Pod Insights ABC Rewind 02 The Loveday Trilogy | Francesco Fantin About this episode Italian anarchist Francesco Fantin fled Mussolini's Italy for the freedom of the Queensland cane-fields, only to find himself locked up in a detention camp in wartime Australia, surrounded by his political enemies.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:22 Speaker 01 Hi, Mike Ladd with you for Rewind, and the second programme in our series based on the lives of World War Two detainees in Love Day Camp in the South Australian Riverland. If truth is the first casualty of war, subtlety is the second. Australia's initial detention policies were crudely based on race and ethnicity, not political loyalty or personal history.
0:46 Speaker 02 I think the Australian authorities tended to regard national groups as homogeneous groups, so they would think of Japanese as being all in the same basket, Germans similarly, Italians, and so they weren't sensitive to the many differences that in fact existed.
1:04 Speaker 03 The Italians were taken into custody all around Australia, but mainly up in the cane fields in Queensland and over in the gold fields in Western Australia, and they were just rounded up en masse and taken away. Some of them didn't get to see their families before they left. One gentleman, he was at his wedding reception when he was taken into custody.
1:28 Speaker 02 For quite some time, I think, the Australian policy was a cruel one because it meant that in certain instances, people of quite different views or quite different cultural backgrounds were placed together in internment.
1:41 Speaker 01 Historians Peter Montyth and Rosemary Gower. Here at Love Day Camp, civilians who were classed as enemy aliens were detained from 1941 onwards. Seventy-year-old Japanese pearl divers, who'd been in Australia since the 19th century, were locked up. German Jews were imprisoned with Nazi sympathisers. Anarchist and communist Italians were interned with fascists, their sworn enemies. Which brings me to the tragic story of Francesco Fantin, and it is a tragedy in the Shakespearean sense of an impending doom the hero can't avoid.
2:29 Speaker 04 Ma cosa volevo saperti?
2:30 Speaker 05 Francesco, dovresti tenere attento a questi ragazzi, perché sanno di che strada sei.
2:36 Speaker 04 Perché? L'etichetta "devi appartenere a una faccione".
2:41 Speaker 05 Lo spero. Chiedilo a loro.
2:45 Speaker 01 Trent'anni fa, Teresa Craya scrisse e dirigette Red like the Devil. Spostata a Love Day Camp, è un'attrice a lingua bilingua sul Francesco Fantin, e io ho prodotto una versione audio per ABC Radio Drama.
3:02 Speaker 05 Devi arrotellarti un po', come i fiori nel vento, o io non ti romperò. Fai ridere tutti, eh? Tu sei come se non ti ridai.
3:11 Speaker 04 Non posso negare le mie idee.
3:13 Speaker 05 E qui ti trai i tuoi nemici come i tuoi amici.
3:15 Speaker 04 Si tratta di condizioni.
3:17 Speaker 05 Sai nulla di sopravvivere. Il camp è pieno di persone che si stanno rottando dentro.
3:24 Speaker 01 Quindi chi era Francesco Fantin? E come arrivò a incontrarsi a Love Day Camp? Biografo di Fantin, David Faber.
3:33 Speaker 06 Era nato un bambino invecchito nel mid-winter, il 20 gennaio 1901, nel paese di San Vito di Legazzano, che è nel distacco di Skio, che significa "paese rural industriale".
3:52 Speaker 06 Era cresciuto da una madre cattolica di classe lavorativa egualitaria e da un padre di classe textile di classe meno influenzata, e diventò un adolescente anarchistico, anti-fascista paramilitare.
4:23 Speaker 05 I remember as though it were yesterday, that adolescence of mine, an infancy without games, growing up among the clash of arms in that little industrial city, the pain of seeing all the slaughter of that war. Then, the spring, the life which is ever renewing itself with a hymn to love, to liberty. But too short the time, too many those slow to understand this great idea of love. The wickedness, the ambition for dominion, the acts of violence against the poor people. Too late was it understood, all the evil which fascism was doing. Francesco Fantin, Pensieri e Ricordi.
5:18 Speaker 06 His opposition to fascism was based on his mother’s ethics, which were Catholic, but which translated into secular, socialistic anarchist ethics. Fantin would have exercised with arms and he was involved in supplying explosives to worker defence in factories.
5:40 Speaker 01 After World War One, a violent political battle raged in Italy between Mussolini’s fascists and various anti-fascist groups. In a coup d’etat, Mussolini became Prime Minister of Italy in 1922.
5:54 Speaker 06 Fantin could see there was no immediate future for resistance in Italy. Many of Fantin’s friends emigrated to Australia at that time and he stayed because he was married, but then the marriage broke up.
6:08 Speaker 01 The story goes his wife left him for a fascist, which must have been doubly painful.
6:14 Speaker 06 He drank for about a year.
6:18 Speaker 06 In Francesco Fantin’s home district, they’d known about Australia as a political destination for emigration since the 1890s. All of his friends were gone to Australia, so he followed them.
6:51 Speaker 06 He arrives in Melbourne, goes straight up to the cane fields and works there with his brother. He was widely known for his anti-fascist activities in the cane fields. There's oral tradition that suggests that he was by his best mate's side during the 1934 Ingham Cane Strike, which was a health and safety strike over Wiles Disease, which was a fatal illness that was afflicting the cane cutters.
7:18 Speaker 07 "We had to strike. The boss wouldn't let us burn the cane that was full of rat's piss. We were getting sick." "Just don't bring your cane cutter politics in here."
7:29 Speaker 05 "Did you bring the paper?" "As promised. Are we ready?" "I told you before, read your paper somewhere else. You do it here, we are all involved. I'm not taking risks for you." "You can always go outside if you don't like our company." "Your bloody propaganda's gonna get us all in for trouble."
7:48 Speaker 01 The strike was successful and led to the practice of burning the cane. Initially, the cane owners opposed the practice because it lowered the sugar content, but with support from the medical fraternity, it was proved that fire killed the bacteria that came from rat's urine in the cane fields and led to the fatal Wiles Disease, when the cutters were scratched and infected.
8:10 Speaker 06 So that national tradition that we know of, of the cane being burnt, actually started with a health and safety strike in which Fantin and battalion Australians were very prominent.
8:34 Speaker 01 Fantin became known for his activism on behalf of workers and for raising funds for the Popular Front, the Coalition of the Left, during the Spanish Civil War.
8:47 Speaker 06 Once military security got going in 1939, 1940, he was recognised as an anarchist leader of a small following.
9:04 Speaker 05 A rabid fascist, he openly expressed to me his hatred of England and Englishmen. James McCarthy, Brisbane.
9:13 Speaker 07 Fantin is reported to have actively spread communist propaganda amongst the sugar workers in North Queensland. Intelligence Officer, Cairns.
9:24 Speaker 05 From the inquiries made, I am satisfied that Fantin has no followers of anarchism in this division. Constable, Ah Ra, Kelly.
9:33 Speaker 01 A fascist communist anarchist, eh? Seems the authorities covered all bases for Fantin.
9:41 Speaker 06 The education level of Queensland Police, whom the military relied on for local knowledge, was primary. They didn't have a secondary education, most of them. They didn't really understand politics. And they certainly didn't understand the politics of foreigners. And so, a couple of police stations dreamt up the notion of the fascist communist alien. A hybrid whereby they're all extremists, they're all foreigners, their ideas are all foreign. We can't tell the difference. We don't care. They're all disloyal, they're all anti-British. And this damned him.
10:29 Speaker 01 Fantin was arrested on the 14th of February 1942, and sent south on a train.
10:36 Speaker 06 Which the Queensland Commissioner in charge described as full of the scum of the earth, because they hadn't been able to wash for about four days on the train. He was then taken to Gaythorn, near Brisbane, then on a train down to Lovelace.
11:14 Speaker 03 Most of the prisoners that were in Love Day were not necessarily political. But there were a lot of fascists among the Italians and they were very brutal towards the Italian men who were anti-fascist.
11:32 Speaker 06 Fantin was an identified enemy so far as the fascists was concerned and the fascists were a minority who had the apolitical majority under the thumb and they were a larger minority than the anti-fascists. The anti-fascists were primarily from Queensland and some 300 internees came into the camp from Western Australia and that boosted the fascists.
12:09 Speaker 01 Fantin was now, courtesy of the Australian authorities, nestled in the bosom of his enemies, in almost as much danger as he would have been in Italy.
12:21 Speaker 03 There were a lot of ironies. There were men in the camp who'd lived here for many years and had families here and they were often visited by their sons and they'd be in Australian army uniforms. So there were a lot of people there that shouldn't have been there. But the hardest thing was the fact that they had the fascists in with the others and they were very brutal.
12:46 Speaker 06 Dr Pichietelli was a medical businessman from up North Queensland way and he came out with a job lot of Italian medicos who were loyal to the regime. In the camp, he was allowed to be elected by the fascists as camp leader. So he was the preferred conduit for all information between the military authorities and the internees.
13:12 Speaker 03 Fantin overheard the doctor in charge saying, "We've got to get rid of him." And he was very much afraid for his life, and he was right.
13:23 Speaker 06 Fantin had been half-strangled on one occasion. He'd been punched in the face on one occasion. His diary, thoughts and memories, was a response to his sense of threat in that he started reviewing his whole life. So it's very evocative prose.
13:46 Speaker 05 "In this, my life of roaming through the world in search of a piece of bread less bitter, of a little liberty, in these long months of my internment camp, in the evening hours when the sun disappears, when the earth, veiled in a tenuous shadow, already dozes quiet and melancholy, I feel in my heart a great sadness. In these last twenty years, in these times of dictators and dictatorship, the human species, full of fevers, seems mad. All the world rings with the roar of ruinous butcheries, everywhere. Chaos in a stir, seething without hope.
14:31 Speaker 05 It is only a little while since they emerged from the great bath of blood."
14:46 Speaker 01 Lovde was a huge prison farm irrigated from the Murray River. And many of the Italian internees worked in the orchards, vegetable gardens and opium poppy fields.
14:57 Speaker 01 But since the detainees were civilians, under the Geneva Convention, they didn't have to work if they didn't want to.
15:04 Speaker 02 But the authorities could make them that offer, that if they wished to, they could work, and they would be paid a small amount for working. And there were those internees who, as a matter of principle, said, no, they weren't prepared to do that, they weren't going to do anything that might be construed as aiding the enemy in any way. But there were lots who opted to work, and I think for a variety of reasons, it gave them a way to pass their time.
15:34 Speaker 01 So how did Francesco Fantin spend his time at Love Day?
15:39 Speaker 06 He certainly wouldn't have been against working, either himself or other people, because as we know, he said that he wanted to work for the war effort.
15:51 Speaker 06 He was a fitness fanatic, so he probably have done some calisthenics, or he might even have played a game of soccer. Fantin would have read the newspapers and organised the effort of counter-propaganda for that evening. The fascists were doing things like holding news readings at dinnertime, where they would spin the news to say that, you know, the news is telling us that the fascists are winning, the Axis is winning, which until 1942, you could do and get away with, because the war wasn't going so well for the Allies. Fantin assumed the leadership of the anti-fascists in the camp, and they would go to these readings
16:36 Speaker 06 and contest the news. And eventually, they organised a collection of money for the Sheepskin for Russia campaign, which was about Lady Jessie Street's war charity, to provide the Russians with as much Australian war for winter uniforms as they would need. At this time, this is in this fortnight, Il Alamein is won, which is the first real allied victory, and the Russians are about to go in for the kill at Stalingrad. And Fantin is saying the news is wonderful on all fronts. And he's also saying how much he loves the Australian working class.
17:22 Speaker 04 It's a list! Vedi, non è per niente difficile, è una lista. A list of people sending money for sheepskins in Russia? Anti-fascist. Froschoni. Too hot here for anarchists. Maybe we send them to Russia, eh? Guess who is on the list? I don't know! Francesco Fantine, your friend, he has sent money from this camp. I don't know anything about it. Oh, is that so?
17:52 Speaker 06 This collection of monies enraged the fascists. They thought it was disloyal, un-Italian. And they decided about four o'clock in the afternoon of the sixteenth of November nineteen forty-two to murder him. He knew about this. And he moved around the camp, hoping to avoid attention. But unfortunately, unbeknownst to him, he was being tailed. Because it was a group of people that were after him, not just one single person.
18:23 Speaker 03 He'd been beaten up before, and he knew that his life was in threat. So he went to the camp lieutenant, and he told him, and he pleaded to be moved to another camp.
18:35 Speaker 04 I don't believe what they believe, is that so? I don't believe in this war. Well, you'd better believe it, mate. I have the freedom to choose. Right now, you don't even have the freedom to scratch yourself. Help me. Settle your own arguments. How can you say that? You put us here, you are responsible.
18:56 Speaker 06 Eventually, the National Security Service designated him as a case to be released. That was a fortnight before he was attacked. But he's bogged down in army bureaucracy.
19:13 Speaker 03 And they didn't do it, and as a result, they did get him.
19:17 Speaker 06 And he was hit on the back of the head as he was drinking from a tap, which anybody who's ever been in a straddled playground can tell, it was a vulnerable moment.
19:28 Speaker 06 And he was probably struck down by being hit at point-blank range by a thrown jar of skittle. Some such wooden object.
20:00 Speaker 06 He was then taken to the regimental aid post in the camp, where he was seen by the fascist leader in the camp, Dr Fishteteli, the guy who had probably commissioned the crime, who made excuses and pretended not to see things and to see others and so forth.
20:21 Speaker 03 And he didn't get seen to for six hours. By the time they decided to send him to the Barmah Hospital, it was too late and he died. But he could have been saved.
20:34 Speaker 06 And he died at Barmah at 10, in the evening.
20:38 Speaker 03 He died for his politics.
21:12 Speaker 06 A young man named Giordano Bruno Casotti, he was charged with murder. The police worked out it was a political crime, an assassination, straight away. But they couldn't prove it because the witnesses were intimidated. Because everyone knew that if you said anything about that, you were next. Unfortunately, the Crown Prosecutor accepted a plea for manslaughter. Casotti claimed that Fantin had provoked him by insulting his mother, that there'd been some push and shove and that Fantin, who might have had a thin skull, had fallen backwards onto the tapstand.
21:54 Speaker 06 And the defendant was advised by his lawyer to plead guilty of manslaughter. And so the Crown Prosecutor thought, well, he won't go free with manslaughter. Rough justice, that's just what you get. So eventually Justice Richards sentenced Cossotti to two years hard labour and told him he was very lucky. He did the time at Adelaide jail. In 1947, after he'd done his time, he was deported.
22:26 Speaker 01 Alarmingly, Cossotti got back into Western Australia in 1954. But that's another story.
22:33 Speaker 03 There was a lot of propaganda going on during that court case.
22:37 Speaker 06 It was Amensy's government policy. And Everett, one of the first things he'd done when he became Attorney General in late 41, was to have all cases reviewed case by case. Because you couldn't release people in a mass in the middle of a war with Italy. The public opinion would never have warned it. But what Everett did do was he spared the blushes of the army. Because the army could have been held up to disrepute on grounds of negligence. A very embarrassing death in custody. So it was more embarrassing to the army than to the Labor Government. Everett was a win the war social democrat. He needed the army.
23:22 Speaker 06 He couldn't afford to have it embarrassed.
23:32 Speaker 03 All the men that died at the camp, Fantin's the only one we know that was murdered or died as a result of assault. They were all buried at the Barmer Cemetery.
23:44 Speaker 06 Subsequently, his bones were exhumed and they were deposited in the Italian ossery at Nurturson in Victoria.
23:55 Speaker 03 He was a very genuine man, he was a very intelligent man. He wasn't an educated man, he'd only had a few years at school. But, he was a very sincere man, and he was a very good worker.
24:08 Speaker 06 Fantine was one of those people who thought, like Martin Luther King, that if you stop caring about the things that matter, you're already dead, your soul dead. There's not much point after that. He wasn't a martyr, he was not seeking death at the hands of his enemies. He was willing to bear witness to the truth in the face of death, which is different. Fantine should never have been interned in the first place. I think it's a case that's very pertinent today, of security legislation gone mad.
24:48 Speaker 06 When the news came through to Brigadier Simpson, the Chief of the Security Service under Evatt, the Attorney General, that Fantine had been killed, he was highly embarrassed. And it disturbed him. And later on, when he became a federal court judge, he said that he thought the Fantine case was a case of murder pure and simple.
25:17 Speaker 05 To those outside, let them know that in this internment camp there are living friends, workmen who make common cause with them. Companions who have years of struggle for liberty, for justice, who have the same goal and are cheered by their victories. And pensively, they continue to talk of all the peoples who in pain suffer the fascist tyranny. And, before the bitter reality of every day, before this deep darkness, let us try to stand up for the light and for the truth. 1942, Frank Fantine.
26:13 Speaker 01 Ironically, Fantin's possessions, including his memoir entitled Pensieri e Ricordi, Thoughts and Memories, went up in smoke when a sugarcane burn-off, a practice he'd helped establish, got out of control and burnt down his hut. After his death, all his effects had been sent back to Queensland and stored in the hut. Luckily, an intelligence officer at Love Day had translated Fantin's words, and we still have that translation, though the original in Italian is lost.
26:49 Speaker 01 We also have a copy of Fantin's will.
26:53 Speaker 05 Let this money be divided in this way. Two shares to the dear nephews and nieces and sisters for the care they have given my dear parents. The two other shares, libertarian press and political victims.
27:11 Speaker 05 In addition, the sum of forty pounds sterling, which they can take out of my bankbook. A donation, which I make between Red Cross and General Hospital Cairns, North Queensland. Thanking that hospital for the care given during my stay in the year 1929. Francesco Fantin, last will and testament.
27:44 Speaker 01 And so ends the tragic tale of Francesco Fantin. Part two of the Love Day trilogy, here on Rewind. Readings from Fantin's memoir were by Mark Saterno. Sound engineering and original music was by Tom Henry, and production was by me, Mike Lad. Join me next time for the moving story of Japanese internee Miyakatsu Kike, or download the whole series on the ABC Listen app.
28:23 Speaker 00 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. You can discover more ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listener.
28:31 Speaker 04 Kelly Talton was New Zealand's most successful treasure hunter. His expeditions recovered millions of dollars in gold, silver and jewels from shipwrecks all around the world. But when he died, Kelly's final hunt was incomplete. The search for the oldest European artefact in New Zealand. I'm Hamish Williams. Join me as we go on Kelly Talton's Final Treasure Hunt. Follow and listen now on your favourite podcast app.
Previous 01 The Loveday Trilogy | Oskar Speck Next 03 The Loveday Trilogy | Miyakatsu Koike Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated