The interviews were carried out and transcribed by state department employees in Australia itself.

I am merely describing what I read. They are true descriptions of real experiences.

Your relatives might have had more money and migrated differently.

‘Legal emigration’ to Australia in 1950 was not what we understand legal emigration to be today.

It was very similar to what is happening with ‘illegal’ migrants today, except that they got onto legitimate boats.

They arrived totally penniless and destitute, sometimes with only the clothes they had on, and camped on open ground until they cobbled a hut together. They lived without drainage or running water and buried their faeces in the ground around their huts.

They didn’t know the language and they took menial jobs in the black economy.

It was considered normal to treat destitute immigrant labourers like dirt.

And back then the Maltese, as we are seeing today with others, paid for their children’s passage and had them emigrate alone, exposed to all those risks and dangers. That was considered normal too.

People clambered on boats, arrived, and were literally dumped on open ground. They scrabbled around and built huts and lived in them.

And no, most Maltese did not make a ‘name’ for themselves. At most, they made a living. Very many continued to lead marginal lives on the brink of poverty, and the reason they didn’t return was that they would have been poorer still in Malta.

The one to make the biggest name for himself in Australia in the last 50 years is – ironically – Alex Vella of the Rebels MC biker gang.

The Maltese don’t work in slaughter houses anymore because they don’t exist anymore at the Junction. They’ve been replaced with Walmart, Home Depot and townhouses.

And yes they took unsavoury jobs because we had a class system in place then with every new immigrant group expected to be the runt of the litter. So we agree on that.

Even famed Maltese magician Johnny Giordimaine (Giordimaina) got his first job as an immigrant at the Swift slaugtherhouse/meat packing factory located at the Junction.

He first worked as an electrician there, as he received his journeyman papers at the Admiralty Dockyard in Malta in 1918 and then emigrated to Canada. Johnny left Swift after an industrial accident almost maimed him for life and he decided to pursue a career in magic.

Johnny Giordmaine was Canada’s most beloved children’s magician during his lifetime (1898-1974). Mentor to hundreds and possibly thousands of now grown
up amateur and professional magicians, he was also the first magician to
ever appear on television in Canada . He appeared on Captain Kangaroo Show and
as well as on the Ed Sullivan Show on U. S. television. For many years he was the
magician in residence at the magic counter of one of Canada’s largest
department stores. He is still fondly remembered by all who knew him.

Many of those post-war Maltese migrants to Australia did not speak English and were illiterate. They have not recorded their experiences.

A few years ago I stumbled upon, quite by chance, a veritable treasure trove of the experiences of Maltese migrants, on the internet. I have, frustratingly, not been able to find it again. It was a public-record project by a state department in Australia, the purpose of which was to gather the ‘living testimony’ of post-war migrants before they died.

I found the interviews with Maltese migrants and they were horrific. When they landed, they were taken straight to camps that make Malta’s detention centres look like heaven: a stretch of open land with huts of corrugated iron and no sanitary facilities. Newly arrived migrants, most of them large families, were given corrugated iron and told to build their own hut. Until it was built, they had no shelter.

There was no drainage in the camp and just one water-pump used by everybody. Human waste was buried in holes dug into the ground around the huts. You had to bury it near your own hut and not encroach on others’.

One women described how her family – her parents, a couple of grandparents and many siblings – even took in her aunt, uncle and their children when they migrated too and turned up at the camp. There were around 20 people living in that corrugated iron hut with no water, no electricity and no drainage.

They stayed in their huts until they earned enough money to buy a small home. This wasn’t as easy as you think – as migrants in the slum camps, they couldn’t get bank loans and they couldn’t rent anywhere decent either. So they ended up in those huts for years, burying their faeces around them.

Speaking of Detroit you remind me of that Maltese American lawyer fellow who blogs constantly on all things Norman Lowell.

Clearly you know who I speak of. He leaves out the part where he was forced into early retirement for corruption and the person who ratted him out was his boss and African American.

It must explain his, and maybe yours, deep rooted hatred for black people.

This has nothing to do with Maltese immigrants.

The Italians or Sicilians to be more precise, brought the Black Hand culture or what is known as the mafia today to New Orleans. They came in turf conflicts with Irish mobs and Creole mobs.

There has always has been conflict between the Italians and the Irish, the latter hate everybody, including themselves.

President Benjamin Harrison paid reparations to the Italian government of 25,000 dollars after the Italian government protested.

How clandestino became inverted status.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSEUH4KRfN8

Best selling album for months. No paninoteca slow, birreria alla spina, casa occupata, gelateria artigianale or any other radical chic place would dream not having it as background music.

The second half of the 20th century – post World War II. And even then there were problems, with Australia turning ships full of Maltese away on the basis that its immigration quota for coloured people had been filled already.