Faella Phil

Phil Faella came to Rowville in 1945 following a serious farm accident in Western Victoria. Little did he realise then that he would spend most of the rest of his life here and in nearby Wantirna. The Rowville P.O.W. Camp was basically a transit depot for prisoners as they were moved from one place to another in the State. However Phil was to spend almost two years at the camp before he was one of the last of the inmates to be repatriated to Italy in early 1947.

Phil is Called Up into the Army

Phil was born in 1917 in the little village of Pagliara near the town of Benevento, 80 kilometres inland from Naples. He was the fourth of eight children of Peter and Josephine Faella. The family owned about ten acres and leased some other land on which Peter grew maize, wheat and tobacco. The family lived on the farm during summer but moved back to live in the village when winter came. Everyone was very poor and Phil remembered that there was no money to buy school books. The one-teacher school itself was poorly equipped: there was no heating and no toilets. If the pupils needed to go to the toilet they had to run home.

Phil left school at the end of the third grade which was the usual fate of poor children in those days. When he was a little boy one of his daily tasks was to take the family’s sheep and goats out to graze. His father milked the goats and made cheese with the milk. As Phil grew older he was taught to use a hoe to keep the crops free of weeds. Later he became a builder with his older brother until at the age of 21 he received his call-up papers from the Army. After a week at an army depot, he joined dozens of other young conscripts aboard ship on his way to a training camp at Derna in Libya.

At War in Libya

After six months basic training in Derna, Phil was assigned to an engineering unit in Benghazi where he dug trenches in the rocky desert ground with a pick and shovel. He also installed barbed wire entanglements and laid mines. When the unit had finished at Benghazi they were moved on to Tobruk and Bardia where they continued the same back-breaking and dangerous work. The next big job was the building of the road between Salum and Sidi Barrani. This road was to become the scene of incredible military activity over the following two years as allied and axis armies alternately advanced and retreated along its length.

Phil was stationed at the aerodrome at Tobruk when Italy came into the war on the side of Germany on 10th June 1940. Within hours British planes appeared in the sky and bombed the port and aerodrome. After many months of wretched duty in the desert, Phil was part of the retreat when thousands of Italian soldiers walked for three days without food or water along the beach towards Bardia where they were finally surrounded and made prisoners. They were put on ships to Alexandria and after three weeks they were moved on to a big camp close to Suez. Life was very miserable there. They were crowded into tents, were given little food and were covered with lice. Many of the prisoners became ill but Phil stayed well though very weak. After three months the P.O.Ws were back on ship, this time bound for Bombay in India. They stayed near the city for a few months before moving to Bhopal.

Bound for Australia

In September 1943 Phil was on the move again by train back to Bombay where he was one of 500 prisoners crowded aboard an American ship, the “Uruguay”, en route to Australia. The ship was part of a small convoy of four ships – two troop ships carrying the prisoners and two naval escort ships. They were only at sea for a few days when the escort ships left them and Phil recalled that the prisoners were scared knowing that Japanese submarines would be operating in the shipping lanes between India and Australia. The voyage, however, passed without incident and Phil remembered the weeks he spent aboard the “Uruguay” as the best time of all his years spent in captivity. The captain was a generous man who allowed the prisoners to go anywhere they liked on the ship. And the food was wonderful!

The ship sailed through the Great Australian Bight and straight on to Sydney, arriving in the harbour on 23rd October 1943. They marched off the ship with their packs onto a train that took them to Cowra. On arrival they were issued with their P.O.W. uniform which was similar to that worn by Australian soldiers but instead of being khaki the colour was a distinctive dark red.

Conditions were all right in the Cowra camp and the internees were often out of the camp picking tomatoes or cutting wood on the nearby farms. After three months Phil was sent to Murchinson in Victoria and so was not in Cowra at the time the Japanese P.O.Ws made their mass escape that cost so many lives. After five months in Murchinson Phil was told to pack up his kit again to travel to the tiny township of Condah located south of Hamilton in the Western District.

Sent to Rowville after a Farm Accident

Life on the dairy farm some miles out of Condah was pretty boring for Phil and his two prisoner companions, Sammy Parizi and Mick Montenegri, except for Sundays when they were taken to the village to attend Mass and so had the opportunity to meet other Italians assigned to farms in the district. Phil only remembered the farmer and his wife as Mr and Mrs Baker. He didn’t know their Christian names because they only ever addressed each other as “Mum” and “Dad”.

Later Phil went to another farm at Coleraine owned by Mr Banks and it was there that he was injured. While cutting grass hay Phil made the mistake of trying to remove a stick jammed in the teeth of the cutters. When he did, the machine sprang to life amputating his right index finger. He spent three weeks in Hamilton Hospital before returning briefly to Murchison. He was put on the train once more, this time heading for the transit camp at Rowville, from where he expected to be sent off to another farm. However, except for one brief foray to Warragul, he was to spend the rest of his time as a detainee in Australia at Rowville.

Life at the Rowville P.O.W. Camp

The number of prisoners varied between 200 and 250 and there were always men coming and going, some of them spending only one night there.

As a permanent inmate of the camp Phil was put in a hut which was better accommodation than the tents that the prisoners in transit were billeted in. Twenty men lived in each hut and about twelve in each tent. He was given a palliasse (a big hessian bag filled with straw) for a mattress but had to search around for some timber to construct a bed for himself. The men were only issued with two blankets so on the cold Rowville winter nights they wore all their clothes to bed as well. The huts were unheated and unlined and on frosty nights the condensation would drip down on them from the tin roof. However, the huts did have wooden floors so Phil and his mates did not have to suffer the flooding during heavy rains that the tent dwellers did.

“Lights Out” was at 10 o’clock after a roll call. The next morning they were called out of bed at 7.00am and ate breakfast in the big mess hut that seated over 200.

After that the prisoners were lined up in their work groups and the Captain did a head count before they were driven off in trucks to work sites. Most of them travelled each day to the railway yards at East Oakleigh (now Huntingdale Railway Station) where the majority loaded and unloaded railway trucks. They got on well with the Australian truck drivers and taught them to play an Italian card game called Setto Mezzo (Seven and a half) which had rules similar to Blackjack.

At the camp they were mainly organised by their own officers; the only Australians were the camp commander Captain Waterson, a sergeant, a few other soldiers and a civilian interpreter. There was a guardhouse up at the entry from Stud Road (near the present intersection with Timbertop Drive) but the fence around the camp had only a few strands of wire and the prisoners could have walked out at any time if they had wanted to. Security wasn’t a big issue although the prisoners knew that they had to obey certain rules. They were not allowed to go beyond where Wellington Road (to the west) and Stud Road (to the south) cross Dandenong Creek. To the north, the limit was Corhanwarrabul Creek and to the east, the quarries. They were not to go to anyone’s home nor were they supposed to speak to anybody they met on the roads. If they were caught breaking the rules they could be sent to the guardhouse for up to 28 days.

Phil in the Guard House

There was a prison cell at the guardhouse and there was always someone in it. After his hand healed Phil was sent to a potato farm in Warragul but the conditions were bad and he refused to stay there. He was returned to Rowville and sentenced to seven days in the guardhouse on bread and water. It didn’t work out too badly though because his mates looked after him. They collected food from the cooks and passed it through the bars of the cell window to him. The cooks were prisoners too and they were given plentiful supplies of pasta so were able to prepare Italian-style meals.

The men made sure that the fruit scraps from the kitchen such as banana skins and bruised grapes were not thrown out but carefully put into clean bins which were then taken well away from the camp and hidden among the trees lining the bank of Dandenong Creek. After a time the fermented mash would be ready for distilling which, of course, had to be done secretly. The men used to keep their bottles of grappa hidden on ledges at the tops of the walls of the huts until one night when Captain Waterson found a bottle of the potent brew and confiscated it. He was known to enjoy a drink and didn’t make a fuss about his discovery.

There were lots of occupations represented among the prisoners. As well as cooks, one was a barber, another a doctor and there were also a couple of male nurses. These men ran the camp clinic. An Italian priest who was also a P.O.W. came once a month to say Mass in the mess hut and the sergeant made sure that all of them attended. The priest also brought them copies of the Italian language newspaper “Angelo della Famiglia”. They were able to write to their families in Italy and were always very happy when mail arrived although it took about six months between sending a letter and receiving a reply.

Apart from playing cards, their favourite recreation was soccer which was played on a pitch they had levelled with picks and shovels in the area of the present S.E.C. station.

A Death in the Camp

The prisoners were paid one shilling and threepence a day with coins that were specially minted for use in the detention camps. The coins were similar to the penny, threepence, sixpence and shilling coins but all had holes through their centres to indicate that they were not normal currency. In the camp there was a small canteen where the prisoners could use these coins to buy things like lollies, razor blades and toothpaste. A free ration of five cigarettes per day was funded by the Italian government and they could buy one packet of cigarettes and half a packet of ready-rubbed tobacco each week. The canteen was run by a young prisoner named Rudolph Bartoli whose life was tragically cut short in a incident that has never been satisfactorily explained.

Phil remembered the incident occurred while almost everybody was eating the evening meal in the mess hut. A shot was heard outside and soon afterwards Captain Waterson ordered two of the men to carry a badly injured prisoner to the clinic. When these men returned to the mess hut to tell the others what had happened there was an angry reaction and the prisoners gathered shouting outside the Captain’s office. Shortly afterwards an ambulance arrived followed by a squad of armed police. When the prisoners continued their protests, the police fired shots into the air and then into the ground in front of the prisoners’ feet. Eventually they were all forced back into their huts and tents. The young man died in hospital that night. This tragic incident occurred in 1946, well after the end of the war so actually the men were no longer P.O.W.s but alien nationals awaiting repatriation to Italy. Captain Waterson was removed from his command at the camp and was reprimanded at a subsequent court martial but never faced police charges.

Back to Italy

In December 1946 Phil finally left Rowville and spent a few weeks at Watsonia and Broadmeadows camps before sailing back to Italy aboard the Lorondes. He was never again to meet any of the men he had spent time with in the camp at Rowville.

He was one of 150 Italians and there were a similar number of German soldiers aboard. After arriving in Naples he spent the night at an army depot and the next morning was told that he was free to go home. His family had not been told of his homecoming so when Phil walked in after seven years absence there was an emotional reunion.

He went to work with his brother as a builder but times were very hard. He had met and fallen for Maria Iscaro, a girl from a neighbouring village and he could see no future for them if they remained in Italy.

Return to Rowville

Phil wrote to George Leeworthy, a Rowville farmer who had an Italian wife and who had befriended Phil when he was at the camp. George had told Phil that he would sponsor him if he ever wanted to return to Australia. George paid for Phil’s flight and in 1949 he arrived back in Rowville. He lived on George’s farm where Stud Park Shopping Centre is now located and worked there growing sprouts, cabbages and peas for six pounds a week. For two years out of that six pounds he paid back three pounds ten shillings a week for his air fare but still managed to save enough to pay for Maria’s voyage out in 1950.

Phil and Maria were married at St George’s Church in Carlton. George let them live in a shed at the back of his sawmill in Stud Road just south of Corhanwarrabul Creek. Unfortunately the shed burnt down with all of their possessions including their photographs. They found accommodation with a Mr Foster in Wantirna who rented them two rooms in his house for ten shillings a week. Eventually they bought land for market gardening in Cathies Lane and gradually turned a shed into a house in which to raise their four children Angelina, Peter, Tony and Anna.

Phil worked as a market gardener into his 60s and then with the CRB for six years. When his son Tony bought a service station in Bayswater, Phil went to work with him and did not finally retire until 1995 at the age of 78.

Interviewed by Bryan Power

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 From FAELLA (04 Apr 2005)