I used to write a lot about my mother until one day she ordered me to stop. “You can write about me when I’m dead,” she said.
During Mum’s final months, I’d arrive at her house and invariably find her sitting in her chair, a cup of tea going cold beside her, watching yet another documentary about Mussolini.
“You know, El, they never mention Mario Abbiezzi,” she’d say. “He was there when they got Mussolini, but they never mention him.” She would grow indignant on his behalf, as though history had committed an injustice.
His story was one of her favourites, and, now that she is dead and I am free to write about her, I keep returning to it.
In 1949, a 42-year-old Italian boarded the Sebastiano Caboto in Genoa, bound for Australia. Mario Abbiezzi’s arrival in Sydney later that year didn’t make the newspapers, but it was noticed at the Italo-Australian Club in George Street. No doubt it was also noticed at ASIO, Australia’s premier spy agency, which had been formed that year.
Abbiezzi, a Milanese, joined the Italian Communist Party when he was 18. Jailed for four years by Mussolini’s fascist government in the 1930s, he commanded one of the communist-led Garibaldi Brigades, the largest of the partisan groups that fought the fascist and Nazi armies during World War II. In this role, Abbiezzi reportedly performed the act for which he was most famous: ordering the capture and the execution of Mussolini.
By the time he got to Australia, Abbiezzi was a hero among left-wing Italian migrants. Before long, he was secretary of the Italo-Australian Club and editor of the weekly radical newspaper, Il Risveglio (“The Awakening”), while living in the inner working-class suburb of Glebe, along with many postwar Italian migrants.
At the paper, he met a bright young woman who was working as a translator and writer. She was half his age. They began a relationship. That young woman, Maria Varrenti, was my mother.
Fifteen years ago, my mother left Melbourne and moved to Castlemaine, the Victorian town where I had been living with my young son. She didn’t want to live in the country, but she wanted to live near us, as my younger sister, Lizzie, had died suddenly and Mum was now rearing her baby son. It was a brutal time. But my mother’s pragmatism, and her single-minded commitment to her late-daughter’s child, somehow kept the grief from completely taking her over. She was 77.
On our regular morning walks in the town’s Botanical Gardens, we resumed our endless, fast and sometimes furious conversation. Amid chat about politics and books, friends and parenting, her two grandsons and her latest score at the op shop, we talked about men. About failed marriages, love gone wrong, bad choices. I had more experiences to relate, but hers generally had more dignity born of restraint than mine. And she talked about her love affair with Mario Abbiezzi when she was in her early 20s and a passionate communist.
The daughter of a mother from Tuscany and a father from Foggia, Mum grew up in inner Melbourne’s Fitzroy. When she was 18, she married an Italian immigrant, Hector Varrenti. “Our families knew each other, so I thought I could trust him, and I have to admit, he was charismatic,” she said. She also wanted to leave home, and marriage was the only way to do it.
In 1950, Hector and Maria joined the Australian Communist Party. A year later, my mother was chosen to travel in the party’s delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, a gathering of Soviet-aligned organisations attended in later years by such notables as Angela Davis, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela and Vladimir Putin. “But your father kicked up such a fuss I let him go instead,” Mum said. “It wasn’t worth an argument, and anyway it meant more to him than to me.”
It was probably a good choice on her part. Mao Zedong had just conquered China, the Cold War in Europe and the hot war in Korea were in full swing, and Australian prime minister Robert Menzies was holding a referendum to ban the Communist Party. It failed, but “Menzies hated us,” Mum told me. “It was a scary time, extreme scrutiny and vigilance, particularly towards migrants with left-wing beliefs.” When my father got back from Berlin, the government confiscated his passport.
“Your father thrived on the drama of it all,” she said. “And he was always more ideological than me and loved a good fight.”
They divorced after two years of marriage. Divorce was unheard of for an Italian girl in those days. So was my mother’s next move: to leave teaching, resign from the education department and shift to Sydney after the party found her a job on Il Risveglio, where she translated articles and speeches, shifting between languages and the party’s Italian and Australian arms. She visited factories and wharves, speaking to the Italian workers, urging them to join their union. “They had to stand me up on top of boxes, I was so short,” she told me.
There, she was paid a man’s wage. “The newspaper even found me a little flat to live in with a couple of Italian models. They were small, like me, so we could share clothes.”
And she loved to dance. Every Saturday night, the party held dances to raise money and, on one of those nights, she danced with the Soviet official who, in 1954, would make world news as a defector: Vladimir Petrov.
“He was a real pig, El,” she said. “And a terrible dancer.”
I imagine Mum working with Mario Abbiezzi late into the night at the office of Il Risveglio, translating and editing his articles as fast as he could recite them. Perhaps, once they’d put the paper to bed, they went for a drink at the famous Piccolo Bar in Kings Cross. Mario worked hard, he was smart and he was attractive in his immaculate suits, swept-back hair and black-rimmed glasses. And he had been a famous partisan, after all.
“Did you ever dance with Mario, Mum?”
“Oh yes. But he was reserved, not showy. He preferred to wander around the club talking politics to people, making them feel welcome.”
In December 1952, Mario approached Maria uncharacteristically agitated. The Australian government had refused the renewal of his visa; he was to be deported in two months. He had already been denied permanent residence as a member of a “communist-penetrated organisation and a financial contributor to a communist publication”. On getting this latest letter, Mario fled to Darwin, where he was arrested and then locked up in Sydney’s Long Bay jail, according to a report by the Glebe Society.
News of his arrest spread quickly. The Italo-Australian Club created a “Defence of Mario Abbiezzi Committee”; a petition opposing his deportation collected up to 10,000 signatures. “We worked day and night,” Mum told me. Trade unions, the ACTU, and trades and labour councils in three states lobbied on his behalf, as did Victorian senator Don Cameron and 17 other federal MPs. The Italian ambassador to Australia, Dr Silvio Daneo, also asked the immigration department to drop the deportation proceedings, which was perhaps surprising, given that the ruling Italian party, the Christian Democrats, was fiercely anti-communist.
I am not sure when Mum’s relationship with Mario ended. Was it during this campaign? Mum was never entirely clear as to when or why.
Mario had wanted her to accompany him to Darwin; she didn’t go. Then, presumably after his release from jail, he asked her to come with him to Canberra to lobby officials to change their decision. This time she agreed. But when she got to the airport, she saw him in the distance – with another woman. She turned around and went home. She didn’t even wait to find out who that woman was. She says she “just knew”. But I think she needed an excuse not to go with him because she was scared of what she’d got herself into. Had there been another woman? Children? None are mentioned in any records.
By that time, Mum was cooling on the Communist Party. Her dancing had attracted attention; she was called before a party commission to answer a charge of “frivolity” and to explain her father’s alleged spying activities. She was furious but also thought it ridiculous. The Soviet invasion of Hungary a few years later was only the final nail in the coffin; she had already begun her march away from communism to something she called “democratic socialism” and a lifetime commitment to the Labor Party.
Then, immigration minister Harold Holt, perhaps embarrassed at the attention the Abbiezzi campaign was generating and the unrest it was creating among Italian migrants, finally renewed Mario’s visa. But it was only in 1973, under the Whitlam government, that immigration minister Al Grassby granted him Australian citizenship.
Mario Abbiezzi remained publicly active. He helped found an Australian branch of the Italian Communist Party and edited another Italo-Australian workers’ paper, Il Nuovo Paese. He opened the Garibaldi Bar, a bohemian joint in East Sydney famous for its huge mural of Garibaldi on a white horse. From 1978, the first planning meetings for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras were held there.
After five years in Sydney, my mother went back home. The Victorian education department, though initially reluctant to reinstate her, given her affiliations with the Communist Party, eventually allowed her to teach again. Her ex-husband – my dad – had never given up trying to get her back, and they remarried in 1959, had two daughters, then divorced again eight years later. “I’m like Elizabeth Taylor,” she’d say. “We were both born in 1932, and we both married and divorced the same man twice.”
“You reckon Mario was the love of your life, Mum?”
“He was, El. He was the love of my life.”
In the mid 1990s, Mum called my sister Lizzie and me into the kitchen, brandishing her ASIO file, which she had just accessed. ASIO noted that, during Hector Varrenti’s absence at the Berlin youth festival, “his wife, Angela Maria Varrenti nee Sabatino came to notice”, and was later “conducting the Italian portion of some Union paper, name unknown, in Sydney”.
“‘Some union paper’?” Mum laughed. “They weren’t very good spies, were they?”
Lizzie had become steadily more radical than either of my parents had ever been, so she was thrilled. In 1991, she’d returned home with an ex-fighter pilot husband in tow, having fought with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. She then resumed her medical degree. Before she died in 2010, Lizzie obtained her own ASIO file and proudly observed its comparable heft.
Mum always said that Lizzie was the real revolutionary of the family, but, while she admired her courage, she was always scared stiff for her. So was I.
I don’t think she ever saw Mario again. Early in her second marriage to my father, she’d found a pretext to go to Sydney and went to the Garibaldi Bar, but Mario wasn’t there. She left no message.
Nearly 20 years later, she got a call. Mario was coming to Melbourne and he wanted to see her. “I said no,” she told me. “I just couldn’t see him. I don’t know why. I must have still been hurt or something. I don’t know… Let’s play cards.”
After Mum died, among her things I found a few short, neat letters written during her time in Sydney to her mother back in Melbourne. Sometimes she sounds lonely and overwhelmed. In one of them, from 1952, she begs her mother to visit her and come to “a big ball at the club” with Mario, adding that she has already found her mother a man to accompany her on the night. She goes on to say, “Mario bought me a lovely marcasite bracelet.”
I also found a photo. My grandmother Irma was just 17 years older than Mum, and the photo shows the three of them. On the back of the photo, written in Italian:
Dear Mario, I wish this photograph to testify to our affection and friendship. Maria.
Sydney, 7/11/52
All three are dressed up and standing in a foyer at the Italian Club. Mum is next to Mario. Both women look young and beautiful. Both are carrying black handbags and wearing gloves. Mum is wearing the marcasite bracelet Mario bought her. He is handsome, smoking a cigarette and smiling. My mother is leaning ever so slightly towards him.
This piece was first published in the June 2026 issue of The Monthly Magazine.
https://www.themonthly.com.au/june-2026/nation-reviewed/red-letter-days