You’re a wog, did you know that?

Nah yeah mate, I am fair dinkum Italian. Ridgy didge ‘Made in Italy’!

I was introduced to one of the office ladies and, after learning that I was Italian, she exclaimed: ‘You’re a wog, did you know that?’

Surviving my first day at work - As a society, where did we land on giving out gold star stickers for adulting?

With the confidence of a middle-class white Boomer, Doris (not her real name) casually anointed me with my first racial dig.

A real one, unlike when I go to the Chinese takeaway and ask for the ‘Gweilo Special’ because if I am what I eat, then I am honey soy chicken and sweet chilly pork like every other westerner.

Wog: Derogatory term to identify southern European immigrants (dark-skinned) in the mid-1900s.

I thought we agreed that I was not part of a minority. Now Doris is telling me I could have played that card all along?! Urgh.

Google results expanded on the definition and cited a research paper from recent years¹. It highlighted how the evolution of wog from slur to celebration peaked in the 1990s, led by second-generation migrants as a form of convivial labour and ethnic entrepreneurship. Today, wog-humour is considered a uniquely Australian comedy trope that unifies all Mediterraneans.

It would have been funnier if Doris said ‘Welcome to the wog corner’, pointing at Spiros and Nuccia sitting beside her. Or maybe this was Aussie humour? Like when they call their enemies ‘mates’ and their friends ‘c*nts’, or when they talk about drop bears.

I will not be fooled again!

A brief history of wogs

I swear there was no Australian chapter in my High School history books because I would have remembered reading such lovely words.²

In the 1800s, Italians would adjust to the Australian climate better than pale English migrants. Italian peasants, accustomed to being frugal, docile, and hard workers with extensive knowledge of Mediterranean-style farming techniques were perfectly suited for rural labour. They were the better men for the worse job and distance and lack of communication prevented them from unionizing. In the early 1900s, the White Australia policy controlled entry into Australia and repatriated Pacific Islanders. There was some confusion as to whether Italians should be let into the country. This put Italians at the bottom of the Australian racial totem pole, just above other Southern Europeans and First Nation peoples.

I have so many questions about the way we’ve been labelled here.

1. Docile and hard workers? Us? We’re lazy and street-smart at best.

2. Not a question but imagining a frail British Victorian child getting sunburnt after two minutes out in the fields makes me laugh a bit.

3. Again, not a question, but it wasn’t the distance preventing Italians from forming unions, it was the different dialects. They probably couldn’t understand each other.

4. Are we not Southern Europeans?

5. Do people think we’re black?

6. Unrelated but important. Why are we not widely recognised as Latinos? We were, quite literally, the original Latins.

Imagine Doris looking at me like this, pleased with her hectic zinger. Courtesy of Canva PRO.

Are ‘Italians’ abroad the only patriotic ones?

I have reservations about definitions but someone has to be patriotic, and it surely won’t be me.

I wish I had spent a decade in New Jersey just to confirm what, for now, is just a theory held up by the cast of Jersey Shore crew and my various encounters with “Italian” shop assistants. All these Italians who weren’t born in Italy, couldn’t speak Italian, have never visited and didn’t know what it means to live in Italy seem more proud of being Italian than me or anyone I know.

Except for my openly right-winged neighbour back home who is very proudly patriotic, so there might be a political component to patriotism and we’ll leave it as that.

I tend to feel patriotic only when confronted with an opposing equal force. For argument’s sake, we’ll name it France. Italians abroad aren’t involved in this imaginary war but they will hang onto their 2% of Italian genetic heritage like I do calories on my thighs.

Is being an ‘Italian’ abroad just about the community vibes, and not as literal as I thought?

If it’s the vibes, then put me in a room of Italians (but not too many, please), Cypriots, North Macedonians, Greeks, Spanish, and I’ll include even Argentinians and Turkish because geography is an opinion, and we’ll prove that we’re all one people bonding through food. Not you, France.

Watch us form the olive and citrus alliance and stuff our faces with various types of flatbread and cheeses.

Ask any Italian, and they’d say we’re, basically, cousins with Spanish people and we’d mistake any Greek-speaking person for Spanish too if there were more than three ‘S’ sounds in a sentence.

We’re inclusive like that.

We see no race but our own olives may be the best ones unless yours are free, in that case, we’ll have a few thank you very much.

Maybe it was because my Italian experience was (mostly) of a mountain town and we kept to our own. Maybe I’d never explored Italy as much as I should have or I’d never expanded my network outside of schoolmates and internet fashion friends. But I wouldn’t know why there was beef between Italians and Irish. I’d never met an Irish person except that one drunk girl in England. And I’d never even met anyone from Greece or had souvlaki before moving to Melbourne.

Wait until I tell you how my first sushi was in Prague at age 16.

Also, the ‘wogs’ in the office are the only ones who can pronounce my name correctly. Did you hear that, Doris? It’s bar-bar-ah, not buh-rbrah.

Just for fun, here are the names I’ve been called in the past:

• Pablo (thanks Starbucks)

• Bobol (?!)

• Whimsical (twice in one day)

• Flower-Girl (as opposed to Produce-Girl. Long story.)

• Canadian (for my accent?)

• Turkish (because I mentioned knafeh)

• A shark (I still don’t understand why)

• Histrionic (by a drunk dude at a Beach Party)

• A magic 8ball (in terms of accuracy or lack thereof)

• Not transcendental enough (according to my flatmate in Bologna)

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Directly from the archives, please enjoy this authentic photographic evidence (mostly) dated back to 2015, when these events took place:

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Culture shock is something only cool people experience...

Every day is La Dolce Vita if you’re Italian and unemployed

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10304312.2023.2253382#abstract

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Australians