For the first 66 years and  50 days of my life …

My name’s Barry Carozzi. I was born on June 8, 1943. At least, I think I was. That’s what my birth certificate says. According to that document, my mother was Linda Robina May Carozzi (nee Kipping), and my father was Herbert Garibaldi Carozzi.

Linda Kipping was born in Casterton in the Western District of Victoria on October 26, 1907.She was the eldest girl in a family of seven. Her father, Bill Kipping, had been a coach driver. His father – John Kipping – had migrated to Australia from England in the 1860s. Henry Kipping (my grandfather’s grandfather) had migrated to Australia almost a decade before – in 1854. Henry was a shepherd. Prior to their migration, the Kippings had lived in Enfield, near London, so that side of my family was English.

My mother, Linda,  spent most of her childhood and adolescence in Hamilton. She left school after Form 3 (Year 9 in modern parlance) and worked in the town as a salesgirl until she moved to Melbourne in the late 1920s. When she reached ‘the Big Smoke’ she lived in Coburg and worked as a domestic with a wealthy family named French. Old Victor French was Coburg’s best known dentist, and his two sons followed in their father’s footsteps.

It was at a dance in Coburg that she met my father: Herbert Garibaldi Carozzi – Garrie for short. He had been born in Coburg on November 1, 1905. His mother, Caterina Carozzi (nee Mazza), was the daughter of an Italian migrant – Gianna Mazza, and his father, Annibale Carozzi, had migrated to Australia in the late 1880s. They had 8 children – four of them in the 1890s, and another four in the new century. Caterina and Annibale married in 1900, but Annibale died in 1912, when my father was just 7. So my father’s family was predominantly Italian.

I say predominantly because my great grandfather, Gianni Mazza, married a woman named Margaret Burnside. They met and lived in Daylesford. Margaret’s  father, Alexander Burnside, was a Scotsman. He died in 1884, at the age of 60; his death certificate gives the cause of death as ‘general debility’. According to family lore, his ‘debility’ was a result of his life long addiction to alcohol; according to my Uncle Arthur (my father’s brother), Sandy Burnside drank half a bottle of whisky every day!