Each month throughout 2016, Stephen Mudd will speak to people who have called Griffith their home and tell their stories.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Less than a year before the outbreak of WWII, a young family came to Yoogali from Mussolini’s Italy.
Peter and Elsa Sartor had to come to Australia with their daughter Mary when she was five years old. They were met at the train station by Mr Sartor’s brother-in-law, Angelo Peruzzi, in the middle of a flood.
Mr Sartor had been given a loan to pay his family’s way and he went to work on farms to pay it back.
Fran Pietroboni, the Sartors’ second daughter, was born in Griffith after the family had moved to the Cunial’s farm.
“It was like a boarding house, there were two or three other families living there,” she said.
A few years later, they moved into a two-room house with a wood stove, bags on the walls for insulation and a rainwater tank. Mr Sartor worked hard on the Valentin’s farm, picking melons and carrying them back in a bag, sometimes with his baby daughter along for the ride.
“My mother did not like living in Australia,” Mrs Pietroboni said.
“She came from Torino (Turin in northern Italy) and said this was a God-forsaken country.”
The Sartors worked 10 acres of land near Bilbul and grew a variety of vegetables, which they sent to Sydney via Griffith Producers.
Mr Sartor wanted to buy his own farm, but he had to become a naturalised Australian and renounce his Italian citizenship in order to do so. He bought the rundown Farm 654 at Yoogali and paid cash for the farm and tractor.
Finally, the family had running water and electricity. They grew peaches and grapes on their 12 acres, sending the stonefruit to Leeton or Hanwood and the grapes to the Sydney markets, or to the Penfolds and Rossetto wineries. The farm was watered once a fortnight and any crop spraying was done by hand.
The hard work of migrant farming families like the Sartors eventually paved the way for the future of the area.