Immigrants and Exiles

Today, Walter and Moreno trace the aftermath of World War II - We are the products of everything that came before, and our movements in the present carve out new people, personalities and predicaments for the version of us yet to be. How do ripples in time shape how we live our lives and who we become? Moreno educates Walter on the consequences of history.   Your hosts are Walter Musolino and Moreno Giovannoni.  Technical production is by Laura Wild. 

In this episode, Walter & Moreno discuss some of their most significant memories of childhood - their first trips to Italy.  Together, they recall and compare the disparity of those formative experiences: the drama of travelling by sea, first encounters with true boredom, toothless grandfathers, emaciated aunts, the nighttime emissions of elderly relatives, and above all - the dislocation of returning to Australia.    Your hosts are Walter Musolino and Moreno Giovannoni.  Technical production is by Laura Wild.

In today’s episode, Walter and Davide Musolino continue the discussion about their music with Moreno who keeps arguing the case for the listener’s freedom to hear & interpret a song anyway the listener wants, without having to pay respect to the songwriter’s reasons for composing the song. Backstories are argued over but always in the friendly spirit of sharing divergent opinions. Influential connections with migrant parents and families keep surfacing but also intimate, even disturbing, details become shared.

In today’s episode, one of two on the subject of music, we hear me - Walter - and Davide Musolino speaking about the songs we write as the founding members of an indie rock band called Man City Sirens. As anyone listening regularly would know, I am one of the co-producers of the podcast series “Immigrants and Exiles” together with my friend, Moreno Giovannoni. Moreno and I have spoken about his novels The Fireflies of Autumn and The Immigrants, beautiful books of wistful reflections and solace but also, the second, of socially and politically focused anger related to the complex world of the migrant. Now we’re expanding our horizons that little bit more to investigate the many and varied lives of the descendants of those same migrants as well. And this is where Davide steps in to bring some order and a cool head to the debate.

The chat you're about to hear was recorded in the small mountain town of Palombaro in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. It presents migration from the perspective of someone, Josh Arnold, a super successful young American businessman and entrepreneur from Arizon, who has come to Italy looking for a better life. After an unexpected heart attack a few years ago, he started out on a series of explorations to see what else the world has to offer a man who has basically everything except contentment. As it turns out, Italy is where he may have really struck it rich and in a way that money can't buy - though it still helps.    Music: "Lonely Star” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

The chat you’re about to hear was originally recorded in Messina (Italy) late 2024 at the seaside home of Agata. Agata’s two daughters flew the family nest as young women 13 years ago and they’ve made London their home: clearly far, that is, from the home of their birth. This is the story of how their mother and father have been coping with an unavoidable abandonment. This is the story of those left behind. Of course, you’ll be hearing a translation of the interview. My thanks to Rosemary Musolino for her contribution as the other voice.   Music: “Why Bother” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

Welcome back to another episode of the Immigrants and Exiles series recorded at the Beachcomber Café in St.Kilda. Today we hear about the early adventures of young Arthur in a country schoolyard, about the value of ‘bi-linguism’ in brain development but also how being cosmopolitan was a barrier to being socially acceptable or ‘integratable’. Inclusivity was, and still remains, largely elusive in a country like Australia that measures the worth of people by their resemblance to the cultural establishment.  At many levels - at the institutional and the popular - there continues a resistance movement against difference. New arrivals need to fit an old template.   Music: “Why Bother” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

Welcome back to another episode of the Immigrants and Exiles series recorded at the Beachcomber Café in St.Kilda. Get ready for some history lessons on the impacts of war, on Italian repopulation of the planet and on citizen historians, all of which brings to light the colour and wonder of migration. Through stories retold and benign memories shared between generations, we hear how sentimental bonds are forged between the original adventurers and their descendants. But we also discover how the offspring listening are inevitably infected by an incurable disease: a niggling sense of their own displacement, of cultural deprivation and even loss of identity because part of them belongs elsewhere. And so, communicable nostalgia - an intense desire for a fictional place never experienced - is born. And grows.   Music: “Runaway” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

Welcome back to another episode of the Immigrants and Exiles podcast series recorded at The Beachcomber Café in St. Kilda. Today our chat revolves around a truism about migration. You won’t find a better life in another country – yes, it’s ‘out there’ – rather you have to make your life better. Like gold, it’s not waiting for you, you have to fossick and pan, dig and extract: invest, struggle, fail and go again. In other words, a better life is a determination, a state of mind, not a dream, a form of escapism. Dreamers, wake up!   Life Coming Down On You Today (remix) by Walter Musolino and Davide Musolino.

Welcome back to another episode of the Immigrants and Exiles podcast series at The Beachcomber Café in St.Kilda. This time we hear Walter tell us about his enrolment at the Scuola Normale in Pisa. I remember going past the gates of the Scuola Normale when I was attending the rather ordinary University of Pisa, going through the gates and into the cafeteria and buying myself a plate of pasta and sitting there and eating it with all the upper class, elite students. I started by asking Walter why he went to the university, that is, to the Scuola Normale in Pisa.   Music: “The Man Who Visited The Earth” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

“Allora, Walter, tell me then… you want to tell me a bit more about your grandparents…”   Music: “Runaway” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

Welcome to the Immigrants and Exiles podcast recorded at The Beachcomber Café in St. Kilda. We’re calling this one: ‘Walter Goes To Italy’. This time Walter talks about his visits to Italy and the people he met over there. He first went back at the age of nine in 1963 although he refuses to confirm that. Walter, start talking…   Music: “A Girl, A Picture, A Wall” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

Welcome to the second part of an episode of the podcast series Immigrants and Exiles, which started as a conversation between myself, Walter, and my friend, Moreno, regarding his second novel: The Immigrants. We talked about so many topics: love, loving, having loved, having no luck, staying here, leaving here – that is, Australia – going back to Italy. And we finished by talking about how he wanted to stir people up. And I said some people might think that when he’s criticising Australia, or non-migrant Australians, that he’s writing a kind of revenge story, that he’s upset about things in the past. But, in fact, his passion, his motivation, reflect the conscientious effort to validate as much of the totality of the past as he experienced it and has been officially documented as having been experienced by others. He relentlessly makes demands of readers who don’t know, or of those don’t want to know, about things that happened to people who set off in search of the El Dorado of a better life: and failed. And suffered.  He has written a book to restore historical memory, that seeks to speak truth to power, and all of which has made it an intriguing and disturbing work, full of joy and tragedy, impressive and absorbing, and shocking, and, in many parts, beautiful and comforting.

Welcome to the Immigrants and Exiles podcast recorded at The Beachcomber Café in St. Kilda. This is a conversation between me and my friend Walter. In this episode we talk about my next book to be published in July 2025, this year, called The Immigrants. Black Ink published my first book, The Fireflies of Autumn, in 2018. Now seven years later, here we are, finished the copy editing and all the other work that goes with publication and the book will be launched in a few months time. It’s currently out with reviewers and book sellers who may or may not want to stock it on their shelves. My life is on the line here, that’s how I feel. But I gave Walter a copy of the manuscript a few months ago and he was good enough to read it, made copious notes and we had a conversation about it which has turned into two of the longer podcasts and this is number one. We’re calling it Part One and then it will be followed, of course, by Part Two. So, now I’ll hand over to Walter and he will talk about the book and ask me questions.

Hello, and welcome to Immigrants and Exiles; a series of chats recorded at the Beachcomber Café in St. Kilda between me, Walter, and my friend Moreno, the sons of Italo-Australian migrants. Today we chat with Niki Baras, a long-standing friend of Moreno’s. Over the years, they’ve been colleagues – translators and interpreters – and share an affinity as intellectuals. Niki has also worked as an academic, a union organizer and a workplace activist. She’s a force of Nature. Music: an extract from ‘Extinction Rebellion’ by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

You’re listening to Immigrants and Exiles; a series of chats recorded at the Beachcomber Café in St. Kilda between me, Walter, and my friend Moreno. In part two of the episode dedicated to ‘Ukraine’ Maria – sorry, Maria, we know you’re really Russian – we reflect some more on twenty-first century Italy as a modern destination for new migrants, but also on why Italian cemeteries can be so welcoming and why Australia shouldn’t simply be accepting of newcomers but should also be acceptable to them: that’s right, acceptable to them. Music: an extract from ‘Leningrad’ by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

In this two-part episode, Walter meets Franco Cozzo at the dentist, Moreno asks whether Franco Cozzo ate spaghetti, Walter has an argument with Bob Maguire, and Moreno prefers Ted Whitten to Franco Cozzo.

In this episode, we talk about what drives people to emigrate, other than war and natural disasters, Wuthering Heights gets a mention and we ask you what your parents and grandparents told you about why they came here.

In this episode, we discuss Australia’s shallow political culture and the complicity of migrants in promulgating terra nullius.

This time we discuss an issue that our parents struggled with all their lives, namely: Italy or Australia? Did they do the right thing in coming to Australia?

This time we talk about bullying, neighbourliness and illegal immigrants.

In this episode Walter and I talk some more about our parents, rats as big as cats,  whether Walter was conceived on a ship, his fascination  with broad beans and how both of us received a $1500 gift.

This time we talk about Australian girls in the 1960s, our experiences in Little Italy, in Carlton in  the 1970s and, finally how a visit to Italy can hurt.

In this episode Walter and I talk about why you should open a chain of travel agencies, something magnificent that Mussolini did, picking grapes in Mildura and a dramatic overnight trip from the city to a tobacco farm in country Victoria.

In this episode, Walter and I talk about our families before they came to Australia and the early years in what Walter calls the penal colony and I, in the book I have written which will be published in 2025, refer to as the English colony.