The Sugar Industry in North Queensland

The 1893 Sugar Works Guarantee Act set the framework for further expansion. A series of central mills were built in areas of sugar cultivation, subsidised by the Queensland government, to ensure production of this vital export crop. In the north, mills appeared at Mossman, Mulgrave, and Proserpine in the late 1890s, with later co-operative central mills established at Babinda (1915) and South Johnstone (1916).

It had always been difficult to recruit the workers needed for the hard manual work of cutting the cane in the tropical climate. Indentured labourers were recruited from the islands of Melanesia across the Coral Sea: in circumstances that were controversial (both at the time and later), young men were issued with labouring contracts to work the sugar plantations of central and North Queensland. Especially around Mackay, these ‘Kanaka’ labourers provided the labour to harvest the cane fields by hand. Further north, around Cairns, it was often northern Indian labourers who supplied the colonial-era workforce, many of them Sikhs from the Punjab.

To a large extent, the racist ‘White Australia’ policy implemented at Federation in 1901 was a reaction against this ethnically diverse workforce. Many South Sea Islanders were deported as a racially exclusive immigration policy for the new nation was implemented.

New migrants to fill the gap were thus sought from suitably ‘European’ sources, including Italians. Many came from regions in the north of Italy, but by the 1920s a pattern of chain migration saw greater numbers come from Sicily in the south. As Girola writes:

We have clear evidence that the trend of chain migration –– a first group of migrants subsequently followed by parents or fellow-townspeople –– has promoted regional settlements characterised by migrants of homogenous origin (region or town). With regard to Sicilians, the migration to North Queensland was mainly from the province of Catania, to the extent that in some historical accounts of this phenomenon the terms siciliano and catanese are used synonymously. (Girola, 2001: 76)

Links to Sicily

What kind of society did the Sicilian migrants to North Queensland leave behind? In fact, it was not the hard-scrabble world of peasant misery that we might imagine. Catania was a relatively prosperous agricultural region, marked by intensive cultivation, with many small independent landholders and a significant regional wine-growing industry. This success had produced a local population boom, and those with means and prospects were ambitious and mobile enough to consider a future for themselves abroad. Many were young men, but in time women and dependents emigrated as well.

Among them was Giuseppe Parisi, a young man from the Catanian town of Sant’Alfio. This was situated to the east of Mt Etna, the notoriously unstable active volcano. As a young man, Parisi had witnessed the eruption of November 3, 1928 that threatened to engulf the town in a slow-moving wave of molten rock.

Given the volcano’s proximity and unpredictable eruptions, the residents of Sant’Alfio had long sought solace in the town’s patron saints. According to Catholic tradition, the three brothers St Filadelfo, St Alfio, and St Cirano had been persecuted and then martyred in gruesome fashion by Roman authorities in the 3^rd century CE. ‘The Three Saints’ became  the focus of prayers and requests for divine intercession, expressed in shrines, holy images, and pilgrimage; a pattern of religious veneration highly characteristic of popular religiosity in Roman Catholic communities (Girola, 2003). Across the generations, in Sicily and further afield as modern Sicilians migrated elsewhere, the annual Feast of the Three Saints continued the tradition of the three brothers martyred for their Christian faith. Carved statues of the saints in shrines and churches were associated with miraculous interventions when prayers were heeded and intercessions granted.

In 1928, Mt Etna erupted and smoking lava approached Sant’Alfio and other towns on the hillsides and plains below. ‘The old folks of the town and those who have migrated to Australia’, Girola writes (2001: 35),

still recall with emotion that cold and foggy morning of November [1928], when the stream of fire, having destroyed fields and country houses, threatened the town; in front of the desperate crowd carrying the relics of the Three Saints in pilgrimage, the lava eventually ended its fury, generating a deep emotion among the faithful. The cries of Viva Sant’Alfio echoed for a long time through the neighbouring valleys and in the memories of bystanders.

The Three Saints in Queensland: the Silkwood Feast

Like many Sicilians, as a new arrival in Queensland Giuseppe Parisi made his way in the sugar industry. Saving his earnings as a labourer, he accumulated the income to purchase a farm at Redlynch near Cairns, and over time sponsored fellow-migrants to work there and supply the vital workforce for the sugar industry.  By the late 1940s he had been joined by his wife Immacolata, also from Sant’Alfio, and with the birth of their son Ross in 1953 the family was well-established. 

Just a few years earlier a remarkable sequence of events saw the traditional veneration of the Three Saints transplanted from Sicily to the fertile environs of North Queensland. Rosario Tornabene, like Giuseppe an expatriate of Sant’Alfio and born there in 1912, had arrived in North Queensland during World War 1 as a child but later returned with his family to Italy. In 1930, looking to make a life of his own, Tornabene returned to Queensland and worked as a cane cutter alongside other Sicilians.

When his wife experienced an acute medical crisis after the birth of their first child, a distraught Tornabene drew upon his Sicilian heritage and vowed to honour the saints in his new homeland if his daughter and wife survived. When his wife’s health was restored, Tornabene’s personal commitment saw statues of the three saints commissioned from an artisan in Giarre, Sicily, modelled on the statues housed in the church at Sant’Alfio. Funds were raised, including donations organised by Giuseppe Parisi, and sent to Italy. Carved from cherry wood and painted in highly decorative style, the three statues were shipped to Australia in 1949 (Girola, 2001: 97–100).

The Sicilian families of Silkwood, where Rosario Tornabene lived, rejoiced in the arrival of this tangible link to their old homeland. In 1950, the first annual feast in Australia was celebrated at the church of St John the Evangelist, Silkwood, according to traditional Sicilian practices: held on the first weekend in May, with a solemn high mass followed by the removal of the three saints from their enclosed niche above the altar for a procession around the township amid scenes of celebration, with cheering, fireworks, music, feasting, and dancing to follow. Donations of money and valuables are made in honour of the saints, and the proceeds distributed to worthy causes.

Ross Parisi, a lifetime member of the committee that organises the Feast of the Three Saints each year, remembers well the rowdy events of the day that he experienced in childhood, a highlight of the calendar each year. Now, as then, the preparation and enjoyment of traditional Sicilian food and delicacies such as granita and cannoli are crucial. As cultural anthropologist Franca Tamisari suggests (2023: 73–4), ‘the attention given to the preparation, timing and distribution of special local foods, and especially the joy of eating them together and evaluating their texture, quality and authenticity, is at the core of the meaning of the Feast. This collective street performance offers an insight into the ongoing construction and transformation of being both Sicilian and Italian Australian in North Queensland …’

As a celebration of Sicilian life and traditions in the North Queensland setting, the Feast is an evocative expression of religious affirmation and cultural continuity that spans the generations. As Ross explained the day after the 2023 Feast:

My grandson, who is six, knows all about St Alfio. [He says] ‘Nunda, when’s the next festival? I said, ‘There’s many sleeps yet, but it will happen again.’ ‘Oh, I loved it last night, Nunda, it was really, really great!’ … that sense of community, that sense of fellowship, that sense of family is a microcosm of what was there  yesterday. If you cultivate that and if you nurture that, and if you allow that to flourish, you’re always going to have a festival, because people will always believe in something other than themselves.

Oral history interview: Ross Parisi

With thanks

Ross Parisi, Vera Zappala, and the Committee of the Three Saints Feast, Silkwood.

Sources and further reading

Douglass, William A. 1995. From Italy to Ingham: Italians in North Queensland. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press).

Girola, Stefano. 2001. The Three Saints: Faith – History – Tradition from Sicily to Queensland. (Brisbane, Minerva E & S).

Girola, Stefano. 2003. ‘Saints in the Suitcase: Italian Popular Catholicism in Australia.’ The Australasian Catholic Record 80, 2: 164–74.  

Tamisari, Franca. 2023. ‘Working for the Saints: Food, memory and the senses in North Queensland’. Queensland Review 30, 1: 70–84.