another cummare or compare these days, really hamming it up sometimes so that everyone was clear about how much affection they felt for one another’ (Armanno 2001b, p. 384).  The Volcano is littered with short descriptions indicating a strong Italian presence in the area, such as the proximity of neighbours, the gatherings for wine, cards and gossip and the existence of Italian food stores and delicatessens.  A passing reference to biscotti bought at ‘the struggling Sellano Delicatessen’ (Armanno 2001b, p. 385) demonstrates the availability of ethnic foods while also foreshadowing the weakening of the suburb of New Farm as a Little Italy.

The character of Pietro Pierucci, a local police officer in Firehead who was born in Sicily and migrated to Australia as a child, best indicates the precariousness of the Italian community in New Farm during the 1970s, and the sense that it is slowly edging towards its demise.  Sam describes him as ‘our local hero’ (Armanno 1999, p. 11) and as ‘our local guardian angel’ (Armanno 1999, p. 25), later explaining: ‘The thing is, Pietro in Italian means Peter in English but more than that pietro is the word for rock and that was exactly what that young man was to the Sicilian families of those days, the rock upon which they understood the solid foundation of Australian law’ (Armanno 1999, p. 29).  Pierucci’s supervision of the community is an attempt to prevent significant damage to or destruction of Little Italy through a disintegration of values (manifest in criminal activities performed by the community’s members) or unfair treatment (discrimination against Italians by the host society), but he cannot prevent its slow disintegration through class mobility and migration to outer suburbs.  Pietro Pierucci is unable to continue in his role when he fails to protect Gabriella Zazò, whose disappearance becomes symbolic of the disintegration and loss of innocence of this Little Italy.

Analysing spatial narratives in the work of other Queensland authors, Gillian Whitlock (1994, p. 75) argues that they:

by no means glorify the local.  However [these narratives] do cast it in terms of a retrospective, reading Queensland regions spatially in terms of a lost innocence and simplicity, a wilderness space which cannot be recaptured.  Even when the urban space enters Queensland narratives, it retains the qualities of wilderness, impermanence and excess.

The theme of lost innocence certainly resonates within Armanno’s work.  The first part of Firehead, for example, begins with lyrical, dreamy language that evokes innocence, simplicity and humble, romantic beginnings: ‘We were to live side by side in an urban forest of deciduous trees, where crickets and cicadas sang their croaky songs and sparrows and starlings dive-bombed our heads whenever we played our backyard games; how would we ever forget such beginnings?’ (Armanno 1999, p. 4).  Armanno creates an image of New Farm as an ‘urban forest’ in which children play and, as the narrative eventually reveals through Gabriella’s disappearance, in which they may become lost.  Both Romeo of the Underworld and Firehead feature scenes set in New Farm and Fortitude Valley in the 1970s that remember this area as a Little Italy and depict its demise, tying this to the loss of innocence of its Italian Australian youth.  Both Gabriella’s disappearance at the end of the summer of 1975 in Firehead and Monica Aquila’s death in Romeo of the Underworld, occurring at the beginning of the 1980s, mark the dissolution of this urban space as an ethnic precinct.  Their loss is connected to the dilution of the networks and community of Little Italy through migration into the outer suburbs due to increasing social mobility:

I thought too many of the families had moved out of ‘their’ suburb of New Farm.  They’d left to show that they’d done well in the new country.  It was their way of demonstrating progress.  Too many of them now lived in big brick houses.  Too many of them were in distant Brisbane suburbs nicely planted with trees in rows on the footpaths, where the surroundings were as whistle-clean as the grounds of a retirement estate…  There used to be energy, there used to be life; to my mind it had all gone too quickly and I blamed that on Gabriella’s disappearance – but who knows, it might just be the thing that happens to migrants in any country.  They stay together as long as they can but then life intrudes and the old connections get lost (Armanno 1999, pp. 134-6).

In Romeo of the Underworld, Romeo makes an explicit connection to his mental and emotional state and his presence in Brisbane.  The opening chapter, entitled ‘Stronzo in a Stronzo Land,’ opens with rumination upon the word stronzo:

Stronzo is a seriously Italian, Italian type word.  More so when used in one of the Southern dialects, preferably Sicilian…  It’s best to have too much to drink before you utter the word, it’s best to ache to the very core of your bones and, if you can manage it, to have not slept well for longer than you can remember.  Then the word takes on its legitimate meaning and, when applied inwardly, with great personal insight, describes that gut-queasy sensation of realising you’ve made a mess of not only your own life but the lives of those who have been luckless enough to become intimate with you (Armanno 2001a, p. 1-2).

This chapter ends with Romeo thinking as he falls asleep on his first night back in Brisbane, that he is a ‘Stronzo in a stronzo land’ (Armanno 2001a, p. 32), for he has returned to the place where he believes he has made a mess of his life and the lives of the Aquila family.  The connection between his ‘stronzo’ state of mind and his geographical location is more explicitly drawn later in the novel when, left with only five dollars to get home after a night on the town, he ponders: ‘How far would that get me through Stronzoland?’ (Armanno 2001a, p. 50).  Taking a cab as far as his money will allow, Romeo walks the remaining distance home, unafraid of passing cars and fellow pedestrians, and trapped in his own thoughts: ‘Oh, here in Brisbane we walk without any fear of each other at all.  Why should I choose to call it Stronzoland?  That name was only right for the terrain of my heart’ (Armanno 2001a, p. 50).  Romeo’s state of nostalgia, melancholy and discontent, while an ongoing problem previously established in The Lonely Hunter, is expressed through his perception of his urban environment.

In this previous novel, Romeo often seeks to shrug off the cultural burden of his Sicilian background, yet succumbs to it after every resistance.  He accepts a job in a factory because he needs it, despite feeling resentful that he has obtained it through some cumpare of his parents that he has never met.  He also marries a woman of Italian descent, despite vowing he never would do so as it would please his parents too much.  Although Anna is not entirely the ‘good Italian girl’ that his parents would have hoped for, they are satisfied simply because she is Italian, and Romeo is displeased that he has brought about this satisfaction for them.  An integral part of Romeo’s development in the first novel is his departure from his parents’ home, where he has lived since Anna’s suicide.  But having dealt with one aspect of his experience of his Sicilian heritage – that is, his failed ‘Italian’ marriage – Romeo must return to Brisbane to reconcile the other aspect – his idealisation of Monica as the ‘Italo-Australian princess’ (Armanno 2001a, p. 90), echoed in his later relationships with his late wife Anna and Monica’s daughter, Mary.  Whilst Romeo does not return to a physical Little Italy, his return to Brisbane signals a return to a symbolic Little Italy.  In a sense, his interactions with the prominent and ostensibly successful Aquila family become representative of his interactions with the greater Italian Australian community, and his Italian/Sicilian Australian identity is bound up in the Aquilas’ perception of him.  In order to resolve his identity as an Italian Australian male, Romeo must acknowledge the way in which his idealisation of Monica has impacted upon his life and his relationships with women, particularly Anna and Mary, and must orchestrate a catharsis for Gloria, Michele and Mary Aquila.

 In The Volcano, Emilio returns to Brisbane's Little Italy in his memories as he recounts his story to Mary Aquila.  His departure from this symbolic space occurs upon his agreement to work for an underworld criminal, Oscar Sosa.  It is through his connection with Mary and her own search for a sense of her origins that Emilio is able to return to a symbolic Little Italy and to participate in cultural maintenance through telling his story, despite the fact that he has never left the physical space of New Farm.  The Volcano is significant in this aspect of return as important to personal and ethnic catharsis.  This novel, and thus the Romeo trilogy as a whole, closes with Emilio's and Mary's return to Sicily.  As argued by Loretta Baldassar (2001, p. 3), returning to Italy is a significant journey for migrants and the successive generations.  In Italian Australian narratives, the journey to Italy aids protagonists in the articulation of their Italian Australian identities.  Returning to Sicily, Emilio is able to make peace with his ex-wife, Desideria, and returns to the foothills of Mt Etna to die.  Mary, upon travelling through Sicily towards Etna and the town from which her family originates, experiences a 'shift into a different sensory zone, one she needs … The Sicilian Zone'. (Armanno 2001b, p. 505).

Remembering Cloudland: ‘all we leave behind is the memories’ [4]

Through memories of the Cloudland Ballroom featured in both Romeo of the Underworld and The Volcano, Armanno identifies the appeal of New Farm and Fortitude Valley to Sicilian migrants, as well as identifying another symbol of the rise and fall of this area as a Little Italy.  Armanno creates an explicit connection between Cloudland and migrants’ sense of home, place and community in Brisbane:

‘Guardi.’ I follow his pointing finger toward Cloudland at the top of the hill. ‘Etna,’ he says, ‘Etna with a fire that never goes out.  It’s the only thing you can see, day and night, the volcano always there above you.  Always on fire in the belly, always with fire coming out of its mouth.  We came here and saw Cloudland and we felt like we were home again.  So we wrote to our friends and our relatives and they came and they stayed too (Armanno 2001a, p. 128).

Destroyed early in the morning of 7 November 1982 by the notoriously mercenary demolitionists, the Deen Brothers, Cloudland Ballroom was an important social centre in Brisbane.  Completed in 1940 and opening in August of that year, Cloudland was originally known as Luna Park Brisbane, located on Cintra Hill in the inner-city suburb of Bowen Hills.  The ballroom featured a funicular to transport its guests up the steep hill on which it was perched.  There were plans to incorporate an amusement park, but it was never built due to events of the Second World War and the occupation of the site by the United States army (Fisher 1991, p. 57; McBride & Taylor 1997, p. 47).  After the war, the ballroom was sold and reopened in 1947 as Cloudland Ballroom.  Cloudland witnessed generations of dancing by socialites, migrants and teenagers, university examinations, flea markets and rock bands.  One of over sixty heritage-listed buildings demolished in Brisbane between the mid 1970s and early 1990s whilst the anti-heritage, pro-development National Party was in power in Queensland, Cloudland’s demolition is seen as one of the most significant, together with the BelleVue Hotel and the Queen Street Commonwealth Bank.  Fisher suggests it was these demolitions that transformed the ‘pre-war town … into a nondescript high-rise city’ (Fisher 1991, p. 57).  Cloudland has played a significant role in Brisbane’s social and cultural past, and is a notable presence and absence in Armanno’s fiction.  Armanno highlights its importance to migrants of the 1950s and to their teenage children growing up in the 1970s, reflecting Brisbane’s nostalgia for the lost landmark, lamenting its loss and sharply criticising the construction of an ultra-modern apartment complex on its former site.

As his plane circles above Brisbane with smoking engines at the beginning of Romeo of the Underworld, Romeo scans the landscape outside his window for the landmarks of his youth spent in Brisbane only to find that the final one, and the most important, has been replaced by modern townhouses.  Cloudland’s absence provokes both anger and nostalgia in Romeo:

For once upon a time at the peak of Bowen Hills’ hillock there was a place we’d go for music and dancing and beer, and for girls.  A huge and ornate structure from a bygone era, that Cloudland Ballroom, and never was a place so properly named.  You saw it from all over Brisbane, perched on its hill with its neon lights more colourful than anything in the evening sky.  The ballroom always seemed so kind of nice, so magical.  It must have burned to the ground, a Brisbane tragedy, for no one would knock such a place down for anything as crass as commercial housing.  The red lights of Cloudland’s central dome always made me think of the silhouette of a volcano – the active Mt Etna, of course.  Its sprung wooden dance floors used to make me think of the canvas floor of the wrestling ring, bouncing up and down, up and down, ready for sparring, skirmishing, for the beery-dreamy love match that would start when you latched onto some new Friday night girl (Armanno 2001a, p. 12).

The likeness he draws between ‘the red lights of Cloudland’s central dome’ and Mt Etna establishes a parallel between Cloudland, Romeo’s Sicilian origins and the restaurant, Il Vulcano.  Romeo’s assumption that Cloudland must have accidentally burned to the ground foreshadows his discovery of Monica’s own fiery demise.  Romeo’s Cloudland of the 1970s is contrasted against migrants’ experiences and memories of Cloudland in the 1950s, revealed by Michele, as quoted above, and Emilio.  Echoing an earlier description of a reddened night sky outside Emilio Aquila’s volcanic lair in Sicily (Armanno 2001b, p. 287), Cloudland is described thus: ‘In the Cloudland Ballroom Emilio looked from the holy city of stars, which were the multicoloured lights set so high amongst the vast colonnades, the brocaded royal blue and gilt ceilings, the leadlight dome, then he spun Desideria into his arms…  Mansion of music, palace of dreams: in those days the price of admission was two shillings per adult’ (Armanno 2001b, p. 358).

Although each of the novels comprising the Romeo trilogy (The Lonely Hunter, Romeo of the Underworld and The Volcano) are easily read as individual narratives, certain images, characters and themes recur throughout all three narratives that act to unite them as a whole.  The image of the volcano, specifically Mt Etna, is the most significant of these unifying images.  As its title reveals, The Volcano constantly draws upon imagery and stories relating to volcanos, specifically Mt Etna.  As Michele points out, Cloudland, with its red dome glowing from its vantage point on the top of Cintra Hill, reminds Brisbane’s Sicilian migrants of their homeland and serves as an enticement for future migrants – they will not have to leave the volcano for it will still be there when they arrive in Australia.  Andrew Dawson and Mark Johnson (2004, p. 116) argue that ‘the imagining of migration and exile become constitutive parts of the construction and experiences of place and landscape’.  The Sicilian migrants of Armanno’s narratives imagine the Brisbane cityscape as reflecting the Sicilian landscape they have left, and so construct a sense of home and place.  Although Cloudland was by no means a social centre exclusive to migrants, Armanno represents it as an important one in his fiction and a beacon to which his characters are drawn, and in close proximity to which they create their own Little Italy.  Like Gabriella’s disappearance in Firehead and Monica’s death in Romeo of the Underworld, Cloudland’s demolition parallels the demise of Brisbane’s Little Italy, and the demise of the Sicilian community’s Etna-esque beacon.

The house on Spring Hill: syncretic space and urban palimpsest

In Firehead, the theme of ethnic and urban development and renewal is played out through a different site, although it is again a building situated on a hill in Spring Hill, a suburb neighbouring New Farm and Fortitude Valley.  At the beginning of the novel, it is Nocturne, the brothel to which Gabriella and Sam take Gabriella’s grandfather, Enrico Belpasso, for his birthday, and the place from which Gabriella disappears that day.  Nocturne’s former ‘palatial, colonial splendour’ (Armanno 1999, p. 58) is replaced ten years later by Sam and Tony Solero’s nightclub, La Notte, a modern steel and glass construction.  Nocturne’s demolition and La Notte’s construction are placed within the context of the ‘rapidly disappearing colonial architecture of Brisbane’s past’ (Armanno 1999, p. 95) previously explored in Armanno’s depictions of Cloudland and its demolition.  Ten years later again, in 1995, La Notte is replaced by Notte e Giorno, a successful restaurant run by Sam and his parents.  Andreas Huyssen (2003, p. 7) argues that ‘cities and buildings [can be] read as palimpsests of space’.  Huyssen (2003, p. 7) argues that although buildings themselves may not be actual palimpsests, ‘an urban imaginary in its temporal reach may well put different things in one place: memories of what was there before, imagined alternatives to what there is.  The strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses, and heterotopias’.  The Spring Hill site’s various incarnations create a palimpsest wherein what is imperfectly erased (local Brisbane memory of the brothel where a young Italian Australian girl disappeared and of the underhand dealings that eventually led to the closure of the nightclub that ruined the lives of promising young Italian Australian men) is written over (by a successful Italian restaurant).  Yet these memories exist beneath the layers (through the memory of the Italian Australian man who runs the restaurant and was involved in the notorious events of the past).  The repetition of ‘Italian Australian’ above is deliberate, indicating how Armanno transforms the site into a stage for a drama played out in the Italian Australian community, within their ethnic and urban imaginary, depicting the community’s fall (signified by Gabriella’s disappearance and the illegal activities of the Solero brothers) and the promise of resurrection (signified by the success of Sam’s legitimate, family-run business).

Armanno’s site in Spring Hill is made to reflect the changes occurring within Brisbane and the character of Sam Capistrano – their loss of innocence, their corruption and their redemption – through its various incarnations and their resonating names.  Heather Scutter (1999, p. 191) identifies the house that is the central location and source of conflict in another Brisbane narrative, Tom Moloney’s young adult novel The House on River Terrace (1995), as ‘a syncretic house with a highly syncretic history which is made to stand for the jostling and competing elements of Australia’s cultural identity’.  Likewise, the Spring Hill site featured in Firehead is a syncretic site with a syncretic history that stands for the history of Brisbane’s Little Italy.

In the second part of the narrative, Sam and Brisbane are both in the process of erasing and recreating new identities – Brisbane through its modernisation and Sam through his attempt to forget Gabriella in the love and happiness found with Irina Luna.  In the third part, it is learnt that such erasure is imperfect or impossible, and that balance and acceptance are paramount in their processes of identity formation.  Nocturne, La Notte and Notte e Giorno all refer to the night and, through this, darkness.  Only Notte e Giorno, the final incarnation that coincides with Sam’s personal and ethnic catharsis suggests day, light, hope and balance.  In the third and final part of the narrative, Sam finally establishes a balance between the present and the past, his memories and his lived reality, his Italianness and his Australianness.

Conclusions: developing sentient spaces

[I]t's no wonder ...that the characters are always in some kind of rebellion with [Brisbane] and for me that makes the city a character because it was something that I had to fight against.  It was always, to me, a kind of sentient place.  It had a character and its character was mean (Armanno in Carniel 2005a, p. 151).

In Armanno’s fiction Brisbane is used as a symbolic space for ethnic development, but he also depicts its changing urban landscape in such a way that reflects the changes occurring within his protagonists.  Brisbane is, in many ways, another of Armanno’s characters, and an important part of his narratives.  Armanno creates a link between Brisbane and the past – or of Brisbane as the gateway to the past – for his protagonists, making the city a significant site whereupon their ethnic catharsis might occur.  By returning to Brisbane, to the suburbs that comprised Little Italy and, through these sites, remembering their past, the protagonists are able to resolve their ambiguous relationships with Italianness and Australianness, the past and the present.   Cloudland is used to represent the Sicilian migrants’ senses of place and home through its imagined likeness to the volcano, Mt Etna, and how this contributes to the construction of New Farm as a symbolic Little Italy.  The early demise of Brisbane’s Little Italy is played out symbolically through Gabriella’s disappearance in Firehead and Monica’s death in Romeo of the Underworld.  This demise represents the loss of innocence of the protagonists, the Italian community, and the city of Brisbane.  The protagonists must return to this symbolic space and, through witnessing the changes in the urban environment, are able to reconcile their pasts and accept their ethnic identities.  Although the stories of love, loss and redemption told by Armanno cross time and borders, he uses the specific urban setting of Brisbane to further elucidate the thoughts and experiences of his protagonists, which reveals the city’s own unique story.  Changing attitudes to migration, heritage and culture are marked in its cityscape, as skyscrapers replaced colonial architecture and cafés and restaurants developed a cultural cachet beyond the ethnic communities for which they initially catered.

NOTES

1  An early version of this article appeared in Italian Studies in South Africa.  See Carniel 2005.

2  This urban development sought to eradicate many aspects of Brisbane’s cultural heritage.  I do not suggest, however, that Brisbane’s Little Italy was at all targeted in this program, but that its demise was merely endemic to this process.

3  The ethnic bildungsroman is conceived here as a conceptual framework for examining narratives that centre upon ethnicity and ethnic identities rather than the rigid generic category that is the traditional German Bildungsroman genre.  For a discussion of the traditional Bildungsroman and its various revisions and criticisms by critics such as Todd Kontje, as well as the concept of ethnic bildungsroman derived from work by Mary Jo Bona, Pin-chia Feng and Julia Alexis Kushigan in various ethnic American contexts; in an Italian Australian context, see Carniel (2006).

4  Deen Brothers demolition company motto.

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