Paul Murray: The story of Carla Zampatti’s family’s harsh welcome to WA

A lot has been written in recent weeks about the inspirational life of Australian fashion legend Carla Zampatti, who died in Sydney early this month. Despite the dramatic circumstances of the accident that led to her passing — a slip on the stairs after the opening night of the opera La Traviata — it was a dismal anticlimax to the stellar career of our undisputed queen of style. While media reports mentioned her formative years in WA, none explored the extraordinary story about how her family came to live and prosper here. In an era when instant gratification is a major motivating force and where resilience seems to be in short supply, the struggles of Carla, her family, and many of those who came to Australia in similar circumstances, contain lessons for everyone. She arrived in Australia from Italy with her mother Marianna in 1950 on the migration liner Ugolino Vivaldi. Aboard were others looking for a new life with now-familiar surnames like Papalia, Omodei, Sala Tenna and Marchesi. Her father, Domenico, had been in WA since 1941, leaving Italy shortly before it joined in the fighting in World War II on the side of Adolf Hitler’s Germany. She was about to see him for the first time. In the 1930s, northern Italy was very poor and many young men left their villages and took off to the New World to make money to support their families. Domenico was not the first of the workers from the Valtellina town of Lovero, in the mountains near the Swiss border, to arrive in WA. In 1935, Sergio Caratti, later known as Mick, landed on the Fremantle docks as a nine-year-old, alone. Mick Caratti’s father and Carla’s mother were brother and sister. Mick would later play a crucial role in his cousin’s grand success. His first day in Fremantle was as eventful as his often-chaotic business life would become later. Mick’s father, Giovanni, came to WA in 1927 to escape the hardship that followed World War I, leaving behind his wife and their baby son. But eight years later he called for Mick to come to Australia so he could get an education before Giovanni would be able to afford relocating the rest of the family. Many of the young Italian men working in WA fell back on an ancient tradition of arranged marriages, often with women they had never met but who were known to their families. A system of proxy marriages evolved, with the brides going through a ceremony in Italy — usually with a male relative of the groom — before departing to Australia for a new life with their real husband. So it was decided that one of these proxy brides would look after nine-year-old Mick on the long sea voyage, handing him over on arrival. When the ship arrived in Fremantle, the bride was so excited to meet her new husband, she forgot the arrangements to hand over the boy, leaving Mick — who spoke only Italian — sitting on his suitcase on the wharf. Well after dark, he was eventually spotted by the local police and spent his first night in Australia sleeping in the cells before the muddle was put to rights. But back to Carla. In stinking hot February, 1950, the nine-year-old was meeting her father for the first time. Domenico left Italy before Anna knew she was pregnant and he spent much of Carla’s early childhood years imprisoned in WA. Shortly after Domenico arrived here, he was interned as an enemy alien, officially referred to as a prisoner-of-war. The year 1941 was not a good one to be an Italian in Australia. Some 4727 Italians, almost all men, were sent to prison camps. In the US, less than one per cent of Italian-Americans were interned, in Britain the figure was just 2 per cent. Here it was 20 per cent, the biggest proportion being non-citizens, mainly recent arrivals, with the figure even higher in WA because of our perceived risk of imminent invasion. One of the first to be interned in the Fremantle area was Giuseppe De Ceglie, the grandfather of this newspaper’s editor. So instead of Domenico Zampatti sending money back to Lovero to support his wife, their two elder sons and the new baby, the family was thrown further into poverty. Imagine it. A family torn apart on either side of the world, one spouse imprisoned in a hostile country with an uncertain future, the other trying to support three children in a war zone. Think of the resilient kids. In her autobiography, Carla is not bitter about that time: “I was barely more than a toddler when the war in Europe ground to an end in 1945, not yet able to comprehend how fortunate we were to have escaped the death and destruction caused by bombing raids and street battles in so many communities to the south of us. “Still, our family didn’t emerge entirely unscathed. My mother, Anna, went thorough those perilous times without a husband, raising my two older brothers, Dino and Pasquale, and me on her own. Countless other Italian wives found themselves in a similar situation.” It was not until 1948 that Domenico had enough money to bring his family to WA. He sent a letter telling Anna to start making preparations, with the plan for 17-year-old Dino to come first when he could be found a good job. Many of the Italians who were interned justifiably couldn’t wait to return home, feeling betrayed by Australia. But Domenico saw a bright future with a job at a Western Mining Corporation subsidiary at Bullfinch, a speck on the map 330km east of Perth and 35km north of Southern Cross. Carla arrived on the same dock where Mick Caratti had been stranded 15 years before and spotted the father she had previously only seen in photographs dressed in traditional Valtellina mountain clothing: “He was much taller and more strongly built than I could ever have guessed. There was Domenico Zampatti, dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and chinos and fairly aglow with the aura of a healthy, suntanned Australian.” And he quickly transported his European family to Bullfinch by train. “I could see the shock on my mother’s face at our first glimpse of the place, an endless clutter of fibro and corrugated iron sheets thrown together to construct not just most of the housing, but the town hall, post office and one-room school,” Carla remembered. At that school she became Mary because the teacher said hers wasn’t a name “known around these parts”. She didn’t reclaim Carla until she moved to Sydney in the 1960s. “Dino’s middle name was Bernardo and that was soon shortened to Bernie. Pasquale went from Arturo to Arthur. In the 1950s, attitudes to New Australians lacked the sensitivity we know today, but there was still considerable thought given to the process then known as assimilation, the melting pot concept.” Bullfinch was an unusual place: “Executives at Great Western made every effort to ensure Italians and any other ethnic group could feel themselves an integral part of community life. A country club was built at considerable expense for all to enjoy.” The young manager who reopened the Bullfinch mine and ran it from 1951-58, employing 3000 people, would become one of the legends of the Australian industry — Sir Laurence Brodie-Hall. Carla left Bullfinch school at 14 to work in the town’s only shop and four years later in 1960 the family moved to Perth. She found a job in a clothing workshop to indulge her interest in fashion and later went from cashier at Rowley Goonan’s whitegoods store — the Rick Hart of the era — to his personal assistant, appearing in the company’s advertising. The businesswoman was emerging. Carla packed up and drove to Sydney to pursue her dreams in 1963, launching her brand two years later — and the rest is history. When she hit the wall financially in 1970 after a disastrous first marriage wrecked her fledgling label, she reached out to Mick Caratti, who by then had made a fortune in earthmoving. Mick gave her $5000 on the basis Carla ran the business alone. She never looked back. But her WA life receded. Mick died in a car accident near his property at Marvel Loch in 1972. Keeping alive the fashion and design link, his granddaughter, Rebecca, is editor of Vogue Living, having been given her first job in Sydney by Carla. Carla’s brother Bernie, who worked with Mick Caratti, still lives in Perth, aged 90, and has three sons. Arthur died here in 2012, leaving a son and three daughters. Footnote: I went to Guildford primary school with John Caratti, Rebecca’s father. Later, at Guildford Grammar, my best friend was Brodie-Hall’s youngest son, Charles. WA was once a very small place. Everyone seemed connected.

Paul Murray: The story of Carla Zampatti’s family’s harsh welcome to WA

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