Eassy

It is interesting to contemplate who is the victim in this story. Judah Waten makes no moralistic comment at all. He is careful to build up a large body of information about Plinio’s background so that the reader is able to understanding both his extreme action in a crisis, and the bewilderment which follows it. It is probable that Plinio has had no contact or communication at all with Australian-born people since his reluctant arrival in his new land, an experience which has left him cut adrift from everything that gave life meaning. He has no way of coping with the righteousness of Australians, who’d be the last to recognise that they have their own secret images of evil.

Many memories-sad, gay, tender- danced through Plinio’s mind whenever he looked at his father’s knife. That knife was his most definite link with home. A well-knit, good-looking young fellow of twenty-three –the new kitchen-hand at the café Milano – he had come from a poor village in Calabria, in a very desolate part of southern Italy. Most of the men had emigrated to America and Australia; women easily outnumbered tem in the villages. And many a mother had to bring up children without ever hearing again from a father who had vanished without a trace into one of the new lands.

No Plinio’s father who had died in his native village nearly fourteen years before. Old Bonelli had never cared to leave his wife and his large brood of children even for a week. For them he had worked hard as a day labourer on the roads and in the fields, and in his spare time he had carved things with the knife that had come down to him from his grandfather. It was his most valued possession, his mark of self sufficiency, a symbol of poverty, yet a very proud poverty.

Now in Melbourne, Plinio always carried his father’s knife and he wore his father’s black corduroy trousers. In the new land, lonely, pining for the village he had never before left, Plinio thought more than ever of his father; it was as if the new