Perth Voice Interactive

A LOCAL doco will delve into the history of Italian cuisine around Perth.

Adrian Craddock decided to make Spaghetti in the Suburbs after hearing his nonna’s tales about how important the comfort of food was to a young immigrant growing up in a strange new country.

“My nonna came over to Australia in the ‘50s,” he says.

“She used to talk about that time when she was very homesick. For a year when she moved to Australia from Napoli she cried every day.

“One of the things that gave her great comfort was the Re Store in Northbridge.

“At the time, with the language barrier, it felt like a little bit of home.”

Mr Craddock says it’s a common story to hear from Italian child migrants that they’d get picked on when showing up to school with salami sandwiches.

“A lot of people had a really visceral response to Italian food, they viewed it as being disgusting and suspicious.

“It was pretty English, the culinary landscape at the time: Fish and chips, lamb roast on a Sunday, that’s why it was so hard for people like my nonna.”

He says the Re family looked after Italian immigrants and had a lot of loyal customers: His nonna tells a story about how she’d bought a pasta pot from the Re Store shortly after arriving in Australia.

“Thirty years later the handle broke off. She, being my nonna and fairly thrifty, went back to the Re Store and said ‘you sold me this and it’s broken!’.

“They amazingly said ‘fair enough’ and went out the back and said ‘we’ve got this one, it’s a bit bigger, would you be happy with that?’ and they just gave her a pot.”

While Australians’ initial reception to Italian food was frosty, Mondo’s butcher Vince Garreffa—interviewed in the doco—says the tide gradually turned.

Mr Garreffa told him: “Once we started selling spaghetti in the surbubs, we’d won the cultural war!

Mr Craddock says: “He suffered that same things of being teased when he was younger. And now you don’t have to go to a specialist store to buy these foods, they’ve won the war, it’s completely normalised now.”

He found the cycle repeats through different waves of immigration: Vietnamese food suffered a similarly sceptical reception before being embraced, and now Middle-Eastern and African food is gradually becoming more common.

The 24-year-old, who grew up in Perth but moved to Melbourne last week to be the new correspondent for Monocle magazine, won a grant from Vincent city council’s film project for the doco.

It’ll feature at a free outdoor screening along with the other winners, Milly James’ drama Beautiful Distortion and James Pontifex’s romantic comedy The Meet Cute. A short film about the “One in, All-in” amalgamation campaign will also show at the February 22 screening at Hyde Park.

by DAVID BELL