le seconde - inheriting the unspoken

When Angelina discovers what has gone unspoken in her parents’ and grandparents’ lives, she is forced to re-evaluate her entire upbringing.

Angelina’s childhood in the far North Queensland cane fields is full of adventure. But it is also turbulent. Her beloved grandfather was an ardent fascist. Her father and grandfather struggle with the ferocious undercurrents of an unspoken past. Her mother, as the dutiful Italian wife, cannot speak about how she feels. Instead, she teaches her young daughter a revolutionary song that she knows will irritate her father-in-law.

As an adult, Angelina must deal with different sets of preconceived notions about who she should be and what she should do as well as the inherited trauma of the second generation. She enters corporate Australia at a time when women’s voices were only starting to be heard. Often, she is the only woman in the room and the only person with Italian heritage. Choosing between what is expected of her as a woman and what she feels she must do will have consequences.

Through the telling of her own story, Angelina reconstructs her family’s diaspora story from World War II Italy to the cane fields at a time when Australia’s White Australia Policy was still in place. Their fractured history takes her to Mussolini’s rise to power, German occupied Crete, the Gustav line in southern Abruzzo and Adelaide’s Loveday internment camp.

After years of conforming to what she thought it meant to be ’Australian’, she realises that her identity as a second-generation immigrant woman, one of Le Seconde, is a

lot more complex.