Taste of Ital y for Har mony Day

People: NOLA GREEN

THE Collie Italian and Sporting Club will throw open its doors to the community tomorrow for its Harmony Day celebration.

From 4pm to 8pm, visitors will learn the art of pizza and pasta making, try beach volleyball and bocce, buy sizzled Italian sausages, homemade lasagne and Italian biscuits.

Live music will be provided and the bar will be open in an event that is a blend of Italian and Australian flavours.

The focus on food is an apt one for the club, for it played a large part in the fundraising which resulted in the building of the premises in Ewing Street, and continues to play a large part in the social events which occur there.

The mixture of beach volleyball - the beach being the Aussie element - and bocce, happening in harmony alongside one another, is a sign of how the Italian and the Aussie cultures have blended together, without one diluting the other.

The founders of the club would probably be surprised to see the success the club has become. Their idea to form a club in the 1960s was for it to be a place where Italians in the Collie community could meet and preserve elements of their Italian heritage.

There was a bit of confusion between the older men and their younger counterparts about the aims of the club.

Long-time committee man and president Leo De Angelis recalled at the time of the opening of the current premises that “we young ones wanted to play soccer, and when we found that was not what they wanted to do, we went away.”

The club was formed back in 1966, meeting at first in members’ houses or in the fire brigade hall. In 1974, a big step forward was taken when they purchased the Amusu Hall (now Collie Canvas) from the PCYC, and serious work began on building a solid club membership, as well as premises.

Joe Mileto had his tailor’s shop in the front of the building, and old John Battista and Joe Octobre used a chisel and hammer to break up rocks to get sewerage connected to the building.

The men did the physical work, and the ladies took over the fundraising, which took the form of many family dinners, social nights and barbecues. New Year’s Eve dances in the Miners’ Institute began a tradition still observed more than 50 years later.

A formal dinner marked the opening of the club in the first hall, with the Ciallella family having the difficult task of catering for 200 meals in the tiny kitchen. This was solved by cooking much of the food at the Miners’ Institute and transporting it to the club in Johnston Street.

When - in 1996 - the large hall in Ewing Street was opened with a gala function, the Ciallella family was again involved, but the club ladies prepared the food which the Ciallellas served so the ladies could be seated with the guests.

The gala event, organised with flair by the late Pat Garofano, numbered among the guests the Italian consul, Mrs Barbara Bregato-Bonafini, and the then Leader of the Federal Opposition, Kim Beazley.

With a much larger kitchen, the ladies continued their catering, sharing their traditional dishes with their families and Australian friends.

When the need to raise funds was no longer so pressing, they continued to utilise their skills to run family nights, with pasta nights through the cooler months. Families have always played a large part in the life of the club, and the culture of families getting together to make large quantities of pasta sauces to last through the winter until the next harvest has continued.

Festivals held in the spring of 2002 and 2003, which highlighted the Italian traditions, brought home to the Italians that what they thought of simple everyday things like preparing pasta from scratch were eye openers to their Australian neighbours.

The ladies found their pasta making drew crowds of onlookers, and as soon as they got it through the pasta machines, it was whisked into the kitchen, cooked and sold in the hall.

Meanwhile, the men had customers trying their homemade Italian bread dipped in homemade olive oil, and washed down with a taste of homemade vino. They were all genuinely delighted to find their traditional foods were such a hit, that what was to them an everyday thing was a special treat to others.

Subsequent Harmony Day festivals gave them the chance to again promote their delicious cuisine, so it is fitting that this will happen again tomorrow.