Casa mia : home ownership, identity and post-war Italian Australian migration

This thesis begins with an inquiry into the high rates of home ownership for Italian Australian post-war migrants and second generation Italian Australians. This inquiry points to the importance of home ownership to Italian Australians and suggests a connection between Italian Australian home ownership and migration. An examination of urban and geographical literature establishes the argument that the experiences and meanings of home ownership are not homogenous but are variously influenced by class, gender and ethnicity. Further, it is argued that the meanings, rates and importance of home ownership cannot be attributed to being Italian. This argument is based on feminist poststructural debates about the formation of identity and arguments within recent cultural geographies against the use of culture as an explanatory tool. The methodology is developed from feminist discussions on standpoint epistemologies and feminist geography debates on research methods. Qualitative data from 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with first generation Italian Australian post-war migrants and 20 interviews with second generation Italian Australians answer the research question: what does home ownership mean to Italian Australians? This thesis argues that to first generation Italian Australian post-war migrants home ownership means security, independence, privacy and autonomy, control, success, responsibility, place and a future. It is argued that these meanings are unique because they take on a distinctive character within the notion of sistemazione, best translated as 'settling down'. This thesis demonstrates how the desire for sistemazione comes out of a specific migration experience. The relationship between sistemazione, immigration, identity and home ownership for first generation Italian Australians is represented as a heterosexual home ownership matrix'. Within the matrix the desire for home ownership is naturalised by connecting it to a specific set of heterosexual household relations. It is argued that second generation Italian Australians naturalise home ownership further, by defining it as an Italian tradition. The matrix is one site around which second generation Italian Australians negotiate their gender, class, sexual and ethnic identities. The nature of these negotiations is reflected in four separate lists of meanings of home ownership for second generation Italian Australians. This thesis shows that the experience and meaning of home ownership are not homogenous but are influenced by the complex relationships between immigration and identity