A community finds its place - the Lettesi story

‘Why did we leave? Why wouldn’t we leave? We had lost everything.’ 

 In the Hamilton home of Tony (Antonio) and Pina D’Accione, I am listening to Ralph (Raffaele) Della Grotta with his wife Maria tell of their experiences as a member of the Lettesi community in Newcastle. The Lettesi[1] are part of a unique community of extended family members of some 145 households where one or both partners were born in the Abruzzo village of Lettopalena in Italy, and who settled in Newcastle between 1950 and 1956. [2] Two similar Lettesi communities are located in America and Argentina. [3]

A discovery place - Hamilton Public School

My first impression was of some kind of a discovery garden - but it is a public primary school. Buildings are plain and functional and there is plenty of paving, but what catches my eye are the creative touches everywhere. A huge funky chair balances high above the entrance gate in Samdon Street, and colourful hand painted signposts are immediately helpful to the visitor.

Search for the station master's house

Since I first discovered the trove of online digital images available through Newcastle’s cultural collections[1] I have been fascinated by the photograph of the Hamilton station master’s house. Damaged and discoloured with age, the cottage with three people standing in front had an other-worldly quality. I wondered where exactly it was – perhaps it still existed – and who those individuals were.

Gregson Park

As a gift, it wasn’t  quite all it seemed. It was probably the worst piece of land in Hamilton. That’s hard to imagine today, as we absorb the colourful expanses of spring flowering annuals and roses, wander the meandering paths, or watch kids in a playground protected by ancient fig trees.

Music in the genes - Betty Lind

When Disney’s Beauty and the Beast opened in Newcastle in 2006, three generations of the Lind family were involved in its production. Carolyn, daughter of Betty Lind and her late husband Frank, directed. Another daughter Kathryn played Madame de la Grande Bouche. Three of Carolyn and Kathryn’s children played ‘enchanted objects.’

Hamilton Baptist Church

It seems only natural that the early Hamilton Baptist Church would conduct its Christmas Day service on a summer evening in the much-loved Gregson Park. After all, the Church is directly opposite, at 108 Lindsay Street, where it has been since 1929. Historical church records refer to this as ‘our tradition.’

An Italian childhood - Maria Martinelli

‘I was born in 1938 on a small self-sufficient farm on the outskirts of Ascoli Piceno, a city on the north coast of the Adriatic Sea. I am the 10^th child of a family of 12, seven brothers, four sisters and myself.’

So begins Maria Martinelli’s life story.[1]

The Fern Street house

Every weekend, from the age of two in 1938 until he was about 24, Brian Archer stayed at his grandmother’s two storey weatherboard house in Fern Street, Islington.

Not far from the house was the railway line.

Every time a train passed through, the building shook from the vibrations.

Mac's Fruit Shop

‘He knew every piece of fruit in the shop. If anyone touched anything, he could tell!’

So says Julie Lomax, whose father Norman (Gaetano) Santamaria ran Mac’s Fruit Shop at 138 Beaumont Street, Hamilton, spanning the years of World War II, from 1939 to 1946.

I wondered how someone from the Aeolian islands in Italy’s far south, with the name Santamaria, happened to call his shop by the very English-sounding ‘Mac’s.’

Pina Deli - a community of food lovers

Pina Deli has been serving the cosmopolitan community of Hamilton and beyond for 54 years. There have been eight different owners of the business in that time, including two sets of sisters. The first five owners were from the tightly knit Lettesi community, people who migrated in large numbers from the war-devastated village of Lettopalena.