Her father had already been living in Australia for five years, and was waiting to meet her and the rest of the family at the dock.
A young Lella walked along the Princes Pier, the point of arrival for thousands of Italian migrants in Australia.
Little did she know, that very wharf would become the focus of her research years later.
But for now, she was just happy to see her father again.
“In 1941 my father was captured by the English army,” Cariddi recalls.
“They detained him in a prisoners’ camp in Kenya, where he remained for many years.
“Until one day, when we received a letter; it was just a piece of folded up paper, without an envelope.
“The message had been redacted in part, but we understood what it said: my father was coming home.”
After eight years in prison, Cariddi’s father returned home.
At the time, Italy was a country in ruins.
The only work available was in reconstruction.
Cariddi’s father, who was a Morse operator before the war, picked up work building bridges and tunnels.
“It was dangerous work,” Cariddi says.
“My father was greatly debilitated after his time in prison, and he just couldn’t do it.
“Especially because of all the dust that was stopping him from breathing properly.”
Cariddi’s father decided to move to Australia.
“At the time, you could apply to go to Argentina, Canada and Australia, where we had family, so my father decided to apply to come here,” Cariddi says.
“When my father was coming back from Kenya, he was so ill that they made him sign a document saying that it was his own responsibility if he died while on board the ship.
“As soon as he boarded the ship, he began to feel better.”
While Cariddi has spent most of her life in Australia, she’s never forgotten her origins.
For many years, she worked to facilitate the assimilation of Italian migrants in Australia.
In 1974, Il Globo published a job ad on behalf of CO.AS.IT.
“They were looking for candidates for the role of ‘ethnic youth worker’,” Cariddi recalls.
She became the first ever ethnic youth worker at CO.AS.IT.
“I worked with misfit youths who were at risk of ending up in prison,” she says.
“I had to keep them out of the judicial system; otherwise, they would be lost forever.
“They were marginalised youths.
“I invested all my energy into integrating them into society.
“We went on excursions and camping trips, and their mothers would also come.
“The presence of women, especially mothers, was fundamental for their recovery.”
Following her time with CO.AS.IT., Cariddi dedicated herself to another project, which was also aimed at assimilating migrants.
It was 1980 and the government was implementing the new guidelines of the Kangan Report, which addressed continuing adult education and improved access for professional qualification.
Cariddi went on to found the Migrant Women Education Program at Footscray TAFE.
The initiative provided professional training and qualifications to migrant women.
“The school had a big industrial kitchen that the women were able to use,” Cariddi says.
“They taught each other how to make traditional dishes from their countries.
“In this way, they were able to learn a trade while interacting socially and escaping the isolation caused by the language barrier.”
Isolation was a concept Cariddi was familiar with.
“When we arrived from Italy we went to live in country Victoria, where my father had already been working for some time,” Cariddi recalls.
“The geographical isolation was tremendous.
“My mother suffered a lot.
“My sisters and I were luckier because we went to school, while my mother suffered in silence.
“It was total isolation – from the family, but also from society, due to the language barrier.
“If you didn’t know English, you didn’t speak. That was that.
“That’s why my father pushed for me to learn English as soon as I arrived in Australia.
“He said: ‘If you don’t speak English, they won’t give you work’.”
Motivated by her experience of the devastating effects of isolation on women, Cariddi applied for a role at the Mercy Hospital for Women in East Melbourne, where the first Migrant Women Health Services Department had been opened.
The initiative soon became the prototype for translation and interpreting services in hospitals.
Cariddi insists on the importance of cultural diversity, a diversity which she says must be understood and respected.
“We taught doctors and nurses the most important tips for when a woman from another culture finds herself in hospital,” she explains.
“Things like the importance of hot food for Vietnamese women who are pregnant.
“And we taught ‘childbirth English’ to migrant women.
“It was a very important initiative as it allowed the women to communicate with the medical staff.”
Cariddi’s social commitment has not been limited to her professional life.
Following her work at the Mercy Hospital, Cariddi decided to dedicate herself full-time to the documentation of the migrant experience.
She achieved this through an exploration of social history and a subsequent curation of exhibitions.
These projects can be traced all the way back to her own journey back in 1955.
When Cariddi departed for Australia, she brought a set of embroidery samplers with her.
They consisted of squares of material, each the size of a tissue.
On one of these samplers was a flower.
On another, there was a snowflake, and on another, a geometric pattern.
The set of embroidery samplers is of particular importance to Cariddi: it represents what she didn’t want to do.
“When I was young, I wanted to study, but there wasn’t enough money and I was a woman, so they sent me to learn embroidery,” she says.
Although Cariddi was unimpressed by the prospect of becoming a seamstress, those squares of material were the origins of her work as a curator.
In her exhibitions, Cariddi recounts the social history of migration through objects that people brought with them, during their voyage to Australia.
“The story of these people had never been documented,” Cariddi says.
“In those early years of immigration, no one spoke about their experience... There were not many written testimonies about the actually journey.
“Those stories were at risk of being forgotten forever.
“It was necessary to begin telling them, before it was too late and they were lost forever.
“The migrant experience makes up part of the social history that is at the roots of contemporary Australia; it must not be lost.”
It was based on this idea that the ‘What Happened at the Pier’ exhibition was born, under the auspices of Multicultural Arts Victoria.
The exhibition explored the migration experience through the objects and places visited by immigrants.
Princes Pier and Station Pier were two of those key places.
For many migrants – including Lella Cariddi – those wharves were the places of arrival in Australia.
But what kind of objects were used in the exhibition?
There were the three kerosene cookers that a Maltese woman had brought with her, so as to feed her family upon their arrival to Australia.
And the coffee grinder that one Dutch woman used, to grind grain bought on the black market to feed her family during the famine of 1944.
And the magnetic tape one Italian woman used to record messages to her mother, who had stayed behind in Italy.
That tape was never sent because of the fear that it would be lost.
“We received many objects,” Cariddi recounts.
“We were contacted by people from over a dozen countries: the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, Ireland, Malta, Egypt and others.
“These people brought objects of daily use with them and recounted the stories that accompanied each one.”
‘What Happened at the Pier’ eventually led to another project called ‘Sailing into History: Displacements and Arrivals’.
Cariddi dedicated this exhibition to first-generation Italian migrants, who, after arriving in Australia, began to form the Italian community in Carlton.
In the very same places where these stories were set, Cariddi, in collaboration with Domenico de Clario and Laura Cionci, organised another event, which took place in April of this year.
‘Reciproco/Reciprocal’ – this was the title of the new project, born from the collaboration of five pairs of artists.
Each pair was made up of an Australian artist of Italian origins and an Italian artist.
The works born from these collaborations were exhibited, installed or projected in those places significant to Italian culture: the Melbourne General Cemetery in Carlton, the CO.AS.IT. Museo Italiano, La Mama Theatre, Brunetti’s and the Readings bookshop.
It is through initiatives like this that Lella Cariddi has documented the experience of migration in Australia.
Without her contribution, this experience would be at risk of being lost forever.
Thanks to Cariddi’s work, these stories will not be forgotten.