Memoir’s a true winner for Maria
AUTHOR Maria Bianco has received a special award from Queensland Family History Society for her book, Three Trunks and a Cardboard Case.
Judges for the society’s book awards were so impressed with her writing, they created a special award, Highly Commended as Memoir.
While the book was technically outside the society’s criteria for a full family history, judges felt the historical pageturner demanded recognition.
“I could not put it down,” one judge said at the Brisbane presentation. “I read it twice.”
Set in Upper Whyanbeel north of Mossman, Three Trunks and a Cardboard Case gives an insight into the vanished era of manual cane cutting and real horsepower cultivation in the 1950s.
Salvatore Parisi cut cane for five years to bring wife Nunzia, son Vito and daughter Maria with their three trunks and a cardboard case to a pioneering life of determination and courage in the Far North in 1951.
The book opens with threeyear-old, Sicilian-born Maria fighting for life in forced quarantine with her mother on an Italian ship, while her eightyear-old brother roams free.
Once in Australia, her parents battled language, corruption, isolation and ill health, while trying to keep their children fed and safe as they tramp to school through floodwaters and headhigh grass.
Parental illness forced Maria and her brother to leave school early, but she graduated from James Cook University as a mature-age student with a Bachelor of Arts and Diploma in Secondary Education.