Madeleine Regan
Madeleine Regan has undertaken oral history projects with migrant communities, educational organisations, family businesses and local government in South Australia. ‘I buy this piece of ground here’ documents an oral history project with descendants of market gardeners who had arrived in Adelaide from the Veneto region of Italy in the 1920s. The project arose from Madeleine’s personal interest and the engagement of the community and became a major research project over almost two decades. Madeleine holds a PhD from Flinders University, Adelaide and Adjunct Academic Status in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1202-3739
‘I buy this piece of ground here’ »
An Italian market-gardener community in Adelaide, 1920s–1970s
Authored by: Madeleine Regan
Publication date: 2025
‘I buy this piece of ground here’ is a group biography that examines the lives and work of a cohort of Italian migrant families from the Veneto region who arrived in Australia in the 1920s and formed a new community and identity as market gardeners in outer suburban Adelaide.
This book investigates the settlement processes in a period of Australian migration history often overlooked in favour of post-Second World War studies of mass migration and multiculturalism. It considers the impacts of the Depression, fascism, the Second World War, the White Australia environment that excluded southern Europeans, and ultimately, the suburbanisation that overtook their community.
Drawing on 65 oral histories with sons and daughters of the first generation, archival and published records, the narrative reveals what it felt like to work market gardens that became economic and emotional anchors for a new community. The first generation raised families, worked and bought the land, planted vegetables, bartered for glasshouses, sold produce at market, celebrated in packing sheds and established a stable, resilient community between the wars.
The Veneto families developed successful commercial market gardens and created a self-contained village or paese in a small area west of Adelaide. Withstanding marginalisation, the market gardeners lived and worked together in a small community, prospered and created an economy, a sense of belonging and a future for their children.
“A formidably detailed piece of research and the product of a most fruitful community collaboration.”
— Frank Bongiorno AM, Professor of History, ANU.
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