13: The Immigrants, Part Two: The House on The Hill and The Promise of Happiness

Welcome to the second part of an episode of the podcast series Immigrants and Exiles, which started as a conversation between myself, Walter, and my friend, Moreno, regarding his second novel: The Immigrants.

We talked about so many topics: love, loving, having loved, having no luck, staying here, leaving here – that is, Australia – going back to Italy. And we finished by talking about how he wanted to stir people up. And I said some people might think that when he’s criticising Australia, or non-migrant Australians, that he’s writing a kind of revenge story, that he’s upset about things in the past. But, in fact, his passion, his motivation, reflect the conscientious effort to validate as much of the totality of the past as he experienced it and has been officially documented as having been experienced by others. He relentlessly makes demands of readers who don’t know, or of those don’t want to know, about things that happened to people who set off in search of the El Dorado of a better life: and failed. And suffered.  He has written a book to restore historical memory, that seeks to speak truth to power, and all of which has made it an intriguing and disturbing work, full of joy and tragedy, impressive and absorbing, and shocking, and, in many parts, beautiful and comforting.