Delfina Manor, the ‘Book Lady of Benalla’, was born in Rome and migrated to Australia with her mother in 1960. At the same time, her parents separated and her father moved to Canada.
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Delfina’s only recollection of school in Rome as a six-year-old was when a young nun told the class that “Jesus weeps when you throw away good food.”
Shortages of food in wartime Rome gave this saying real meaning, and hunger only abated with the arrival of the Americans at the end of World War II.
Delfina's mother often regaled her with tales of her life in Berlin during the Depression, seeing the rise of Nazism as a teenager and then living in Rome under Mussolini's fascists.
The German occupation was followed by the great relief of the arrival of the Americans.
Delfina's grandmother also had many tales to tell.
She told her of an episode of buying bread on the black market during the German occupation.
The seller was a young German soldier and the transaction was almost complete when they were disturbed by the sudden alarming appearance of an SS officer.
Members of the SS were capable of inspiring terror wherever they went. But the quick-thinking soldier enfolded Delfina's 60-year-old grandmother in a passionate embrace.
Prostitute? Lover? Whatever the officer thought, he ignored them and an issue of life or death was narrowly averted.
But 70 years later Delfina can still not abide wasting food. The belief that ‘Jesus weeps’ when such waste occurs is not a bad belief by which to live.
On arrival in Australia Delfina's mother was employed in the Italian department of Melbourne University.
Initially, the family lived in Heidelberg but because her mother couldn’t drive they moved to Carlton.
This was regarded as a slum by Delfina’s friends, but such suburbs are now well and truly upmarket.
But wherever they lived Delfina was not keen on school. She often wagged school and stayed home watching TV all day.
The constant exposure to American TV programmes gave her a pronounced American accent.
So Delfina’s early life was as a combination of an Italian living in Australia and speaking like an American.
Her only attempts at sport was as a ‘dribbler’ playing basketball. But as she never progressed past the height of five feet, her prospects in this sport were severely limited.
After secondary school Delfina headed for university to study Ancient Greek and Latin, wanting to become an archaeologist.
She readily admits that she should have failed this classics degree and probably only passed because there were very few students in the course.
She also soon realised that an education in the classics did not offer huge paths to employment.
Perhaps the only positive in this outcome was that her income as an unemployed graduate would guarantee that she would not have to worry about Jesus weeping because of food being thrown away.
But as an 18-year-old, good news arrived when her mother offered to take her on a trip to Italy.
Further good news came when she realised that the father she had virtually never seen was also in Italy at the same time.
So a meeting with him was arranged to take place at Florence railway station.
At the station Delfina approached a man she thought looked like herself and optimistically asked “Excuse me, are you my father?”
That was the opening line in a tearful reunion between father and daughter.
But after a year in Europe Delfina was forced to confront reality and find employment.
So she returned to Australia and like so many graduates before, and since, without a clear path to employment, she became a teacher.
But as in many such cases Delfina found that such an option was not really an option at all.
Becoming a teacher proved to be an absolute nightmare.
In fact to quote her own words after a horror experience teaching Italian at Wangaratta High School, she had come to believe that “prostitution would be a better option than fronting a classroom again”.
That was the end of her teaching career. So she undertook a course in librarianship, which proved to be a lifesaver and a step towards working in book shops, which became an occupation she loved.
Visiting Benalla, she felt it looked like an affluent public service town in need of a bookshop.
So she opened ‘That Bookshop’, a shop for new books in the 1980s.
This morphed into being part of Irene's Bookshop with Irene Alcorn.
But the great flood in Benalla of 1993 wiped out that shop, so she opened ‘Good Reading’.
She attributes much of the success of this bookshop to having received good publicity from newspapers, when she was pictured rescuing a dog in Benalla’s 1993 flood.
This resulted in a massive donation of quality books and at one stage she had over 100,000.
The shop still functions, with an emphasis on online sales, but with plenty of personal shoppers calling in to its Church St location.
By then having qualified as a long-term resident of Benalla, Delfina became a well known voice in many political debates within the region.
If there was an era that had the greatest impact on Delfina's attitudes, it was certainly the 1970s.
The Vietnam War, the moratoriums, the conscription of 20-year-olds who couldn't even vote, were all issues that brought an explosion of energy and idealism to Delfina and many in her generation.
She became a ‘progressive lefty’ and has remained so ever since.
Her view is that we are a nation of immigrants mainly forced to migrate because of poverty caused by an unequal society, corruption and racism.
But she sees education, once the great equaliser, as once again becoming something that entrenches privilege, with university either unaffordable or crippling for many, and more government money devoted to private schools than to public ones.
The idea of students paying $50,000 for an arts degree seems absurd to her.
The Australia to which Delfina’s mother came because of its reputation for egalitarianism, particularly in terms of education, has changed greatly in her view.
She still sees it as a land of boundless opportunities but worries that many politicians talk to people as though they are still in the 1950s and ’60s.
As Australia is a nation of migrants, she hopes that we will concentrate on becoming a kinder, more tolerant Australia and hopes for the appearance of some more idealistic and talented politicians.
But it seems that many Australians find this a rather bleak hope.
This is the fifth in a series of articles submitted by Brian Lange on behalf of the Benalla Family Research Group.