Amanda Wells and Donata Carrazza tell the story of Anna DeVito, the inaugural Riverland Citrus Queen, and what her crowning reveals about gender, migration, and belonging in postwar Australia.
In 1927, a sixteen-year-old boy arrived in South Australia, unaccompanied and unable to speak English. Giosué (Joe) DeVito had travelled from Tufo, in the Campanian province of Avellino, to meet a father he had not seen in several years. He found work picking cherries in the Adelaide Hills, then made his way to Waikerie, where he spent the rest of his life building a fruit growing and packing business near the banks of the River Murray.
Thirty-four years later, in November 1961, another sixteen-year-old DeVito made her public debut. Joe’s daughter Anna had grown up working in her father’s packing shed. She was now the inaugural Riverland Citrus Queen, crowned in a region-wide competition sponsored by the area’s prime industry.
These two moments, separated by a generation and a world war, are the backdrop to Amanda’s article, ‘Citrus Queens: Selling Produce, Place and Gender in 1960s Riverland Communities’, recently published in Lilith: A Feminist History Journal .They are also the bookends of a family story.
In this blog, Anna DeVito’s daughter Donata Carrazza helps to tell this story, drawing on her own memories and those of her aunt Rita. Donata recalls the woman behind the sash: the introvert beneath the public poise, the worker beneath the ambassador, and the long life that followed the crown.
Anna DeVito’s story offers a way into the article’s core argument: that the Riverland Citrus Queen competition was a carefully managed space where migrant women could achieve a form of public recognition. Such recognition was only within the limits set by industry, ideals of femininity, and the politics of assimilation in postwar Australia.
Migrant Belonging
Between Joe’s arrival and Anna’s crowning came years of difficulty and persistence. When the Second World War broke out, the DeVitos were not interned, as some Italian families were, but they were surveilled. Donata’s aunt Rita recalls being told about authorities coming to the house to check on her grandfather and confiscating the family radio, presumably so the household could not follow news of the war.
The fear was real. Iolanda, Joe’s wife, remembered that other Italians had been taken to internment camps. Giosuè was spared, judged to be providing essential services: he ran a transport company, and the family grew and sold produce, including pumpkins, to the army. During those same years, Joe brought home a pianola for Iolanda, so that there was still music in the house, even while the radio had been removed.
The family had sold its oranges to an army that suspected them. Sixteen years on, Anna would present cases of Riverland oranges to the Lord Mayor of Melbourne on behalf of the Murray Citrus Growers’ Cooperative Association. Ironically, while the state had confiscated their radio during the war, Anna would later speak on the radio herself, as the voice of the industry her family had helped to build.
The First Citrus Queen
The Riverland Citrus Queen competition began in 1961, organised across five communities: Renmark, Loxton, Berri, Barmera and Waikerie. Unlike the town-based fundraising queens that preceded it, this one was explicitly tied to industry marketing, and it drew its judges from Adelaide’s social elite. The criteria emphasised poise, beauty and personality, positioning young women as ambassadors for a region consolidating its identity as a modern horticultural powerhouse.
Anna won her way up through the contest, first as Miss Waikerie and then as the Riverland Citrus Queen. Rita remembers the family gathering at the Loxton Hotel to hear the result, and the thrill of it, this being a new event for the region. Anna was gracious and, in Donata’s words, over the moon. She had been mentored beforehand by a local woman, Meredith Arnold, in etiquette and deportment, a detail that says a good deal about the competition itself. The poise the judges rewarded was not simply natural to the candidates. It was taught.
She was one of five contestants. The Murray Pioneer described Anna as a dark brunette with brown eyes, keen on basketball and dancing, and a Sunday School teacher. It also noted, almost in passing, that she worked in her father’s fruit packing shed. She was the only candidate whose description included manual labour, and that detail was acknowledged and then, in a sense, set aside.
As Citrus Queen, she appeared not as a packing shed worker but as a poised representative of regional prosperity, posing with a wheelbarrow of oranges at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne. There she was hosted by dignitaries and photographed with the cast of Oliver!.
For a young woman who had grown up in a Waikerie packing shed, it was, as Donata puts it, an experience that broadened her view of the world and what was possible.
Women in the Packing Sheds
The tension between the labour that sustained the citrus industry, and the femininity it publicly celebrated, is a central issue reflected in the Citrus Queens. Women were essential to citrus production in the Riverland. They graded, sorted and packed fruit in sheds across the region, and they came from everywhere.
A 1966 Murray Pioneer article reported women of at least ten nationalities working at the Riverland Fruit Products cannery at Berri, among them Polish, Greek, Italian, German, Yugoslavian, Fijian, English, New Zealand and Australian women. Two years later, an industry manager observed that real cost savings came through the skill of the girls. Yet this labour rarely appeared in promotional materials, which preferred idealised images of modern womanhood to images of work.
Anna knew that work in her body. Donata tells one story that captures this:
She had worked very hard in the family business, in the packing shed and at home. I recall a story in which she was throwing dip tins from the back of a semi-trailer to another person. The work was time-sensitive and intense. Her finger caught on sharp metal and ripped into it deeply. It was a wound worthy of stitches, but the work took precedence and she just kept going, tending to it later.
This is the labour the competition acknowledged, and then declined to look at directly. What the Citrus Queens offered was something more complicated than straightforward assimilation. Anna’s selection did not require her to disavow her Italian heritage or her family’s place in the industry. It embedded that heritage within a regional story of economic contribution and civic participation.
This was a kind of soft assimilation, one that sidestepped the totalising ambitions of national policy by locating migrant women within industry and place, rather than erasing their cultural and economic contributions. Later queens, including Vera Lukic and Brigitte Lazarevic in the later 1960s—both daughters of immigrant parents—were celebrated in similar terms. Their backgrounds were acknowledged while their alignment with expectations of femininity and community service was kept firmly in view.
After the Crown
Anna’s public life did not end with her title. In 1962 she was entered in the Miss South Australia Quest competition. She married Don Carrazza, moved to Mildura, and there built a life that drew on everything the packing shed and her Citrus Queen title had taught her.
Donata is clear that her mother was never simply the poised figure of the 1961 photographs. She was an introvert who was good in public but preferred her own company and her privacy. Later in life, with Anna’s husband well known in Mildura, she sometimes felt she had to retreat from public visibility. Marriage, Donata says, gave Anna a sense of independence and freedom that she embraced. She was a fine match for her husband’s entrepreneurial ambition.
Together they developed a string of Mildura hospitality businesses, among them the Mary Elizabeth, the Gelato Bar, Dominic’s, Piccola Italia and the Mildura Grand Hotel. Their success, in Donata’s account, rested on Anna’s organisational skill, her attention to detail, and her capacity for intense physical work. These were the same capacities that had once made her, as Donata recalls, miles ahead of everyone else when the family picked grapes or packed plums.
She kept reskilling all her life, taking up gardening, tennis, yoga, ceramics and macrame. She sent her own daughters to dance and elocution classes, passing on the accomplishment she had once been coached in herself. She was an excellent cook and a fine host.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s the family found itself in the spotlight again, when Donata’s then husband, the chef Stefano de Pieri, ran an award-winning restaurant in the Grand Hotel and fronted the ABC series A Gondola on the Murray. Anna appeared in one segment, showing him how to cook eggplant parmigiana. She worked as the hotel’s main buyer and arranged still life displays for its functions. The Italian heritage that drew suspicion in wartime, had become, four decades on, something to celebrate on national television. Anna, who had been coached to perform poise for a panel of Adelaide judges, ended up teaching a celebrated chef how to make a dish from her own kitchen.
Those who knew Anna remember her as warm, generous, and a little cheeky. She died peacefully at home on 23 December 2018, in her seventy-fourth year.
Remembering the Citrus Queens
Joe DeVito arrived as a sixteen-year-old with no English and a father he barely knew. His daughter left Waikerie at sixteen with a sash and a wheelbarrow of oranges, and went on to build a life of her own making.
The distance between those two departures tells us something about how belonging was made in postwar regional Australia: carefully, conditionally, and always in relation to what you could produce.
What the archive cannot quite show us, and what Anna’s family can, is the woman who lived inside that public story, and went on living long after the sash was folded away.
Dr Amanda Wells (she/her) is an environmental historian and Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania on the ARC-funded project Our Blue Backyard: A History of Australian Cities and Marine Environments. She completed her PhD at the University of Newcastle in 2025, examining citrus agriculture, settler colonialism and multispecies entanglements in South Australia’s Riverland, and continues as a sessional academic there. She also works as a Student Success and Engagement Mentor at the Barossa Regional University Campus, supporting students in regional South Australia to access and thrive in higher education. Her research spans environmental humanities, agricultural history, more-than-human history, and the history of science. She lives and works in the Barossa Valley, South Australia, on Ngadjuri Country.
Donata Carrazza is Anna DeVito’s daughter. Donata is a founding member and former artistic director of the Mildura Writers Festival, which celebrated 30 years in 2025. She has extensive experience in hospitality and an abiding commitment to the arts. Her work includes roles as gallery owner and curator, writer, teacher of English to migrants, bookshop owner and body worker. She has served on boards in Mildura and Melbourne, including six years with the State Library of Victoria. In 2025 she was the recipient of the University of Melbourne’s Dean of Arts Alumni Leadership Award. She has two children, Domenico and Claudia, and a granddaughter, Maia.
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