In her small, immaculate home in Fremantle, Western Australia, Antonina Miragliotta, 100, is surrounded by cherished objects and knick knacks collected over a long life: delicate china crockery, crystal decanters, ballroom dancing trophies and photographs of her sprawling clan, including two daughters, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Her most treasured possession, however, is easy to overlook. It’s a small timber child’s chair, streaked by age and wear, made for her fourth birthday by her father Salvatore from wood scraps salvaged in the family backyard exactly ninety-six years ago.
Nina's home is filled with memories and family love Source: Jarrad Seng
This little chair has been Miragliotta’s constant companion for over nine decades of life. It followed her through marriage as a teen bride in 1937, through motherhood, and now into great old age. Before she got a stepladder, she used to stand on it to reach items high up in kitchen cupboards, she says. These days, she sits on it outside while watering the garden when her legs get tired. “When I look at that chair, I always remember my dad,” she says. “He was one of the best men you can think of. Family was first, always, everything else was second.
“This chair, it’s a rickety old chair but it’s got lovely memories, I look at it and think of how he made the chair for me. It’s a big thing. Today, people would think it’s not worth looking at but to me, it’s worth everything.”
Born in a small town called Capo d’Orlando near Messina, Italy, to Salvatore and Carmela Cicerello on January 9, 1921, Miragliotta arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia with her mother aged nine months. The sea was in the family’s blood. Her grandfather was the first generation to lay roots in Fremantle, arriving in 1895 and working as a fisherman. Her father would continue the seafaring tradition on his own boat many years later while a cousin, Steve, would go on to found a family fishing dynasty, the iconic Fremantle seafood business Cicerello’s in 1903.
Nina is surrounded by treasured knick knacks but the most priceless to her is a chair her father built her 96 years ago Source: Jarrad Seng
Life for Miragliotta and her siblings – she has a younger sister, Mica, age 96, still alive but with dementia; her brother died 12 years ago at 82 – was all about simple pleasures. They walked every day to the local state school, went with their mother to the corner shops, and to the movies at the Princess Theatre every Saturday with their father, a weekly treat. “I used to love seeing the pictures.”
They raised chickens in the backyard, ate fresh crayfish from Salvatore’s winter fishing trips, and enjoyed a simple home life: singalongs around the piano, family picnics. The family celebrated Christmas and Easter, birthdays and anniversaries with big family feasts that her mother would organise. If the weather was good, the whole clan would go to Rottnest or to Garden Island on the family boat. “We loved each other,” Miragliotta says simply.
Looking back now, from the vantage point of her long life, she is struck by how happy her childhood was despite how few truly valuable physical possessions they had. Today’s culture of materialism astonishes her: our endless acquisition of shiny commodities from iPhones to expensive cars is leading us down the wrong path, she believes. Life in her working-class immigrant neighbourhood was about people, not things: true value lay in shared experiences, the bonds of family, and the kinship of loved ones.
Nina and her granddaughter Emily Source: Jarrad Seng
A physical object became cherished not for its price tag but only for the way it embodied the spirit of its owner or maker. This is what she still loves, she says, the way a humble everyday item can bring lost loved ones to life. It’s why she could never part with the little chair her father made for her. To her, it evokes his scent, voice, his work-roughened fisherman’s hands as he laboriously carved the wood into a gift for his daughter when home from the sea. It triggers memories of going to the movies with him, sharing meals around the family table, the musical flow of his native Sicilian accent.
It symbolises other intangible things too – roots and anchors, so crucial for an immigrant family in a new land, her father’s work ethic and love for craft, his steadfastness and strength when her mother was critically ill with pre-eclampsia while pregnant with her sister, his devotion for his family, the love for his children. There is something comforting in knowing the chair was bespoke, homemade, crafted just for her, not her two siblings. “To think of that, to know he thought of me when he was making it, that is very special to me.”
Far more valuable physical things – at least if measured by price – would come and go over Miragliotta’s long life: her much-loved late husband Salvatore’s first boat The Canberra, built by hand shortly before the arrival of their first daughter Nunziata in 1939; the luxurious silk stockings that would arrive via air mail from her husband’s American customers, a Brooklyn firm called Balastiere, as a gift for her (“though I never wore them because I was so frightened I would tear them”); the shiny new car she proudly drove off the showroom floor as the first Italian immigrant woman to drive in Fremantle, a memorable feat at a time when only doctors had cars in this coastal city.
Nina uses her chair to water her Fremantle garden Source: Jarrad Seng
It was a far more materially comfortable life than she had growing up thanks to her husband’s flourishing crayfishing business – he was the first in Fremantle to export crayfish, then not popular locally, to the US and France – but she never lost her attachment to her father’s chair and its rich trove of associated memories. To her, it embodies her father’s soul and spirit in a way far greater than a two-dimensional photograph.
Still doing her own gardening, and living in her own home next door to her daughter, she’s keenly aware of a crucial milestone. On January 9 this year, Miragliotta celebrated her centenary in style with a gala dinner at the Crown Towers Ballroom: think Abba impersonators, 150 guests from all over the country, and even professional ballroom dancers.
It was a wonderful day, but old age has a way of simplifying needs and goals as much as it does a desire for material luxuries. The key luxury for her is time.
“My mother and grandmother lived to 102, seven months and two weeks, exactly the same. My grandson from Sydney rang me up and told me he went to see a clairvoyant a while back - he said, nana, the clairvoyant told me to tell you you're going to get your wish. What is your wish? And I said my wish was to die the same day and at the same age as my mother and grandmother, so there will be the three of us all together.” She chuckles.
With that, she’ll finally be happy to leave her cherished chair behind, passing it on to the next generation as a coveted family heirloom. “My daughter, the younger one, says, mum, when you pass away, I’m going to be the owner of that chair.”
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Nina's Fremantle home is frozen in time and she potters in her kitchen, surrounded by the furniture she bought when she first moved in Source: Jarrad Seng
