V. G. Venturini

I’ve recently begun reading Never Give In: Three Italian antifascist exiles in Australia, 1924-1956 by V. G. Venturini (Search Foundation, 2007); the three being Francesco Fantin, Omero Schiassi and Massimo Montagnana. Anyway, I thought this passage about STRAYA was amusing, so I thought I’d chuck it up:

Ignorant impatience persists, even though it has now been papered over with a ‘multicultural veneer’, while one strives to detect a glacially slow withering away of the sentimental and ‘cultural’ attachment to another country: Britain, whose knowledge and understanding of Italy and its complexity is no less faulty than Australia’s. Much multicultural rhetoric notwithstanding, Australians and above all their institutions remain overwhelmingly English, albeit modified by ‘life in the tropics’. What remains — the writer David Malouf recently reminded us — are an addiction to the pomp-and-forms of the parliamentary process, a heritage of philistinism, a dislike of some things regarded ‘too showy’, theatrical, arty or ‘too serious’, a fear of appearing ’emotional’, a distrust of theory, a preference for ‘pragmatism’ more as an end in itself than as a means to a programme, a feeling of happiness in remaining in doubt as to why something works so long as it does work, a search for ‘the mainstream’, that is the mediocrity which is mistaken for ‘British’ good common-sense, a sense of humour turned black by the subconscious recall of the violence needed to establish and sustain existence in the ‘new country’. But there are some added ‘qualities’, apparently locally grown: a passion for gambling — on the horses or the lottery, or over and about anything standing or moving, the tribal ritual of football, a pride in drunkenness, the flickering shadows of cops and robbers, guys and dolls, emanating from the ‘additional parent’ — the box in the lounge-room — an impatience with details, which puts a prize on approximation, a desperate craving for ‘respectability’ which leads to conformism, and all of that supported by a lazy authoritarianism and a diffident attitude to knowledge and things of the spirit because, where everyone is ‘tolerably’ ignorant, and things are ‘harmlessly’ uncertain, what passes for tolerance — but is in fact indifference — spreads around a sense of comfort.