FG Fantin: the life & times of an Italo-Australian anarchist 1901-42.

Abstract

This thesis is inspired by the historical principles of RG Collingwood, an historiographer whose precepts are recurrently cited herein. It is the life and times style biography of Francesco Giovanni Fantin, born San Vito de Leguzzano in the Schio district of the Province of Vicenza in the Veneto region of Italy 20 January 1901, died Loveday Internment Camp Compound 14A, South Australia 16 November 1942. SA police at the time found that Fantin was assassinated by fascist conspirators who contrived to intimidate witnesses and interfere with material evidence, (findings here confirmed) frustrating the laying of a charge of murder and leading in March 1943 to the sentencing of Giovanni Casotti to two years hard labour for manslaughter in the Supreme Court of South Australia. (Casotti was subsequently deported.) This thesis begins with the reconstruction of Fantin’s origins in one of the rural crucibles of Italian capitalism and industrialism. The presence of anarchist traditions in the Province and in Fantin’s immediate circle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is documented. The history of the Great War, the Red Biennium and the Rise of Fascism in the Schio district is then reconstructed in connection with Fantin’s formative years, with particular reference to the role of the textile strike of 1921 as the precursor to the political and mass emigration from the district to Australia of which Fantin was a humble protagonist. Fantin’s years as an antifascist activist in exile in Australia are then rehearsed as an essential prerequisite for understanding why he was selected for assassination. The thesis closes with a detailed reconstruction of how his death was encompassed and its political implications managed by Dr HV Evatt. An Iconographic Appendix and Bibliography follow.