A good life…

“We are not rich, but rich in here!” says Catalina Mastronardi, sitting next to her husband of 64 years, Guglielmo Mastronardi, in the packing shed of their Borenore farm and orchard.

Both born and raised in central Italy, Catalina (Lina or just “Nonna”)  and Guglielmo (“Bill”) have spent their entire married life here in Orange. Together, from very little, they worked to buy and grow the small farm they call home. It is where they raised their five children and with a lot of hard work forged a new life, half a world away from the place they were born.

But to hear Guglielmo tell his story, the decision to immigrate to Australia was made almost on a whim.

“I was just about 19-and-a-half and that's the time you got to go to the army,” says Guglielmo, who has a remarkable memory for details and appears much younger than his 92 years.

“One day, one of my friends he said, ‘I read on a board down in the town, whoever wants to go to Australia to make an application for it.’

“I said, ‘You want to go?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ So I go… I had no chance to go anywhere, my parents couldn't afford to send me out and they’d kept me home working, so I said, ‘Yes, I will go.”

Landing in Australia on August 1, 1952, Guglielmo and other new arrivals were sent from Sydney to Greta, near Maitland, the site of a former soldier training camp transformed into a migrant reception and training centre.

“We stayed there for a couple of months and then one by one they find you a job and send you out to work,” recalls Guglielmo, whose first employment in Australia was at Bankstown Airport.

“But the work was for ten weeks, so then at Christmas time we just had another week in January and then that was it — unemployment,” he says.

Picking up bits and pieces of work here and there, Guglielmo then literally walked into a job at the Hallstrom Refrigerator Factory in the North Sydney suburb of Willoughby.

“One day I walked down the main road there,” he says, “and there was a watchman at the front of the door there. He said, ‘Are you looking for a job?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Alright, I'll take you to the office. When do you want to start?’ ‘Now!’ So I stayed down there for two years.”

Having visited a cousin who lived in Orange, Guglielmo decided to get out of Sydney and organised to take a job at the Emmco factory.

But in 1960, after eight years in Australia, he decided it was time to see Italy once more. It was on this trip home that he met and married Lina.

“Six months later, Guglielmo set off for Australia once more, this time with his new bride in tow.

“I was excited because I'd never been anywhere,” says Lina. “But I was only 18 when I married him and I hadn't been anywhere at all, not even around Italy, so I was excited to see another place.”

When she was young, Lina said she had always wanted to go to the US, where she had uncles and cousins. But of life in Australia, she knew very little.

“But I said, why not? I'm young. We can do it — and I trusted him,” says Lina.

“He had been here eight years already, so I said a man like that is to be trusted to look after me…

“And my Dad, well my Dad said to me, If he doesn't… then I will walk to Australia and bash him up for you!” she adds with a laugh.

“But it was good and I have trusted him ever since… We've been married for 64 years this year!”

In Orange, Guglielmo returned to work at the Emmco factory but says after a few years he was looking for a change. It was then he saw the small farm at Borenore advertised for sale and in July 1965, he and Lina moved out to their new home.

“There was nothing much here, there was a little shed here and a little house and not enough water,” says Guglielmo, who struggled at times to make ends meet in his farming venture.

“It was a bit hard to learn to do it all and at one stage I couldn't make enough money to pay it back and to live on, so I started to work outside, working this [the farm] in my spare time,” he continues.

“But Lina, she said to me, ‘How about I go look for a job?’ She said whoever finds a job first will go and work and she got a job first!”

“I must have been prettier than you maybe,” says Lina, whose job was at Stan’s Fish Shop in Summer Street.

“They were like brothers to me, those fellas… and their wives, it was like a family, but then they sold the business and went back to Greece for good, so I went to look at the hospital for a job.”

Lina says she was willing to wash dishes or do whatever needed to be done, but it just so happened that the perfect opportunity had arisen.

“The boss there said there is a lady who is retiring soon and would you like to cook? I said, ‘I love cooking! It is the love of my life!’,” recalls Lina, with a smile.

“So I was there for 40 years. It was good. It was hard work sometimes but we were younger then. That's how we went on, with my job helping them, I bought them a spray cart, I bought them a tractor.”

In the years that followed, with son Steve joining them, the Mastronardis were able to expand their enterprise, purchasing a neighbouring property where they still grow a variety of fruits and vegetables.

It has not always been easy, but it has been a good life, says Lina, who recalls fondly her visits back to see family and proudly shows off the imported Italian furniture her husband bought for her.

“It has been a very productive life,” she says. “Exciting, sad at times when you lose family when you are far away, but it has been a good life. A lot of hard work, but a good life.”