Susan Jenkings was talkative even as a young child. She is described by her brother as having a ‘happy disposition’, notably creative, but also quite mischievous. Richard Jenkings glows with pride when he talks about his younger sister: ‘I’ve always thought of Sue as someone with a lot of ideas. Even as a teenager she was quite entrepreneurial, and we didn’t come from a family where entrepreneurial behaviour was natural. We came from a family where we were given good values, a sense of morality, strength of character and a strong work ethic’.
According to Richard, Sue wanted to do a hell of a lot very quickly: ‘She always wanted to have a lot of fun. And she wanted to ask a lot of questions. She wanted to do things her way, but they were always good things’.
Sue was persuasive, using her verbal skills to talk her big brother into leaving home with her when she was barely a toddler. Richard says, ‘She would have been just over eighteen months old and I was about three. We had a doll’s pram and Sue could fit in it. She climbed in, told me where to take her, and had me wheeling it across an open field away from home. Mum and Dad found us and asked what was going on! Sue had said to me, “Come on, we’re going!”’
For the Jenkings family in 1950s Melbourne, living on one income was not penury, but there wasn’t much left for frivolity. John ‘Jack’ Jenkings and Aileen Molyneux first met in Sydney and initially settled in the rural Victorian town of Bairnsdale, where Aileen’s family lived. In May 1947, when the couple’s first-born, Richard, was fifteen months old, baby Susan was born. Not long after Aileen had recovered from the birth, the young family moved to Melbourne and settled in Ashwood, at that time an outer-eastern suburb, 20 kilometres from the metropolitan centre.
The working middle class that, then as now, made up the bulk of Australia’s population mainly lived in a suburban fringe characterised by low-slung brick-veneer bungalows. Its wide streets were lined with gum trees planted on ‘nature strips’ between the concrete pedestrian pathway and the bitumen road. Sue’s experience was slightly different. She grew up in a housing commission estate of concrete-panel homes that were mass-produced in the 1950s and 1960s. These estates sprung up in previously undeveloped outer areas, built to relieve the chronic housing shortage of those postwar times. Vacant land in Ashwood and the adjacent suburbs of Jordanville and Alamein, which surrounded the World War II tank factory in Holmesglen, were prime areas for development of the estate concept—the old concrete tank factory was itself converted into houses.
The state of Victoria was home to blazing hot, dry summers and chilly wet winters. Quiet suburban backstreets were filled with children in summer, playing cricket until the shout of ‘Car!’ cleared the road, the kids retreating to the nature strip to let the vehicle pass. In winter it was kick-to-kick with an Aussie Rules football, particularly after the Saturday league games, where those lucky enough to attend could indulge in a hot meat pie, its pastry lid covered in tomato sauce.
The Jenkings family embodied the Australian stereotype of the era—politically conservative, with a positive outlook and a fundamental appreciation of their good fortune. Their sense of gratitude coexisted with a pioneering ‘Aussie battler’ mentality.
In the mid-1960s, Saturday nights for the seventeen-year-old Sue and her older brother were often spent at local ballroom dances in suburban Melbourne: Heidelberg, Hawthorn, Moorabbin. It was at one such dance that a successful partnership in life, love and business began. Sue was an attractive and confident young lady with a sparkling sense of fun and a rock-solid set of moral values. The charismatic young man with the eye-catching good looks typical of northern Italians was an excellent ballroom dancer. They hit it off.
‘I remember seeing Angelo,’ Sue says, ‘then someone else asked me to dance. I sat down and then Angelo asked me to dance. I remember thinking, “You don’t say very much. Is something wrong?” Then I realised he hardly spoke English’.
Sue’s life adventures would become inextricably entwined with those of young immigrant Angelo Alberti from that point. However, having been raised in a typically conservative Australian family, with Welsh heritage on her policeman father’s side and her homemaker mother having English and French roots, Sue initially faced the slightly daunting prospect of introducing her new beau.
Richard recalls with a chuckle, ‘The first time Sue brought Angelo home was funny. It was tricky in those days because … my parents weren’t racist at all, not at all, but it was pretty new to see an Italian boy with an Anglo-Saxon girl. It made me laugh’.
Sue was strategic: ‘For six months my father didn’t know he was Italian because he was blond, very handsome and tanned, and he looked like a German. We kept this going as long as we could, but with a name like Angelo …’
Richard watched as his parents warmed to Angelo: ‘It took a bit of time for them to understand that he was a good bloke. But they came around. They saw that Angelo was good to her, which was all that mattered’.
Angelo was as personable and ‘can do’ by nature as Sue. In those courtship days, it was also clear to her protective brother that the young man genuinely cared about Sue and that he made her happy. ‘Angelo was very kind,’ says Richard, ‘always thoughtful with Sue. He enjoyed having fun with her and she enjoyed having fun with him. They laughed a lot together. He was a man who was very good at the things that matter as a human being—opening a door, bringing chocolates and flowers, calling if he was going to be late. He would arrange things that were a bit special. He knew to ask Sue how she was feeling. It made her happy to be asked, “What’s going on?”’
Richard adds: ‘Angelo was her rock. As I had been, as her brother, and as she was for me’.
Angelo Alberti arrived in Melbourne in 1960 from Vivaro, a small northern Italian town in the province of Pordenone, in the Friuli region, with no more than £20 to his name. A builder by trade, he was determined to immerse himself in his new life and country, and decided the best way to get ahead was to not associate with other Italians. He learned English quickly and focused on finding work as a bricklayer, operating with his sibling Roger as the Alberti Brothers. The brothers were hard workers and the venture was relatively successful, but their individual approaches to business were incompatible and they ultimately parted ways, though they remained on good terms.
Angelo was a single-minded, enormously driven person, dedicated to making his fortune; there was no time for leisure and self-indulgence. Though he also had a tendency to be domineering, Angelo was Sue’s perfect match in strength of character, intelligence and determination, and in 1967, after three years of courtship, the young couple married—Sue was twenty and her groom twenty-five. The wedding took place at St Michael’s Catholic Church in Ashburton in front of around 120 family and friends. ‘It was where I went to primary school’, says Sue. ‘They were building the church when I was at school.’
Both the bride’s and groom’s families were delighted by the marriage—by that time, Angelo’s mother Georgia, sister Yvette and older brother Roger were all comfortably settled in Australia. Roger was Angelo’s best man and Yvette was a bridesmaid. ‘It was a lovely Australian wedding’, says Sue. ‘My father got pickled and Richard had to drive him home. I’ll never forget Dad saying to me … that if it didn’t work out I was welcome to come home. He said that on the way to the church! Gee Dad, thanks for the vote of confidence!’
After completing her secondary school education at Siena College in Camberwell, Sue went to Stotts Business College in Hawthorn. ‘I worked extremely hard. I was interested in business and I wanted to do well’, she says. Sue topped the class at Stotts and was successfully put forward for a Saturday morning job as a receptionist with a real estate agent, her first foray into the world of property. What she really wanted to do, however, was work as a court reporter: ‘I was qualified for that, having studied shorthand. So I went from the real estate job to a law office where I worked as a legal clerk’.
After she married Angelo, Sue also took up the roles of bookkeeper and secretary to manage the ‘back room’ of the business with her husband, by then known as Alberti Constructions. They complemented each other perfectly. Bruce McPhail, a long-time family friend, says that Sue kept a low profile in the early days, working in the background, while Angelo was the face of the business—the builder and deal-maker. But Sue was also the one with the eye on the details. Angelo, says Sue, ‘loved making the deals and he would do 95 per cent, then I would come in and finish it all off. I’m good at that. Detail is very important to me’.
Sue describes her husband as a visionary who ‘didn’t suck up to people’. ‘Angelo’s approach to business was innovative and courageous’, she says. ‘He was pretty fiery and he didn’t tolerate fools. And he didn’t tolerate people shaking hands and then reneging on a deal. He was sharp, very sharp. I was more intuitive. I could read people better than him and he would use that. He would ask me what I thought and I would warn him about certain things … and nine times out of ten I was right. My dad was a policeman and I’d learned from him, he was very good at that sort of thing’. Sue hastens to add: ‘I don’t want to sound like a know-all. But I am intuitive’.
‘Angelo worked like a dog’, continues Sue. ‘He was absolutely amazing. He loved his men, always looked after all his staff … He was an excellent tradesman. In Italy you are taught not just concreting or one trade, but all the trades: plumbing, electrical, everything. I still have all his certificates; he did very well’. Angelo had gained a lot of experience from working in his uncle’s engineering factory in Italy from when he was twelve years old. ‘His father died in a bombing in Trieste when Angelo was three and his mother was left with the three children, so they did what they had to do to survive’, explains Sue. ‘Angelo learned bartering from a very young age. That’s how he had become so good at it; he was an excellent negotiator.’
The drive of prioritising family explains the obsessive edge to Angelo’s work ethic. ‘Helping his family is what drove Angelo’, says Sue. ‘He worked to help his family and he eventually got them all out to Australia.’
Just as Angelo learned English, Sue went to classes at the Centre for Adult Education to learn Italian. Angelo’s mother couldn’t speak English when she came to Australia, Sue explains. ‘I decided the only way I’m going to become part of this family is to learn to speak Italian. So I went back to school and practised Italian with my beautiful mother-in-law.’
Three months after Sue and Angelo married, the hardworking young builder had a fateful accident. Sue’s voice is direct, even forceful, as she recounts what happened: ‘It was 42 degrees and, of course, that didn’t stop Angelo working—hat on his head, no singlet. He was boxing up some concrete and a piece of wood went straight through his eye’. The freak accident on that blistering summer day irreparably damaged Angelo’s left eye, despite thirteen operations to try and repair the damage. Sue remembers the morning Angelo woke up and couldn’t see the ‘No Parking’ sign outside their bedroom window. He turned to her and said, ‘Sue, I’m in trouble’. An immediate trip to the hospital ended with the removal of Angelo’s eye. The injury also led to the loss of a kidney—the drugs used to treat the eye so affected the organ that eventually it had to be removed.
Sue’s frustration with those medical outcomes is still evident. ‘If only I knew then what I know now’, she says, a rueful shake of the head hinting at her latent anger. She implies that the doctors ‘banded together’ and supported each other over what was a poor outcome. It’s the feeling of impotence that really annoys her—Sue doesn’t accept being powerless.
Not given to lingering over emotion, having been raised to be a person of action rather than reflection, Sue shrugs and moves on with the story: ‘Angelo had to give up bricklaying when he lost his eye—he got frustrated that he couldn’t make the wall straight. He could no longer work a trade so he turned his attention to industrial development. He’d always had an interest in property … We bought some land in Braeside, an industrial suburb in Melbourne’s south-east. That’s where he started off with his first building’. Sue says the land was just country then: ‘I remember our three dogs used to run riot down there. We’d take them down and just let them go’.
Sue laughs when she recalls how Angelo dealt with his new circumstances: ‘I remember him coming out of hospital after having his eye removed. They gave him a bottle of Valium to calm him down. They said, “You might need this because you might get depressed”. He took it and, right there in front of them, he tipped the whole bottle down the drain and said, “Here’s what you can do with your Valium”’.
Sue says Angelo then wanted to check on a major project they had going at the time, and she had to drive him because he wasn’t allowed to drive: ‘He had a plastic thing where his eye had been so he could put the drops in—he had that for three months and he eventually got a prosthetic. When we got to the site, he got a ladder. Now think about how high an industrial roof is. He picked up some flashing, put it on his shoulder and went straight up the ladder … There was no scaffolding and he walked along the purlins. With one eye. Straight out of hospital. He wanted to check the roof. As you do, when you’re a builder’.
Angelo was widely regarded as an exceptional businessman. Sue describes how he could pull out a napkin, map out a project and put together a quote in a matter of minutes, to within about $100 of what would prove to be the actual cost. ‘He was unbelievable. He could sit with the bank manager and do the same thing’, she notes with a nod and a smile. ‘I learned so much from Angelo.’
As a couple, Sue and Angelo were both geared to success. Sue says, ‘I don’t want to take anything away from my parents and my upbringing, but I wanted to do better. I remember not having much and I just wanted to be better, to do better’. Sue had the same desire to succeed as her immigrant husband and a similarly exhausting work ethic. She also had the same willingness to put everything on the line. That said, it was Angelo who was driven to the point of being obsessive about his business. He set the pace, and Sue, in her role as secretary and bookkeeper, kept up.
In the early days of the business, Angelo’s focus had been on small-and medium-sized residential developments—his mother would live for many years in one of the apartments he built in Moorabbin. But as he and Sue grew their business, increasingly they became involved in commercial developments.
Just prior to getting married, Sue and Angelo had bought a new home in Scoresby, 30 kilometres east of central Melbourne. This was where they moved after returning from their honeymoon. The house was spartan. ‘It was so basic it’s not funny’, says Sue. ‘The builder had gone bust and so hadn’t finished the house. That meant there was a lot that needed to be completed, which we couldn’t do because we had no money. Everything we had went into the business’. Sue goes on to describe the poor condition of their first house and its surroundings: ‘When we moved in, there were no carpets, no window coverings, no outside paving, just a pile of bricks in the backyard. There were no roads, no footpaths, no water, no sewerage’.
Theirs was the only house on the so-called estate, although according to Sue, ‘It wasn’t an estate, it was paddocks’. She adds: ‘I had no transport, no car. The bus only ran every two hours. We had one local shop, which also served as the post office. That’s what I married into!’ Sue’s laugh has a hollowness to it.
On 1 November 1969, Danielle Yvonne Alberti was born, bringing a new focus to the Scoresby home. Sue and Angelo were both keen for several children. For their first, Sue liked the name Danielle, while Angelo wanted Yvonne, so a compromise was struck. Danielle was a happy baby, and Sue embraced motherhood at the age of twenty-two. But while the challenges presented by her new home were not insurmountable, Sue’s life as a young mother was not one of comfort and convenience: ‘When Danielle was little I had a pram, a fairly basic pusher, I think it was second-hand. Our nearest shops were at Knoxfield, which was a few kilometres away. We had some roughly formed roads with gravel, huge stones, and I’d have to wheel that pusher to Knoxfield to do the shopping. Boy, I remember that pusher’.
After Danielle was born, Alberti Constructions became Dansu Constructions, formed from the combined names of Danielle, Angelo and Sue—truly a family business. It was under this name that the company started buying large parcels of industrial land for business parks. Having managed successful projects in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, the Albertis did not shy away from risk and ‘had a go’ at many and varied business ventures.
‘When we were young,’ says Sue, ‘Angelo and I tried our hand at many businesses. There were so many balls in the air. It was like a merry-go-round—we’d go from one project to the next project’. Sue says they tried a lot of different business ideas, with some failures along the way: ‘We built boats for a while, we invested in chickens, we had a plastic ball factory. Talk about spread yourselves thin! Mistakes and misadventures are inevitable along the way. With the plastic balls, we once made a whole lot of balls and they ended up with a big plastic fin around the join. Many hours with a potato peeler were needed to fix that one!’ Sue also clearly remembers Angelo completing a building without a signed contract because he trusted the other side: ‘That place stayed empty for quite a few years’.
Despite such setbacks, Sue sees that time as a positive one: ‘I learned from Angelo the power in having a go, that in failing we actually succeeded. We made a great team. Every time we went into the next entrepreneurial venture we knew what to look out for, what to avoid’.
One of their ventures was a pig farm in Baxter, on the Mornington Peninsula. ‘We’d go down on weekends’, says Sue. ‘I used to work on Sundays in the shop selling pig products.’ As a pre-teen, Danielle would play among all the animals on the farm, delighting in the tiny pigs and the multitude of cats. Sue recalls: ‘Danielle loved to open all the bread that we’d feed to the pigs and get the free cards in the bread packets. We had that many fat cats around the place—Danielle loved cats. And we had our own horse. She used to come down and ride the pony around’.
For Sue and Angelo, the time spent travelling between work and home was often done separately, and never in luxury. Angelo loved motorcycles, and Sue laughs about always driving around in very basic vehicles: ‘I didn’t have a new car until I was about fifty years old! We always had an old bomb’.
Sue readily admits to working seven days a week, and long hours each day. She says that with such a lot happening around her daughter, Danielle learned a lot about being industrious and became adept at entertaining herself, adding: ‘Yes, we were busy parents, but still very loving’. Sue has always believed in getting on with what needs to be done, in the house as much as at work: ‘I was always up at the crack of dawn and usually still up late. I always did my own cleaning, my own washing and ironing. I still get up at 5 a.m. I scrub the bathrooms, do the vacuuming, clean the verandahs. I like it when my home smells fresh and clean, but as a family we never had a cleaner or a nanny or anything like that’.
In 1972, when Danielle was a toddler and the construction business was still relatively young, the family moved to Jells Road, Mulgrave, in Melbourne’s south-east. This suburb, which was later rebranded with the more upmarket name Wheelers Hill, was closer to the city but also handy to the industrial areas on which the Albertis’ business was focused. The property comprised a smallish farmhouse on a relatively large block of land, positioned on a single-lane road of potholed bitumen and gravel. The young couple continued to sacrifice any thought of luxury and remained committed wholly and solely to saving and investing in their business.
From a young age, Danielle was highly creative. Pencils and paper were her constant accessories from the age of three. Sue remembers Danielle drawing all the time: ‘I had a friend, Father Emmanuel, who was an architect and a priest. He noticed Danielle drawing and commented, “Your daughter has a gift”’. On his next visit, Father Emmanuel brought rolls and rolls of butcher’s paper, and Danielle never looked back. She would sit for hours with her precious paper and hone her skills. ‘I never had to worry about entertaining Danielle in a restaurant’, says Sue. ‘She’d go with her pencils and would draw people, profiles, anything. She was never idle but she wasn’t one of those kids who’d sit fiddling and wriggling. She would always either be reading a book or drawing’.
While busy parents often imply absence or a distance between child and parents, the nature of the Albertis’ home-based business—the Mulgrave house doubled as an office—meant Danielle was very much in the thick of the action. ‘It really was a case of mum’s taxi’, says Sue. ‘We were always on the go and Danielle was always along for the ride and would help out from a very young age, with typing and little jobs.’
Whether it was her parental role models or because productivity was an inherited trait, Sue says the young Danielle showed early signs of entrepreneurialism: ‘Danielle used to love setting up cake stalls and, when she was seven or eight, we’d have bake days where she would set up a table on the footpath outside our house and sell cakes. I’d cook all Friday night baking cakes that she could sell on the Saturday morning for pocket money’.
The family home’s location close to the then major Australian Rules football ground at Waverley Park also made it a natural parking lot on game days. ‘People would pay for parking, and Danielle thought it would be a good idea to offer car washing too’, says Sue. But her daughter ‘was only about this big’—Sue gestures around a metre from the ground—so ‘guess who had to do the washing? Me!’ Sue feigns displeasure but smiles: ‘Danielle would try and help, but I spent all my Saturdays washing cars. She used to squirrel the money away into her bank account … And she put the price up every year. Gee she made a lot of money. If there was one thing her parents taught her, it was the value of money’.
As a child, it seemed that Danielle Alberti never did what everyone else did, and her mother is fiercely proud of this: ‘She was very much her own person and always tried hard at everything she did, always did her very best. We never had to tell her to do her homework. She was driven. She’d constantly ask me, to the point of driving me crazy, “Do you think I’ll be successful?” I’d say, “Keep working at it and you’ll be successful”’.
Sue adds that, from a young age, Danielle took enormous pride in her artwork: ‘Whatever she did, it had to be the best. Or she’d tear it up and start again’. Dogged persistence and a desire for success were in Danielle’s genes.