MARK HUTCHINSON
In the last years of the war, Italy became a vast armed camp. In the north, the occupying troops of the Third Reich, in the South, millions of Allied troops. But Italy was not alone in being invaded. During World War II a million Americans came to Australia, and some returned afterwards as immigrants. This was part of a process not only understood in American terms as part of a turn to the East, but in Australian terms as a long term but nonetheless radical shift in cultural, political, social and economic priorities. Very much the English colony on the shores of Asia before the war, the crushing of British sea power at the fall of Singapore, and the American success at the Battle of the Coral Sea, faced Australia with undeniable strategic facts. They realized that there would have to be in the political sphere the sort of Americanization that had for decades been percolating into Australia through the arts and in culturally related areas such as the film industry. John Curtin's now famous 'Australia looks to America' speech, given during the dark days of the war, was probably more significant than he knew. Australia would indeed look to America, if not 'free of any pangs as to "her" traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom', then at least with increasing openness and boldness as the post-War world order unfolded through the Cold War, and the consumerist decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Cultural change kept pace with financial penetration. Through the 1950s and 1960s, American investment in Australia increased at twice the rate it did elsewhere. By the mid-1960s, American companies owned or controlled 90 of the top 300 Australian companies:
Names like Ford, Kellogg, Heinz, and General Motors, and phenomena like supermarkets, regional shopping complexes and lubritoriums, became as much part of the Australian scene as the American.1
The truth was that, despite traditional ties to Britain and their reservations about American 'pop' culture, crassness and money, the war had thrown a scare into Australia. The bombing of Darwin had drawn attention to the huge size and thinly populated nature of the Australian continent. The old cry, 'populate or perish' was again in circulation, and on official government levels the response was to introduce mass immigration. The isolation of Australia from Europe had also been pointed our forcibly during the war, and so many also saw it necessary for Australia to stop being so dependent on the simple export of raw materials, and to become in its own right an industrial nation. Again, immigration was to help this-many migrants went straight onto the great centres of industrialisation at the Snowy Mountains Scheme and Port Kembla. But more was needed: in the eyes of people like GJ. Coles, the major retail chain founder, Australia needed 'the American attitude of mind ... leaders who can bring the nation to a new way of life'.2
Many people in Australian Churches were beginning to ask the same questions and come to the same conclusions. The old English system of State church and non-conformists facing a minority Catholic church had seemed to be sufficient for a while, but by the 1950s was starting to wear very thin. As Hogan shows, the War and the coming of consumer society meant the breakdown of the 'ties of convenience' that had held government, people and church together:
Most Australians were indifferent to the traditional religious institutions, although there was still some attachment to religious rites of passage such as christenings, church marriages, and funerals. [Before the war] Traditional public morality was being supported by an outmoded economic theory and by social inertia. When the economic of belt-tightening gave way to the expansionist policies popularised by the American 'new Deal' of President Roosevelt and the theories of J.M. Keynes ... much of the basis of traditional social morality evaporared.3
Unable to rely on the traditional support of secular powers, the mainline churches tended to turn in on themselves in a process of renewal in Sydney Anglican diocese to the missionary evangelicalism of Archbishop Mowll, in the Catholic Church to the deliberations of Vatican II. It is perhaps this which partly explains the inability of the Churches in dealing with the needs of migrants across this period. Less mainline churches, like the Baptists, turned to maximisation of their current resources, and as Neville Buch has shown, to the American models of evangelism and church growth like the All Age Sunday School.4 Religious exchange, like economic and cultural exchange, increased between Australia and the United States after the War. There was a constant flow of Australian visitors back and forth from the United States, particularly between the Baptist Union in Queensland (BUQ) and the Southern Baptist Union elements based in Nashville. As the director of the BUQ's youth arm, the Rev. John Knight not only adopted American techniques into his own area of responsibility, but could say in 1951, 'We are all aware of the great strides being made in the development of the work of our denomination in America.... The same emphasis can result in a comparatively similar advance in this country.'5 There was then a general consciousness of something new happening, a consciousness built on the personal observations of the wealth and size of American organizations by people like Knight, who travelled to North America and returned bearing tales of great good news. Others came in the opposite direction. First, of course there were those who, like Charles Troutman, came during the War as chaplains or soldiers with Macarthur's forces. These were astonished by the 'old fashioned and behind the times' approaches being followed in Australian churches.6 Others, such as the Graham Association Evangelists (the Taylor brothers) who toured Queensland in 1954, came after the war for more specifically religious purposes. As early as 1958 the American Plymouth brethren were becoming active in Australian student Christian work, and mainline churches were expressing concern that they would 'take the emphasis for Asian work away from the Evangelical Unions'.7 Such movements were the means for the transfer of ideas and a religious culture quite different from the old melioristic Christianity with its roots in England. It was technologized, corporate, and energetic as only the Americans were back in these days of the twilight of Empire. Much of it also suffered from cultural myopia. As one military chaplain wrote back to his wife:
When we chaplains have tried to explain how we meet just before morning church service and have classes for all ages, ... well these fine Australian people just look sort of blank-like the African pygmies upon seeing the Chicago skyscrapers. They had no appreciation whatever.8
The African parallel, with its overtones of missionary involvement and intercultural contact were not accidental, but the result of a long tradition of imperialistic outreach to 'natives'. Just because the natives in this case were also Europeans did not make much of a difference-the cultural norm assumed was urban America, reducing urbanizing Australia to the position of a client state. Not all were like this, however. Paul White-part-time IVF General Secretary, patriarch of Sydney Evangelicalism and an extraordinary motivator of men- found very few of these attitudes in Charles Troutman, and it is perhaps this, with consideration also of the latter's increasingly difficult position in the United States, that led him to invite Troutman to spend a year as a missioner with the Australian IVF. White no doubt felt that an influx of American ideas into the IVF would not be a bad thing.9 Many agreed with him. The problem was then, as it always was to be through the particular experience of the Italian work in Australia, to find the right people.
out of every city
Among the trickle of American investments that was rapidly widening into a flood through the 1950s was the work of the Carnation Milk Company. One of their senior men, Andrew Nelli, was an Italo-American pentecostal whose business took him through many cities on repeated trips to Australia. He was also member of a wide variety of voluntary organisations, combining commerce and the work of the Cross in the best traditions of evangelical mercantilism. As Assistant Director of the Board of Evangel College he was in a position to influence decision-making about Australia as a mission field, and as the Chairman of the Foreign Missions Board of North Hollywood Assembly, he had access to funds and the means of encouraging missions. During his trips abroad he made three contacts that were to be vital for the future of the Italian AOG work in Australia: he became aware of the condition of the Italian migrants to Australia (which he reported back to the AOG-USA's international headquarters in Springfield, Missouri), he encouraged the work of the budding AOG in Italy (ADI) and he became friends with the Pastor of Petersham Assemblies of God Church, Philip Duncan.10
Duncan was a remarkable man. Brought into pentecost out of the Baptist churches, with his father, under the preaching of Smith Wigglesworth in 1921, and witness to the power of the Aimee Semple McPherson rallies of the next year, he received the answer to his years of searching when he was baptised in the Holy Spirit at the great Sunshine Revival meetings in 1925 held by A.C. Valdez." By 1927, Wigglesworth had returned for a second tour, and C.L. Greenwood had been called to the ministry, a factor that would be important for the future of the Italian pentecostal work in Melbourne. In the next year, Duncan was annointed by Wigglesworth for the ministry, and took over the Rozelle Full Gospel Assembly. Both Duncan and Greenwood went on to become founding members and great stalwarts of Australian pentecostalism, and had particular ties to the Italian work. When Nelli came through Australia in the late 1950s, he contacted both Greenwood and Duncan (as Piraino was to do some time later). Both men were realists, hungry to spread the Gospel, and aware of the great influx of migrants that were flooding into the working class areas where Richmond Temple and Petersham Assembly were situated. Both had Italian members in their churches; indeed, what was to become the Italian AOG in Melbourne (as opposed to the CCNA work there) developed out of meetings held in the vernacular at Richmond Temple. Greenwood, suitably, was Foreign Missions Director for the AOG-Australia, while it was Duncan that suggested Giusti contact the group in Melbourne to establish them as a separate entity.12 In consequence, and possibly in response to the gentle rivalry that had developed across the years, both promised to underwrite some of the cost of bringing out a missioner from Italy to kick start the Italo-Australian work.'3 In a trip that may have taken place early in 1958, Nelli found that both pastors showed 'great enthusiasm over the possibility of a work among the Italian immigrants there ... [as] it was absolutely impossible for [their churches] to reach them due to the language barrier'.l4 Considering the lack of interest from Anglicans in ethnic ministry, and the Irish/Italian clash within the structures of the Catholic Church, such a move showed a remarkable effort of will and breadth of vision for a relatively small denomination. Nor was it restricted only to Italians: over the years, Petersham and Richmond temple assisted Slavic, Fijian, and Korean Pentecostal groups to get 'off the ground'. Their grasp of the tactical was acute: as Greenwood said ominously to Piraino in 1959, 'It is now or never to do something for the evangelization of Italians in Australia'.'5 Still, as events were to show, there remained culture-based misunderstandings which interfered with long-term relationships within the church.
Nelli's contacts were not limited to Australia, however. As already suggested, there was already an American presence in Italy through funding and literature arrangements. There was also a physical presence in the figure of a missionary Field Secretary, based in Rome. In 1958, Anthony Piraino filled that position. Like the pioneers of the Italian work before him, Piraino felt the burden of missions 'very strongly', at least partly because 'my family migrated to America when I was but a boy of six and God in his mercy permitted me to hear the Gospel and be saved in America'. His gratefulness had led him to Italy as missions secretary under the Italian District, where he took part in the fight to win religious liberty for the pentecostal churches by leading representations to government, established Sunday Schools and 'literally flooded Italy with Gospel literature'.16 He was prepared to stand on his record in requesting permission to lead a mission to Australia. The tone of his letters and the figures he bandied around as to the numbers of Italians in what Australians had long called the 'new America under Southern Heavens' indicate that perhaps his enthusiasm was liable to lead him into overstatement. Time and again in his letters he speaks of the chance to evangelise 'ONE MILLION ITALIANS', and of an annual rate of migration of some 35,000. It was no doubt a judgement formed in the pressure-cooker of post-war Italy. One can understand the mistake-if there weren't that many Italians in Australia it wasn't due to a lack of demand for emigrant status from where Piraino was writing in Rome. In fact, the total Italian community in Australia at this time was less than half that (around 400,000) and the number of Italian born people half that again (around 200,0~:)0). If his numbers were wrong (and this was to be a common mistake among Italian workers in later years), however, there could be no doubt about the sincerity of his enthusiasm:
I feel I can be the means of salvation to many of these good people who have been forced to leave their native land to go to a foreign land-Australia-to find work.17
I see a tremendous need in Australia-all those italians [sic] and NOT ONE PENTECOSTAL CHURCH! [sic] A pioneer field-a real missionary field.... God in his mercy saved me-a poor immigrant boy and now, I feel a tremendous burden to go to Australia to try to do to those poor immigrants what God in His great love did for me.18
The problems he faced, however, were many-fold.
The first and greatest of these was the fact that Australia, to the AOG-USA, was not a mission field. There was already an established Australian AOG, and so American efforts were stymied on policy grounds. While the Italian AOG could have done something out of their brief to deal with Italian people everywhere, they were poor and small in numbers. Enthusiastic support was all that Piraino could expect from Rome: money would have to be raised in America. Realizing this, he complained bitterly to Springfield:
Please understand me, I do not say that you should change your policy about not considering Australia a missionary field but I do ask you and the Missions Department [sic] to consider this particular need so that I would not be placed at such a terrible disadvantage. When I see 'Missionary Evangelists' pass Rome by the score, having collected precious funds from our churches and then they simply see the world and take beautiful pictures to collect some more funds[;] and when I and my wife who are so willing and have given up everything and are still willing to give up everything, including our son, just to go to bring the Gospel to the 800,000 [sic] Italians who escaped Italy, hear that Australia is not a missionary field, [it] simply leaves us speechless and forces us to rush to the arms of our Lord for comfort and guidance. 19
Such complaints underscored the difference between the complacency of Anglo-Americans and the fervency of converts from Catholicism. To the former, the faith was a beautiful light to be shed abroad (and so wholly compatible with consumer culture and the acceptance of 'foreign places' as tourist destinations). To the latter it was a raging fire in their hearts.
While a way was to be found around this policy impasse, the net effect was to restrict the vision for the Australian work. It would always remain an 'Italian' work, and so peripheral to the global thrust of AOG missionary work, underfunded and underorganised. This, however, was not Piraino's fault. The vision he sketched for work in Australia was original and bold, as was suitable for a work that needed to span an entire continent and operate with little outside help:
[M]y plan is a much different plan from the usual run of missionary work. I would like to take with me 5 qualified couples, all specialists in their fields: Evangelists-Personal Workers-Radio specialist [sic] with broadcasting experience-qualified couple for Gospel literature including printing and an expert in office management. These qualified young couples would obligate themselves to labor in Australia for a period of at least four years.... I have mentioned this to the leading brethren in Italy and they are most happy and I also mentioned that they should obligate themselves to maintain one couple. Four of these five couples would come from Italy since primarily they will need the Italian language, the fifth from the US, possibly an expert in office management. It would be my responsibility to oversee all this project.20
This was indeed different-no simple preaching of the word of God but an all out invasion. But Piraino clearly hadn't gauged the feeling back in Springfield at all well when he said things like, 'I feel that I am mobilizing for an all-out attack in Australia'. If the thought that they might fall responsible for the funding of this commando raid did not scare the Foreign Missions Department off, then consideration of the repercussions this would have on relationships with the Australian AOG did. Piraino asked for an army. Despite the good offices of Andrew Nelli in smoothing the way with both Duncan and Greenwood, and assurances that they would receive 'full and complete cooperation and support from the brethren in Australia',2l all he got was a small reconnaissance mission. After returning to the States for deputational work, he sailed for Rome on 9 September 1959, and after a three day stay organising support from the leadership there, he flew to Australia via India, Hong Kong and Tokyo, arriving in Melbourne on 18 September. There he was met by another of his great problems: the Australian context.
Contrary to his earlier impression that there was 'no Fundamental or Full Gospel' work among Italians in Australia, small groups had pre-empted Piraino's arrival by some months in all the eastern sea-board capitals. Despite his enthusiasm and the breadth of his original plans, it must have seemed a daunting task. Italians were scattered throughout the country, in pockets quite unlike the communities he had been used to in the United States. '[A] car is really indispensable in Australia-the Italians live in scattered areas and often the trolleys or buses take you only a certain distance'.22 How was he to reach them? There was no ethnic radio, little ethnic press, and his chief pipeline into the country, the Australian-AOG, was almost as small and scattered as that in Italy. 'I was told that there are about 55 churches of the [AOG] there with only five or six over 100 members'. While he evidently expected his team to be effective, he became aware that 'scores and scores of Christian workers [were] needed'. In planning city-wide and 3-moneh long campaigns to establish the work properly in Melbourne, he invited Roberto Bracco, the veteran Italian evangelise to accompany him. The task was so much larger than he expected, even though the actual number of Italians was not. There was a note of desperation in his voice in writing his report for Springfield, perhaps in the realization that even his minimum demands of the previous year were not going to be met: 'I do not know what else to do but pray and believe God to work a miracle so far as you good brethren [at Springfield] are concerned'.23 His miracle did not happen: the team he had dreamed about did not materialize, and the great 'now or never' push into Australia's Italians did not eventuate. The stage was passed over to the rugged individualists like Giuseppe Giusti.
a sower went out to sow his seed...
Giusti was an American missionary who had been evangelizing in Catania, Sicily for some years. It was there, from people such as Salvatore Spinella, that he heard of the large numbers of Italians who had emigrated to Australia. Early members of the congregation remember him speaking of the face that he had long had a vision for going to Australia, telling his people that he had had a dream as a young man that God had spoken to him, saying, 'Ti mandero in Australia'. It was to be a dream long in the fulfilling, but if this story is true, then it explains why hearing of a great exodus to Australia might have suggested itself to Giusti as a call from God. The call came in the form of an invitation from the AOG pastor in Ingham, Queensland, who was struggling with the question of what to do with the Italian immigrants who seemed to be flooding his area. Returning from the Italo-American diaspora to work in Italy suggests the cue of the man-he felt called of God to take the lively word of the Gospel to his own people wherever they might be found. He was also a driven man: despite the face that he was towards the end of his working life, hardly had he found out about this new field than, on returning to the USA, he broached the matter with the Italian District of the AOG-USA. He had, he said, conceived a plan to carry his evangelism among Italians to the shores of Australia, and announced that he would be pursuing this as a missionary calling. He began to take to the missionary circuit-Anthony Foti remembers him coming to the Church he was then pastoring in Shelton, Connecticut, and preaching a missionary message about Australia about the great towns there and the multitudes of Italians lying 'in Egypt' waiting to be set free by the Gospel of Christ.
Giusti was supported by a general enthusiasm for missions in American Pentecostalism through the 1950s. Through the war, American AOG Missionary Secretary Noel Perkins had restructured the AOG missionary endeavour around a global vision for growth. Through the 1950s, support structures such as Speed the Light (which by 1986 had raised some $53 million for mission equipment and building) multiplied, missionaries were increasingly well trained, and, from 1957 a new strategy, known as Global Conquest, was introduced. This later involved a shift from rural to the world's rapidly growing urban areas, an increase in the distribution of gospel literature, and an increase in the training of nationals to lead their own churches through Bible school programmes. The first, and most successful, of these was Paul Yonggi Cho's church in Seoul, which, founded in 1958, by 1983 had some 615 full-time staff and 280,000 members. In 1957, the AOG General Council projected that within three years it would lift its appointed missionaries from 758 to 800, its national workers from 8,000 to 10,000, and the numbers of AOG members overseas from 574,000 to 600,000. In fact, while the first target was not met, by 1960 national workers had increased to 12,500 and membership abroad was approaching some 750,000.24 By 1995, Cho's church in Seoul had nearly that many members in its own right.
Having raised money on the missionary circuit, Giusti sailed for Australia, arriving in early 1959. His first action was to travel between the major cities to size up the situation, spending three months in Brisbane and another three in Sydney. There were already groups operating in Melbourne and Adelaide when he arrived there. In Melbourne, for instance, he found a group of some 40 people who had been meeting for a short time in Greenwood's Richmond Temple, under the direction of 'a fine Italian sister who had arrived from Italy only three months before'.25 Giusti 'proceeded to put the Church in order', electing Trustees, a secretary treasurer, starting a building fund, and holding meetings three times a week both in Melbourne and (further out of town) at Moonee Ponds. In time, however, rather than welcome another worker in the field, these congregations resisted Giusti's ministry. Perhaps they knew of his reputation from Italy, but it is more likely that Giusti himself, a restless soul, could find no place in the tight little family worlds of small congregations. He had an urge to plant churches, but didn't really have the patience for long term pastoral work. This could be seen from the trips which followed, to Robinvale in South Australia, to Brisbane, and inland into the Queensland countryside. In each place he preached the word, won people to Christ, but in no place was a congregation formed by the travelling pastor. Indeed, in some places, his traditional Italian ways of evangelism, which included mounting loudspeakers on his car, met with resistance by locals and even trouble with the police. (The Melbourne Italian AOG, working out of Richmond Temple under the pastorship of Elvis Greenwood, was still treating Robinvale as an outreach centre into the 1980s.) He also raised some hackles among the Australian churches. Anthony Piraino discovered that Giusti had been attempting to organise the Italian Church in Melbourne as the 'Italian Assemblies of God in Melbourne, Branch of the Italian Assemblies of God of the USA'. This was not only against Springfield's policy in Australia, but seemed to confirm Australian fears about American self-aggrandisement. After placating the Australians, Piraino turned to Giusti, extracting a 'promise that he would not make any further moves until he received orders from the Brethren in Springfield and the Italian branch AFTER they had conferred with each other on this vital question'.26 While Piraino was fighting hard to make Australia a national priority through an attachment to Springfield's global goals, Giusti's personality centred evangelism, informed by a view that extended no wider than the Italian District back in the United States, kept pushing it into the periphery. Piraino begged for Springfield and the Italian District to come to terms quickly in order to 'inform Brother Giusti as quickly as possible of your decisions'. In fact, this kind of coordinated planning, whereby the national body took over responsibility for missionary work from the District, was not to happen until 1965.
A gruff, forthright man, with very traditional views on dress and male-female relations, Giusti imported to the Australian work the use of the veil, separate seating for men and women in the congregation, and a ruling passion for the dignity of the pastorate. They were clearly elements tied into the Italian idea of 'respect'. An imposing figure in his blocky, dark pin striped suits, some remember him as 'looking like a mafioso', and one could see in his idea of subjection to the pastor the sort of paternalism found in some southern Italian families. Indeed, despite the fact that he had pastored a small church in Wilmington, Delaware, and had his wife taking care of that church while he was away for years on end, Giusti seemed hardly touched at all by the period he had spent in America.
While, then, he is remembered as a 'sociable man', who could mix well with people, it was the sociability of one who knew the world, and meanings, of Italian hospitality well. Being older than the young marrieds who made up the majority of the congregation, he tended to condescend to his charges. As many of them were away from their parents, it was a style that had an attraction of sorts. It was also in tune with Italian patriarchalism, which enabled him to ask more of his people than other pastors perhaps would. At dinner at the LoSurdo's house in Quaker's Hill, for instance, he did not hold back from criticising his host's long shop hours, declaring, fratello, tu ti devi dedicare di piu al'opera di Dio. He knew the young man's mother in Italy, and knew also that that barb would strike home. To those who met him only as children, he is sometimes remembered, because of his formality, dark dress and glasses that magnified his eyes, as a scary figure, the embodiment of the tight discipline parents then imposed on their children. Certainly, he was never caught out of suit and tie: visitors would have to wait outside his apartment door if they called unannounced, while Giusti dressed himself (as he saw it) to 'represent the gospel'. They were elements which he attempted to pass onto Anthony Foti at his accession to the pastorate with the words. 'Always keep the work this way'
from the other side of the pulpit...
The necessities of settling in to the new country, and of the interaction of the three communities Italians worked in (parenti/paesani, Italian and Australian) with the foundation of yet a fourth community, one of common faith, caused problems. Some of these can be seen in the story of Marcella and Nevio Cunsolo (the facts are true, but the names have been changed to retain some of the privacy of the people involved). When the Cunsolos arrived in Australia, both of Marcella's brothers were running fruit shops and had already set up their own families. Australia was a place she had never really wanted to come, but had the beauty of utility: era bella che si lavorava, portava soldi a casa. Sono an po' di sacrificio negli primi tempi perche poi andato [mio figlio] dopo un mesi, e io non potevo lavorare-quello era piccolino, e c'erano un altro due ('it was good that when one worked, it brought money into the house. There was a time of some sacrifice in the early times, because after a month [my son] came along, and I couldn't work-he was little, and there were another two besides'). In addition to not being able to work, Marcella and Nevio had to pay off their voyages, on which they had been able to afford nothing more than a deposit before they came. A deposit on a house was therefore out of the question, and they were forced to do what most Italians shied away from: rent a house. Yet, by keeping expenses down, they were able to pay off their voyages and begin working towards a house: 'We suffered, because it isn't like its your own house, when you rent'. The unstable conditions of short term rentals with relatives meant that they changed houses five times in four years-first they moved into shared houses in Paddington, then Marrickville, Newtown, Leichhardt and Tempe before they finally moved into a house in Marrickville which, after they had scraped together the $200 deposit, they could begin paying off. While the people they boarded with were always (bar one) relatives, two families in one house was usually a recipe for conflict. Poor living conditions were a trial for almost all Italian immigrants in this period. For nine months they lived with a family that was at that time keen for the gospel. So that Marcella could work at the Kolotex factory (making lipstick tubes), the agreement for the rent was that the Cunsolos would pay eight pounds a month, including childcare with the owner's wife for their youngest. There her workmates were 'tutti Italiani, e per questo che ancora Inglese non lo so' ('all Italians, and that's why I still can't speak ['don't know'] English').
In the long run, the arrangement ended in the bitterness of different families who were placed too closely together. Something of the relationship bore fruit, however, as their landlord's discussions and connections with Giusti's tiny church led them to investigate the new faith. Marcella was a firm but not inflexible Catholic who basically accepted doctrine without question, but not without being open to questioning. Like thousands of others, the new conditions in which they found themselves detached them from the traditions of the Catholic Church:
To tell the truth, here [in Australia] I have never been in contact with the Catholic church. You know how it is in a little paese: 'You, where are you going? to church?' But afterwards, when we came to Australia, we changed-with having to work [so much of the time}; this and that, I don't remember if I went a couple of times, but it was certainly not as strong as it was in Italy.... There are many who left the Catholic church but who haven't gone to another church-perhaps because, as I said before, here it is always work, work, work, not giving you time, and work ... perhaps that is it. Here, after one goes to work, you forget everything [else].
A visit by Giusti to their neighbours saw the Cunsolos involved in discussions about the Bible and the basis for belief. Of course, they knew something of evangelical religion, as they had been aware of the small house meeting run by Cecilia LoSurdo in Spadafora-Nevio's brother had even attended some of the meetings, and would also attend some of the services in Australia, but his interest folded under pressure from his wife. It was Giusti's personal rectitude which attracted first Nevio. He became an enthusiastic follower of the gospel: Lai quando si metteva a pregare, proprio piangeva, sai, si proprio lui voleva qualcosa. Mi ricordo quando erano ancora li a [Hoxton Park], quando non poteva andare, lui piangeva.... Aveva sempre la bibbia in mano che sempre si leggeva. ('When he began to pray, he would really cry, as if he really desired something from it. I remember when we were still out there at [Hoxton Park], when he couldn't go, he would really lament.... He would always have his bible to hand and be reading from it.') Marcella was slower in coming along:
He was the first to come [to the faith]. I, no, I was harder, and because of this they would say, 'But why? Giusti is a fine man.' But it didn't register with me how important it was, what he was trying to say. After the third time that my husband went to church, he said to me, 'Why don't you come, if only to have a look, come'. 'But why do I have to come? I'm fine staying here.' After, he convinced me to go, and I went. At first, it had not really impact on me-the first time didn't touch me at all. There was a group of people there, but they were few-only the Spinellas, sister Dali, Natalina [Dimento]..., Paolina [Caltabiano], her father and mother in law, and that's all ... maybe five families.
While there was not much to the group, however, there was a peculiar power and freedom to their prayers which, as Pietruccia had in Messina, Marcella found attractive in Australia:
Perhaps after I had been a few times, I saw that there was something in the way that these people prayed-I met sister D'Ali, who prayed like that. But I said, 'Where are these words coming from!', because [in Italy], to pray, one read out of all those books, to Saint Mary.... I don't recall how often I went, but after a while there, one evening, brother Giusti was on the pulpit and while he was preaching he was crying. He said, 'Do not harden your hearts'. He had to put up with a lot because still we did not understand anything- perhaps we were slow in understanding, I don't know. But after I said to myself, 'Hey, if this man, this poor old man, cries like this, he must be feeling something'. After a couple of times of going along, I began to understand, but, you see, I began to think 'what am I doing here, leaving what I already know for some new thing?' Then, I said, 'but, I don't know how to pray', so l just said, 'Lord, if this is really your way, make me feel it in my heart'. Because you cannot convince anyone with words if they don't really feel it. And so these were the only words I could pray in those first times.... And slowly, slowly, I became stronger ...
If slow steps brought Marcella into the fellowship, however, it took only one dispute with their landlord to disabuse Nevio of the transforming effects of Christianity. Despite the fact that they had a six month lease, their landlords wanted them to leave the house they were renting, a dispute that ended in the owners referring the matter to their lawyer. To Nevio it was a breach both of family etiquette and biblical precept:
Just as I was growing in faith, there began these contentions with the woman of the house in which we were staying. It was also then that my husband began to fall back, because he said, 'Hey! If we are going to be Christians, we must truly be Christians!' They didn't keep their end of the agreement that we had made with them.... This thing really broke him [Nevio].... From that point my husband began to become discouraged.... He wouldn't go to church anymore, and he didn't want me to go either. He tried to send me to the Catholic church, because 'there are plenty of churches closer to us...'
In this conflict, the roles of the black-and-white faith taught by Giusti and amenable to unlettered and recent converts, certainly played a role. Indeed, the conflict between literalist 'all or nothing' faith and a more nuanced understanding of church and life, would continue to cause problems throughout the life of the church. In the new faith of converts, the perfection of the faith in 'earthen vessels' was a difficult concept for many to grasp. The phrase 'si siami cristiani, dobbiamo essere cristiani' was a common complaint in relationships between believers both outside and inside the church. The underlying dissatisfaction caused both parties by their living conditions was enough of a cause for inter-family conflict, but that conflict was frowned upon by their faith. Personal fault was preferred as an explanation for problems over more abstract terms such as 'social and economic conditions', or 'culture', every time. The choice was to swallow pride and change, or to live with the internal civil war and shape a conception of the faith which would justify the continued conflict and enable traditional conceptions of amoral familism to retain their dominance. It was a process common in church-based relationships in the coming years. Marcella chose one way, Nevio chose the other. With all the conflict going on with their neighbours, a sterility crept upon Marcella's church life, so that no matter how much she sought the Holy Spirit in prayer with people such as Lucia Potenza, she received nothing: lo capivo ch'ero turbata, e non ero libera, e sempre ci dicevo al fratello Foti, che 'finche io sono in questa casa, io non posso mai ricevere il Spirito Santo, perche mi sento turbata sempre', non ero libero con quella gente ('I understood that I was disturbed, and I wasn't free, and I was always saying to brother Foti, that "until I am no longer in this house, I cannot ever receive the Holy Spirit, because I always feel disturbed," I wasn't free around those people'). And it was indeed when they moved out of Marrickville and into Marcella's brother's house in Leichhardt that she received the baptism at a church service. Returning home, she entered the house peeling with a joyous laughter, and her youngest child, Bob, a mere toddler was delighted to join in. She was to need the strength with which her experience infused her.
Such conflicts also caused inevitable stress in the family, with one partner reacting to problems in the church with criticism, the other reacting with faith. After a smash in the church bus put their children into hospital for observation, for instance, they had to agree to disagree: E cos' poi il mio marito ha attacato anche storie, perche loro, dice, 'vedi tu che mandi la cosi lontano, se l'hanno un investito e adesso sono in ospedale'... Ho detto, 'Senti, non parlare cosi, ringrazia Dio che Lai le hanno lasciato in vita, perche se le vuole mazzare, pure qua davanti la porta puo mazzare'. ('And so then my husband started developing all sorts of [wild] explanarions, because they ... he would say, "Look, you have sent them so far away, and they have had an accident, and now they are in hospital." ... I said, "Listen, don't talk like that, thank God that He has left them in this life, because if He wanted them dead, he could have killed them right in front of [our] door.') It was a conflict that grew only worse when the family moved out to Riverwood in order to buy a house big enough to share with their newly married older son. The isolation of the suburbs set in around Nevio, making the isolation from his wife over the church issue even more difficult to bear. It was only over time that the conflict declined, and that by two people simply wearing the argument threadbare and unpalateable. E brutto quando si allontanano, perche per ritornare e difficile.
At the same time God was constantly comforting me. I remember one evening when [my husband] began with his carrying on ... and I couldn't sleep, ... I really heard a voice which said to my heart, 'Look ahead, look to heaven'.... God always comforted me. And then one time I also had a dream which exacrly suited my situation. We were in a great park with lots of tables, like those of the church, and we were seated, and then came along a group of Roman soldiers with shields. It was just as if they were coming against us to fight with us, when suddenly they turned around and no-one at all approached us. They all went away.... I really heard a voice, [which said] ... 'Go forwards, do not fear', and then I awoke. That was for me, because they were coming against us to fight, and I was struggling with my husband.... It encouraged me ...
The different allegiances also created distance between them-there were now things that she would not tell her husband about the church, because they would be the spark for yet more 'storie', and threaten any hope she had that a spark of interest in the things of Christ might yet again be kindled. The conflict was not just within the marriage however-stories, inevitably distorted, flowed out to the relatives, innoculating them from contact with the church. The flip side of the church, then, is the story of all those who have come and not stayed, people whose root struck not deep enough to withstand the brightness of the city lights, or the feeling of drowning in churchy closeness. Even more than for Australians, looking at their relatives across the church divide created heartache for Italians, as if suddenly their citizenship was no longer the same.
In this light, it is clear that the message preached by Giusti-clear, uncompromising, highly emotive-had its strengths and its weaknesses. Foti, however, was of a different stamp, a pastor rather than an evangelist, and while many of the traditional ways were kept up while they were in demand among the congregation, he was prepared to bend where perhaps a more rigid man (like Giusti) might have been broken. They were characteristics that brought out the worst in the controlling part of Giusti's nature. For those under his cure, the older man could be the essence of Christian kindness and gentleness. Most who were adults at the time remember him as an almost apostolic figure, the great church planter, and it is generally this image of him that remains in the public memory of the congregation. He had a petty side to him, however, when he thought people were trying to thwart his vision for growth in the Italian work: 'if things didn't go his way he was difficult. Not aggressive, [but] he had ways of getting around it and under it.' Himself 'living like a monk [in] a little room with a little kerosene heater', he felt that others too should be prepared to give up all for the gospel. 'He had a way of making you say things just to get him off your back'. Before the Foti's arrived, for instance, he thought to prepare the way by convincing one active church worker to give up his own flat for the newcomers, moving the worker himself into the back of a coldwater weatherboard hall that the congregation was using for an outreach centre in Sydney's outer west. Only the arrival of the Foti's and the protestations of the worker's newly-wedded wife prevented this from happening.
This side of Giusti particularly impacted on the Fotis when they came to take over the work. In contrast to the letters appealing for help they had received when back in the States, on arrival, it appeared that Giusti was not quite ready tO leave. For almost half a year, despite letters from America requesting his return and pressure from new converts in the group unhappy about his iron fisted rule, he continued to dominate the pulpit, pushing the new arrivals into the background and playing the senior missionary. He also let people know he wasn't entirely happy about the new couple, in a sense importing the same struggle which had been fought out between the AOG and CCNA, and within the CCNA itself, 20 years before. The Foti's were too American-Jean, in particular, had a modern hair style (though she hid it under the veil), and spoke hardly any Italian. Anthony was too loose on the enforcement of traditions. Even when he left, in June 1962, there was an attempt to control the way the church ran. Out of respect for the foundation missioner, Foti thought it necessary to keep him informed of the work and, being back in Delaware, Giusti should have been a good channel for appeals for help in the rapidly expanding work. Giusti, however, stirring restlessly in his small congregation, thought of such appeals as an opportunity to get back out in the field. He applied to the Italian District for financial support for a trip back to Australia, including a sweep through Italy. At 67 years of age, he could well have thought of this as his swansong. Apart from the problems raised by a return from the firebreathing Giusti, however, such a plan would have entailed an expenditure of thousands of dollars. This the missionary fund could not stand, and Foti, as the senior missionary in the field, gainsaid the suggestion. Giusti was enraged. He saw it as a personal attack from someone trying to shore up their own position in a church which he had started. As well as defaming Foti to all and sundry, he contacted the father of another Italo-American minister soon to be a missionary in the Australian field, Joseph Roma, and made rash promises about how Foti would be removed, and Roma would be set up as senior minister. While Foti 'took it with a grain of salt', knowing how this typified the man, the event divided opinion in the American AOG and undermined, rather than mobilised, confidence in the work at a crucial stage. And in the end it came to nothing: in 1965, Giusti was involved in a car accident, lingering a while in a coma before dying, aged 68. Ironically, before he left Australia, he had prophesied that the Italian work would be a large work. His missionary efforts in Sydney in the late 1950s were among the most valuable in the history of Italian pentecostalism in Sydney; his lack of restraint in the 1960s were among the reasons why that work did not become truly national in scope.
Notes
1. F.K. Crowley (ed.), A New History of Australia (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1977), p. 526.
2. R. White, Inventing Australia (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1988), p. 164.
3. M. Hogan, The Sectarian Strand: Religion in Australian History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 231-32.
4. This came to the Australian AOG in 1960, with the visit of W.E. Kirschke. See D. and G. Smith, A River is Flowing: A History of the Assem61ies of God in Australia (Adelaide: AOG Australia, 1987), p. 45
5. N. Buch, 'American Influence on the Reshaping of the Baptist Union of Queensland, 1945-1985'(unpublished manuscript, 1990), p. 36.
6. See E. Daniel and A. Potts, Yanks Down under 1941-45: The American Impact on Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985).
7. Troutman to Burnard, 21 April 1958, Burnard/Troutman Correspondence, Burnard Holdings (CSAC Archives, Robert Menzies College).
8. Quoted in Buch, 'American Influence', p. 36.
9. See M. Hutchinson, An American Evangelical in Australia: C.H. Troutman and the Perception of Cultural Difference (CSAC Working Papers, 1.1; Sydney: CSAC, 1992).
10. Duncan's daughter, Ruth Woodham, remembers Nelli walking into a youth meeting at Petersham, possibly one Saturday night in 1948 or 1949: 'He came [back] on the Sunday, and had a long talk to Dad about how he would like to see an Italian work established in Australia. They talked it over, and I don't know all the details, but eventually a man came over called Giusti.... I can t remember [Nelli well], but he was a very charming American. He had wonderful stories to tell about the way that the Lord was moving in Italy because of the persecution after the War, and how they had helped to stop that, with aid...'(Interview, R. Woodham, 2517191).
11. B. Chant, Heart of Fire: The Story of Australian Pentecostalism (Adelaide: House of Tabor, rev edn, 1984), p. 91.
12. A Piraino, 'Report of Findings in Australia Relative to the Evangelization of One Million Italians-September 1959' (Archives of the Division of Foreign Missions Research Centre [ADFMRC}), p. 1. My thanks to the Centre for photocopying their Italo-Australian holdings.
13. P. LoSurdo, Ineerview, 3/1196.
14. A. Nelli to N. Perkin, n.d. [1959?] (ADFMRC), p. 1.
15. Piraino, 'Report of Findings in Australia', p. 2.
16. Piraino to Carmichael, 27 May, 1958 (ADFMRC).
17. Piraino to Carmichael, 15 July, 1958 (ADFMRC).
18. Piraino to Carmichael, 27 May, 1958 (ADFMRC).
19. Piraino to Carmichael, 27 May, 1958 (ADFMRC).
20. Piraino to Carmichael, 15 July, 1958 (ADFMRC).
21. A. Nelli to N. Perkin, n.d. [1959?] (ADFMRC), p. 2.
22. Piraino to S. Totaro, 6 October, 1959 (ADFMRC).
23. Piraino, 'Report of Findings in Australia', p. 3.
24. E.W. Blumhofer, The Assemblies of God: A Chapter in the Story American Pentecostahsm, II (Springfield: Gospel Publishing House), pp. 143-47.
25. Piraino, 'Report of Findings in Australia', p. 1. This was probably a reference to Paolina Infantino and her sister, who met the AOG pastor at Moonee Ponds and began gathering together immigrant evangelisti, particularly from among the Melbourne Calabrian community. (Interview, P. Infantino, 511196)
26. Piraino, 'Report of Findings in Australia', p. 2.