In 1981 Rosa R. Cappiello published Paese Fortunato: Romanzo; written in Italian, the semi-autobiographical novel was based on her experience as a migrant factory worker. Following her arrival in Australia, Cappiello had often faced the hardship of unemployment and discrimination while working in Sydney's clothing factories. As a result, her novel confrontingly depicts the 'abject living conditions' and 'exploitation of migrant women workers' on the factory floor. (Source: Rando, 'Introduction', Oh Lucky Country)
Translated into English by Gaetano Rando (q.v.), Paese Fortunato was (re-)published in 1984 with the title Oh Lucky Country. 'Unremittingly angry and scatological, the novel is...in Cappiello's own words, "a tragi-comic interpretation extracted from the primitive and stagnant chaos of the migrant experience". Received warmly in Italy, the novel aroused protests in Australia from sections of the Italian community, dismayed by the language, the explicit presentation of heterosexual and homosexual activity and concentration on the exploitation of women workers in migrant-run Sydney factories. The novel is a scathing indictment of Australian attitudes, especially of the nation's philistinism, but it is also a denunciation of the old country, which has imposed migration on the migrant, of its remnants in the host country, which exploit newly arrived compatriots, and of the rigid patterns of male dominance in both cultures. At the novel's close, the group of immigrant women from different backgrounds, whose experiences are its subject, are in much the same case as at their arrival; there is no escaping the trap of poverty and "difference". Drawing on European traditions, especially the commedia dell'arte and a Neapolitan folk tradition of caricature, Cappiello delights in subversion and comic disruption: "Through writing I often feel the exhilarating sensation of breaking with society, and disrupting its rules, regulations and mediocre values." Much of this freedom is achieved by an exuberant use of language in a virtuoso performance, which counters to some extent the powerlessness and plotless lives of its central characters.' (Source: The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 1994)
Although published (in Italy) several years after she immigrated to Australia, Cappiello's first work, the novella I Semi neri [The Black Seeds] (1977), was substantially written while the author was still living in Naples.
