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Carlo Carli on the future for the Italian community in Victoria

Carlo Carli and Mara Moustafine.

Created:

unknown

Date Added:

21 April 2009

Source:

source not available

Format:

mov (Quicktime);

File size:

5.7 MB

Length:

02min12sec

Transcript

The Italian community in Victoria is – obviously the largest in Australia, it’s also got a large proportion in country Victoria and it’s going through a fairly interesting period because, you’ve got –a community that’s invested enormously in bricks and mortar, I mean, there are any number of Italian clubs in the area and institutionally they’ve done very well. The question is: what survives in the future? And there’s a bit of a period now of people trying to work that out,: can the community really sustain so many little clubs of often town-based what’s a welfare organisation do in the future? What’s the role of an historical society?
                        00:53
There is a bit of work happening with the State Government and I’m actually chairing a committee that’s got a few million dollars to spend on Lygon Street and a lot of that’s about trying do a precinct study but part of that’s about trying to look at what we can preserve in terms of the history or how we can narrate it. How do we narrate it in the built environment? How do we use buildings and that to highlight that history? And I suppose what’s interesting about Lygon Street, goes – is it’s the intersection point between the universities, RMIT in Melbourne, Trades Hall and trade union activity and the Italian community and previous to that, obviously the Jewish community.
                        01:33
And I think that’s a really interesting exercise of trying to in a certain sense, narrate the history for future generations. But I think the Italian community has to do some fairly serious thinking and decisions about,– almost a triage, what’s there to be preserved or protected or where do you put the emphasis and I don’t think the community has done a lot of that because I think they’d be more interested in building clubs and buildings and their obsession has been bricks and mortar.
                        02:11
End transcript