In less than six months, the book had been reprinted eight times and sold 74,000. The book was the first published novel by OGrady, with an initial print run of 6,000 hardback copies. Through scholarly articles, books, personal interviews and my own experiences, I will explore how these migrants transported a microcosm of their culture and cultural practices particular to their region to their new home in Mildura, in Victoria’s North‐West. Theyre a Weird Mob is a popular Australian comic novel written by John OGrady under the pseudonym 'Nino Culotta', the name of the main character of the book. However, this homeland was fabricated with crystallised memories and inhabited with behaviour patterns deriving from what theyīased on this premise, the aim of my arts practice‐based research is to investigate the experience of Calabrian migrants from the Aspromonte region of the province of Reggio Calabria (with a focus on the towns of Platì and Natile) who left Italy in the 1950s (in some cases earlier). Italian Australian scholar, Gerardo Papalia stated “immigrants themselves created their own little homeland within domestic walls. By clinging to their culture, it was a way of preserving it. Their new sites of settlement defined their sense of italianità1, as they maintained contact with other paesani, Calabrese and Italians. They placed importance on maintaining cultural attributes because of the belief that back in their place of origin, the same thing was happening. Like other recently arrived migrants following WWII, settlers from regional Calabria immersed themselves in the familiar and clung to the traditions and customs of their homeland. It may be said that families dispersed for social or political reasons to different parts of the globe were like satellites or capsules of culture, who then became the main custodians of a cultural preservation: where time more or less stood still.
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