“The reason I have spoken in Italian is to prove to you, Mr President, and to all honourable members, that this is a multicultural society. Until now a lot of lip service has been paid to this fact and people talk about it but nothing has been done.”
On 18 July, 1979, so ended part of a little-noticed but not insignificant event in Australian political history, delivered by a man who had once very much felt an ‘Unwanted Australian’.
Italian-born Labor Party member of the Victorian Legislative Council, Giovanni Sgro, had just delivered part of his maiden speech in his native tongue.
It was, he believed, the first time a speech had been delivered in part in a language other than English in a parliament in any country in the world where the main language spoken was English.
The use of Italian had been opposed by his own party and the Legislative Council President – but Sgro was determined.
“I told them in advance I’m going to speak in Italian, and although we were in Opposition, we had the Leader, Bill Landeryou was the Leader of the Upper House, and he said ‘What the f*** are you doing? This is an English-speaking country!’ I said: ‘Bill, you speak English. I’m an Italian, and therefore I’ve got to let them know a lot of us are here now. I’ve got to speak in Italian. You don’t have to be here’. And while I was speaking, as a matter of fact he walked out.”
The segment of Sgro’s speech in Italian related to an incident in 1976, in which he and the principal of the Brunswick Girls’ High School, June Engish, staged a protest in the public gallery of the Legislative Council chamber over the poor state of the school.
Both had been ejected by security guards, with Sgro spending some time in a rarely-used cell in the parliament building.
In his speech, Sgro stated he never imagined he’d be back three years later as the elected MP for the area - an area where migrants comprised half the electorate.
“I do not have any difficulty in speaking with Greeks, Aborigines, Dutch, Russians, or Chinese because we all understand each other and we all suffer the same conflicts,” he remarked. “In the future I will dedicate myself not only to working for the Australian people, amongst whom I have many friends in this country, but also to working with the different foreign nationalities.”
Giovanni Sgro’s speech was a powerful example of how Australia’s post-war migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds were finally beginning to assert their rights not just as relatively cheap and compliant labourers, but as full and equal participants in shaping the future of the nation.
His words and actions were also motivated by anger over the damage to his personal pride and identity, even from Victorian parliamentary officials and his own Labor Party.
“They wanted to change my name. Not Giovanni Sgro. ‘John Anthony’ because my name is Giovanni Antonio and they wanted to change my name to John Anthony. The parliament here, the state bureaucracy, the bureaucrats, they wanted to change my name and the excuse they gave me, ‘Giovanni, it’s hard to pronounce', and this and that and the other. And I said, ‘look, my name is Giovanni Sgro and it stays as it is. If it’s hard for you, it’s easy for me’. I didn’t care a damn what they thought of me."
Giovanni Sgro was born into a peasant farming family in the town of Seminara in Calabria, in southern Italy, in 1931, and had been employed in a local olive oil press when the decision was made for him to go to Australia to work in 1952.
That decision was made without consultation by his father, who forged his signature on the form requesting an assisted passage under a new scheme that had just been launched between the governments of the two countries, committing Sgro to work for at least two years in Australia.
When he boarded the ship bound for Australia, Sgro couldn’t believe what his father had done – and was in utter ignorance over where he was going.
“When I caught the ship in Naples, I thought we got to Canada or somewhere else. Geographically I didn’t know where Australia was. When I landed I arrived in Melbourne. If somebody told me I was in America or Argentina, I would say yes because geographically I never heard of Australia. I didn’t know where Australia was.”
At home in Italy, Giovanni Sgro had little interest in politics, but his transition to political activist began soon after his arrival in Australia.
After three months at the Bonegilla migrant camp in northern Victoria with no jobs, he was one of the organisers of a protest march on the administration office, with the demand that the Australian government either provide jobs or send the hundreds of bored young men in the camp back home.
“We just started to burn the place and broke windows. We just wanted somebody to take notice of us because we were forgotten people. That’s how we felt, anyhow. We felt forgotten people just left there to rot. And if it wasn’t for that demonstration I think, I would have spent not three months, but six months or nine months. Who knows how long I would be there?"
After working for two years in northern Victoria as a painter and farm labourer, Sgro moved to Melbourne in 1954, where his ASIO file soon started expanding apace after he joined the Communist Party of Australia.
The Australian people had voted three years earlier against a referendum proposal from Prime Minister Robert Menzies to ban the CPA, so it remained a perfectly legal party.
But despite this, under Director General Charles Spry, those who associated with the CPA or who may support Communism generally, were regarded by ASIO as the main threats to national security.
It wasn’t until 1958, that Sgro began to realise the seriousness of what that meant.
Hearing that his mother was ill, Sgro applied for a re-entry permit so he could return to Australia after visiting her back in Italy.
His travel agent had assured him that this would be routine, but weeks later, when the day arrived for his ship to sail, still no permit had been granted.
Unknown to Sgro, Immigration Department Secretary Tasman Hayes had advised his Minister Sir Alexander Downer that he was single, had no assets or ties with Australia, and the “security objection” against him raised by ASIO was “a strong one”.
Sgro waited until just before the 'Sydney' left from Port Melbourne in case the Australian authorities changed their minds before he decided to offload his suitcases and stay – much to the embarrassment of his two brothers who had been waiting to farewell him. It would be the first of many incidents in coming years in which he would clash with members of his family who saw his political activities as bringing shame on the family.
The day after the 'Sydney' sailed, Sgro approached his local federal Labor MP, Gordon Bryant. The Opposition MP immediately wrote to Downer to seek an explanation why a re-entry permit had been refused, only to be confidentially told that there were “security objections” against Sgro and his ”record is quite a serious one and it is felt that if he left Australia, it would be to the country's advantage if he did not return”.
Bryant was also offered a separate letter to be passed on to Sgro, giving no reason for the refusal other than that he’d been unable to comply with “certain essential requirements” – which were not specified.
Despite Sgro telling him of his Communist Party membership, Bryant did not accept the judgement that the young Italian posed any security threat, and he would become a vigorous and long-term supporter.
One way around the problem of not being able to gain a re-entry visa would have been for Sgro, like his brothers, to take up Australian citizenship instead, but this, too, was refused on ASIO’s advice.
In a chain of letter exchanges, Bryant told Downer that Sgro was well known to him, that he had worked as a painter in his home, and he could see no reason for him to be regarded as a security risk.
Finally, Downer relented, and in 1959 Sgro was given a re-entry permit valid for just three months, so he took the more expensive but faster option of travelling by plane to make sure he was back in time.
On his return, now as a member of the Labor Party, Sgro would renew his campaign for citizenship - with Bryant’s continued support.
“I have said before, and I maintain it, that the report of the Security Service has visited a great injustice upon Mr Sgro. I have no doubt that he has taken part in political activities which the Service would regard as subversive. I have done so myself,” Bryant wrote in one letter.
However, Downer refused to budge on the citizenship question, and this position was maintained by Hubert Opperman, who took over as Menzies’ new Immigration Minister late in 1963. Opperman had held the job for only a few months when he endorsed a decision by his department to quickly cancel a re-entry visa issued in “error” to Sgro.
A security officer was sent in the middle of the night, requesting Sgro’s passport so he could stamp the visa as “cancelled”, just as he was about to leave on another trip to Italy.
“He said, ‘If you go to Italy you cannot come back to Australia,’ without any reason. He didn’t give me any reason. He said it was a mistake that the day before they gave me the re-entry permit. The Labor Party gave me a big send-off party. And that’s when the mayor of the seat of Coburg thought that I committed some crime during the night.”
Sgro by now had the support of at least one other federal Labor MP besides Gordon Bryant - Jim Cairns.
New Immigration Department secretary PR Heydon had told Opperman that Cairns and Bryant knew him “as a member of the ALP, as a Socialist, and as a man given to radical opposition to authority which is quite unlike the normal attitude of a disciplined Communist Party member”.
Opperman, however, was convinced by the ASIO assessment that despite his ALP membership, Sgro was also an active member of the CPA, and therefore unworthy of citizenship.
In late 1965, Sgro married an Australian citizen, Anne Foster, prompting Opperman to make the unusual decision to overrule ASIO’s objection to a re-entry permit, and he was able to travel overseas with his new wife and return.
In 1970, ASIO Director-General Peter Barbour reported that Sgro had not attended a Communist Party of Australia meeting since 1965, but he had been actively associated with organisations with which the CPA had “some degree of influence”.
And so it continued, for more than 20 years after his arrival in Australia: ASIO periodically issued a fresh assessment that Sgro remained under “adverse security notice” and was still unworthy of citizenship because of his links to a legal political party.
It wasn’t until after the election of the Labor government led by Gough Whitlam in December 1972 that things would change for Sgro and most of the other 'Unwanted Australians' in a similar position who had long been denied citizenship.
Soon after finally becoming an Australian citizen in 1973, Sgro became the founding president of the Australian branch of the Italian Federation of Migrant Workers and Their Families, Filef, based in his home suburb of Coburg.
His work with Filef on behalf of Italian migrant workers would occupy much of his time before he was elected to the Victorian parliament in 1979.
