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Category: Interviews »

Subject: Contemporary History »

Carlo Carli on Brunswick in the 1960s

Carlo Carli and Mara Moustafine.

Carlo Carli, now Brunswick state MP, remembers the place when he was young in the 1960s.

Created:

unknown

Date Added:

06 April 2009

Source:

source not available

Format:

mov (Quicktime);

File size:

6.8 MB

Length:

02min38sec

Transcript

Brunswick was an area of large migration, it had particularly large Greek and Italian communities there were smatterings of Poles and Lebanese, it had an Australian population, a very strong working class Australian population that had been there for a long time. It was a community t – there was a hard working community, I meanI was growing up in the ‘60s, people were making – trying to be successful, trying to settle. It was I suppose before periods of great unemployment so everyone was trying to work as hard as they can, parents put enormous emphasis on their kids succeeding in schools, it was also a period where we were picking up a lot of political activism, coming out of the Vietnam War period, so – well essentially for me, the first political action I can remember was the hanging of Ronald Ryan.
                        01:07
                   I grew up very close to the walls of Pentridge and it became a very big focal point for activity and I was very young then and I remember my father in particular being staunchly anti capital punishment and really seeing it as a a political manoeuvre. The other thing I could remember was growing up in a Catholic community– every time there was an election the DLP, ALP split just divided that community. So family –and this included, not just the –Irish Australian families, but also the Italian families and to some extent the Maltese – there were also smatterings of Maltese anda smattering of Poles.
                        01:50
                   Everyone seemed to take a side and in those periods, the weeks leading up to the election families stopped talking to each other for a few weeks, as they got ready for the poll and I recall–we’re still talking about the late ‘60s, early –you know, you still had the priest using the pulpit to call for a vote for the DLP. So you know, it was still, that’s – that divide in the Catholic community was still very strong.
                        02:23
                   But that was another area of – of very interesting tension if you like, the Irish Australian Catholics believed that people should go to church every Sunday and Italians figured that if you go to church three or four times a year, that was okay.
                        02:37
End transcript