From Suspect Outsider to Model Migrant: The Transformation of Natale Italiano and Perfect Cheese

In 1930, when Natale Italiano and his wife Maria founded the Perfect Cheese Company in their rented North Melbourne backyard, cheese in Australia was synonymous with cheddar. This meant that only the city’s small Italian population was interested in buying the ricotta and pecorino the couple produced. Fast-forward to the 1970s and Italiano was being featured by the Australian government as a poster boy for migrant success. His once ignored cheeses were celebrated as innovative and worthy of imitation. This talk will explore how Italiano and his company went from a small, obscure, even illegal, business, hawking suspiciously exotic cheese to a foreign, marginalised people to a thriving company celebrated by mainstream Australia and regarded by officialdom as a local producer to be protected from foreign competition. By using a range of primary sources, specifically letters, dairy licence hearings, and other material produced by the Victorian Department of Agriculture, this presentation by Dr Tania Cammarano will challenge the narrative of how Australia’s food culture changed by focusing not on how the receiving culture “discovered” Italian food but on the entrepreneurial energy and transcultural skills of migrants like the Italianos who were instrumental in that change. You can view this talk and the other talks in the Italian Australian Culture series on CO.AS.IT.’s website and or Facebook page.