Joe’s loneliness, Caterina’s separation anxiety, and a mother’s burden to keep farms productive are the cracks that surface from life decisions made, glimpses of the effects that isolation has on immigrants.
Chaos emerges as Michele and Pietro make life decisions without fully understanding their effects on their families. Isolation grows into a range of social issues, affecting wives and children left behind for years. Such life choices unfortunately bring unintended newborns into a precarious future. Joe’s loneliness becomes evident as he tags along at workplaces with his father and uncle in Mossman and Cobram, towns barely past the pioneer stage. At nine years of age, Joe still can’t write coherent sentences; expression is a matter of cobbling phonetics and Italglishisms in in-class writing exercises. When his father Michele goes to Gundagai for the asparagus harvests, Joe is billeted out to Italian families. Migraines begin to affect his quality of life. For want of a mother, Joe finds escapism in ‘puppy love’ for les petites femmes. Scholarly arithmetic lifts his confidence. After five years, Maria Concetta decides that the family should reunite in Cobram. The catch is that she has parted with a child, but in 1961 she gains a larrikin half-Aussie-assimilated teenager; adjustments would have to be made. After 1962, high school gives Joe some advantage, but by ’65 he ponders whether there is something better than that bleak existence.
