How the PM’s ‘Italianness’ exposed the nation’s greatest gift

There is something joyously predictable about great success: everyone wants to claim a bit of you. It took just hours for newspapers in Puglia – Italy’s sun-kissed, southern heel – to embrace Anthony Albanese as their own. “Australia: the Barlettano wins” boasted La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno. “Australia Italian-style – the new PM is Pugliese” crowed the national, Il Giornale, among a host of others.

I must admit that in my Italo-Aussie family, now spread over two hemispheres, the election of a prime minister with an Italian surname was greeted with similar, boisterous enthusiasm. As a kid growing up in Sydney in the early seventies, I’d heard “greasy wog” daily in the playground while my year 6 teacher decided my name was too hard to pronounce and called the roll each day substituting Potato Tomato for Paola Totaro. The puerile, pre-election puns and headlines on Albanese’s surname brought back the white-hot shame and fury of childhood half a century on.

Anthony Albanese with his father, Carlo Albanese, in Barletta, Italy.Credit: Lisa Golden

As social animals, we humans have a need to belong, whether we are conscious of it or not. Group identity helps buffer us in times of trouble, or when we feel wronged, and offers a sense of purpose when we can coalesce around common goals.

My dad, Paolo, architect of premier Neville Wran’s pioneering multicultural policies in NSW, experienced his own frisson of pride on election day even though Albanese is really the product of a devoted Aussie-Irish single mum. And it has been observed, quite rightly too, that the very fact that a PM with white European ancestry is noteworthy at all in Australia may be indicative of how little progress we have made on cultural diversity.

And yet, I would argue that Anthony Albanese’s election is significant because it is emblematic of the complexities of identity which, as the world becomes ever more interconnected, have less and less to do with borders, passports and nationality and more to do with how we feel within ourselves. I’ve written before about how spending most of my life in Oz – and loving it passionately – did not stop me from feeling predominantly Italian and never quite “at home” in Australia. Researching my PhD last year, I learned that my mother’s Italian-born grandparents had never given up French citizenship even when faced with losing all to Mussolini’s Black Shirts.

And so, I was fascinated this week to listen to a 2017 chat between the then shadow minister for infrastructure, transport, cities and regional development, Albanese, and Antonio Dottore on the Adelaide-based digital radio station, Radio Italia Uno. Dottore asked Albanese about “Italianness”, fortuitously while filming his first FaceTime live.

Albanese’s mum met his dad while he was working on a Sitmar line ship that sailed between Europe and Australia: “That’s how I came about in the world but my father was betrothed to a woman from Barletta and hence, mum came home to have me by herself.”

For years, Albanese thought his mum was a widow; she gave her son his dad’s surname to protect her little family at a time when being an Irish Catholic mother out of wedlock was very difficult indeed. Albanese learned the true story aged 14 but only found his father, Carlo, in 2009, visiting several times to meet his half-brother and sister, nieces and nephews and introduce his own son, Nathan, to his granddad before he died in 2014.

So, asked Dottore, do you feel any “Italianness” in your upbringing? “Not in terms of having the language or even cultural aspects,” answered the PM-to-be. “But when you have a name that is so Italian like Albanese and everyone thinks you’re Italian, you feel Italian. I grew up close to Haberfield and Leichhardt in Sydney’s inner west among a large Italian community and one of the reasons I wanted to find my heritage was that I felt Italian … it was a part of me in a way that’s hard to describe in any rational way, in any scientific way.”

“So, when I eventually had a breakthrough and found where my father was, I had a real physical need to have contact with him – even though I had no idea what to expect.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese: other than Indigenous Australians, we are all “from” somewhere else. Credit: James Brickwood

And there you have it in a nutshell: apart from our First Nations people ultimately, we are all “New Australians” and Anthony Albanese has shown that, spiritually and internally, many of us can (and do) choose to live multiculturally.

That, in my mind, is one of this nation’s true gifts.

Paola Totaro is a former Europe correspondent for the Herald and The Age and now lives in London.

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.