In the sugar cane fields of tropical north Queensland in the early 1930s, men were becoming debilitated and dropping dead at an alarming rate from Weil’s Disease, or leptospirosis.
The disease, spread by infected rats, killed 19 men in 1933-34 alone, and left many others far too ill to work.
Cane cutters were convinced the outbreak could be contained by burning the undergrowth in the cane fields where the rats were thriving.
The cane farmers strongly resisted, arguing they would need to reduce the wages of the cutters to cover the cost.
The burning would eventually become standard practice across Queensland, and the incidence of Weil’s Disease dropped dramatically, but not without a long struggle by the cutters against the farmers, and even against their own trade union.
Prominent in a series of unofficial Communist-led strikes were hundreds of cutters from Italy – among them Gioacchino (Gio) or Joe Saffigna.
It was perhaps the first of many actions in which Saffigna was involved for better working conditions that would earn him the ire of Australian authorities and eventually make him an “Unwanted Australian”.
Joe Saffigna was born in 1902 in Canebola, north-east Italy, near the border with Slovenia.
He was aged 22, having just completed compulsory military service when he decided to migrate to Australia in 1924, leaving behind his newly-married pregnant wife, Maria, to join him later.
Saffigna had gone straight to the sugar country in north-east Queensland, to cut cane.
In the non-cutting season, he chopped wood used to power the boilers driving the steam engines that crushed the cane in the mills.
His daughter, Esta, was 18 months old, when she and her mother were able to join Saffigna in 1926 at Cleveland near Brisbane, where he’d become part-owner of a small farm.
It was an itinerant life for the Saffignas, living in a succession of corrugated iron shacks in rough bush camps in the Innisfail area as the 1930s Depression set in.
Despite the tough times, they managed to save enough money for Maria and Esta to make their first trip back to Italy in 1935.
But while they were there, the Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, decided to invade Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), between the small Italian colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland.
Back in Australia, a distraught Saffigna panicked, thinking war would strand Maria and Esta in the Mediterranean, so he sent a two-word telegram to Canebola with the simple plea: “Torna subito!” (“Return immediately!”).
Maria obliged, and not long afterwards, at a ceremony in December 1935, she, Joe and Esta became Australian citizens.
While Maria and Esta had been away, Saffigna and other Italian cane cutters had been on strike for several months over the Weil’s Disease issue – in defiance of their right-wing Australian Workers’ Union, which was urging a return to work.
In any event, Saffigna was destined to continue cane cutting only until the beginning of the 1938 season – when he happened to be accidentally hit by a car in Innisfail driven by a sugar mill manager.
As compensation, he was given a considerable sum of money – and a much easier job at the mill as a gardener.
In 1940, Maria suddenly died, and the mill owner arranged for Saffigna to be transferred to Sydney to work at the CSR sugar refinery.
After WW2, and a failed short failed second marriage in Sydney, Saffigna was back in Queensland with a third wife, Daphne Smith, a nurse who was a fellow member of the Communist Party.
The newlyweds set up a vegetable farm at Wellington Point, south-east of Brisbane, and by early 1947 had two sons – Paul and Carl.
While he worked hard to improve his own knowledge of English – reading detective novels being a favourite - he helped many new Italian migrants with interpreting, and finding housing and jobs.
He helped to organise a club in Brisbane that aimed to encourage Italian migrants and Australian-born people to socialize together.
But in 1952, not long after Saffigna returned from his first trip back to Italy since 1924, questions were raised over his right to stay in Australia because he was allegedly “a Communist agitator”.
According to an Immigration Department document produced in 1952, ASIO had “secret information” that Saffigna had been given a mission by the Communist Party of Italy: to provide it with as much information as possible about unemployed Italians in Australia.
Declassified documents say Saffigna had been closely associated with unemployed Italian migrants in Queensland, and he’d reportedly told some to refuse to accept work allocated to them outside Brisbane by the Commonwealth Employment Service because they’d have “no proper accommodation”.
The Department’s secretary, Tasman Heyes, sought advice whether it would be possible to take the unprecedented step of trying to cancel Saffigna’s Australian citizenship, and deport him.
Heyes sought advice from Kenneth Bailey, who served both as secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, and as Solicitor-General of the Commonwealth.
Bailey pointed out for his citizenship to be cancelled under the Nationality and Citizenship Act, Saffigna would have to have “shown himself by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected” towards the Queen, as Australia’s Head of State, and it was doubtful that this had occurred.
Further, Bailey said, Saffigna would have right of appeal to a public committee of inquiry, where the evidence could at best show that he was “a trouble-maker” who may not be going beyond “legitimate political activity in the interests of his fellow countrymen in Australia”.
“For the foregoing reasons I am of the opinion that the Minister would not be justified in referring the matter to a committee for inquiry,” Bailey concluded.
Carl Saffigna says his father didn’t know about the idea of cancelling his citizenship, and probably didn’t even know he’d been under ASIO surveillance.
He died in 1990, aged 87, leaving behind numerous children, grand-children and great-grandchildren in a country that had once come close to trying to throw him out.
