Angelo’s love was reserved for Sue and Danielle, and his obsession was to succeed in business, but his passion was motorcycles. He enjoyed the full gamut of the vehicle, from modern road bikes to classics and dirt bikes. But while he was an enthusiastic collector, Angelo rarely purchased new models. ‘He mostly bought second-hand bikes’, notes Bruce McPhail, the Albertis’ accountant, who found common ground with Angelo as a motorcyclist. ‘He wasn’t a skinflint type. He was very generous in most respects. But he would generally economise when it came to spending money on himself.’ Angelo’s healthy collection of motorcycles included two Yamaha TT600s, a Honda CR500, a Laverda 750 SFC, a pair of 1930s Moto Guzzi Falcones, a Honda CB1100R, and his final dirt bike, a Honda XR600, but, says Bruce, ‘he had many, many more bikes over the years’.
Bruce was a close companion on Angelo’s regular trail-bike-riding trips, as was Sandro Basso, a young friend from Angelo’s home town in Italy, whom he had supported during his move to Australia. The ‘boys’ weekends’ typically involved Angelo lashing all the motorcycles together on his big tandem building trailer, much to Bruce’s horror: ‘I am very fussy about my bikes, I don’t want them all lashed together and scratched and banged up, but Angelo was rough as blazes with that sort of stuff’. He laughs and shakes his head.
They’d find a campground, often in Bright, then unload the trailer and tow it into the hills to fill it with firewood. Bruce chuckles: ‘Angelo was an amazing pyromaniac. He’d light these campfires so big and so hot we couldn’t get near them. It was winter and freezing cold but we’d end up in T-shirt and shorts’. Days were spent hurtling through the bush on single-file trails. ‘As an example of his determination, remember he only had one eye’, notes Bruce. ‘His attitude was, “Well, I’ve got one eye, that’ll do”. Needless to say there was the odd mishap.’
Sandro, whose wife Elda became Sue’s executive assistant, has fond memories of his bike-riding mate: ‘Angelo would take about eight or ten of us to Adelaide for the Formula 1 and to Sydney for the motorbikes. At one of these, it was raining and Angelo got up and said, “Come with me”. I’ve always been a follower, so I went with him. He found a hardware store and we went in and he buys a roll of black plastic, 100 metres of it, and a Stanley knife. We took this roll of that thick black plastic back to the stand and he stood up at the end of the row and said, “Come on, roll it out”. So we passed it down the stand to the rest of the crowd—we didn’t know these people, but everyone was passing it over their heads. He then cut a hole for the head to go through and passed on the knife. Sure enough, one after another, everyone cut a hole for themselves and passed the knife on. So at the end there were about fifty heads poking through this plastic. It was amazing. We ended up on TV!’
For one Adelaide Grand Prix, Angelo organised a charter flight for the same group of mates. Len Harrison offers a further insight into the enterprising side of Angelo—same weather, different solution: ‘We were all sitting at the track on tiered seating, on a bend, when the weather turned and it started to rain. Angelo got sick of the rain, jumped up, pointed to me and said, “Come with me. We’ll find some shelter”. He walked over to a big tent with white plastic sides and a roof, with people serving food inside. He grabbed a ladder from somewhere, put it against the tent and started to undo all the sides of the marquee. Once he’d unclipped it all, he gestured to me to hold the other end and we just dragged these pieces of plastic away that had been a side of the marquee. I am talking 4 or 5 metres wide by about 10 metres long. Everyone inside just carried on serving food. They must have assumed we were maintenance staff. We walked back to our group, holding this enormous piece of plastic, and Angelo hooked it up to the stand and there we were, all sitting comfortably out of the rain’.
Sandro tells countless tales of special moments with his great friends the Albertis: ‘I don’t know where I would have been without Sue and Angelo. Everything that I am now and everything I have done in this country goes back to them. I didn’t make a move without asking their advice. If I had done everything Angelo suggested, I would be much better off, but I am not a risk-taker. If I could handle the risk and the worry, I would have millions now! But I can’t sleep at night over $100 so I wouldn’t be able to handle it if it was millions!’
The ability to identify an opportunity was the hallmark of Dansu. Sue says it was her and Angelo’s complementary skills that worked so well: ‘Danielle used to say to me, “Dad is very lucky to have you. He wouldn’t be where he is without you”. But I don’t see it like that. I learned from him. I gravitate to people smarter than me because I learn from them’. Sue remembers, however, that the irreverent approach favoured by the pair didn’t always work. She erupts in a cheeky smile as she reveals what happened on one trip to the Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix on Phillip Island, in south-eastern Victoria.
‘Every year we used to go to Phillip Island’, says Sue, ‘and we’d hire a house, host friends and go to the racetrack from there. One year I decided to take the four-wheel drive to the racetrack because all the parking is on paddocks around the track. I’m a very confident driver and on this particular day I wanted to get back to the house before everybody else to get everything ready for dinner. The queue to get out of the track area was really long, so I took a shortcut and drove over the paddocks. But when I got to the exit, the police stopped me. I thought the policeman was going to fine me. He looked sternly at me and said, “You cheated!” Then he sent me back the way I’d come, all the way back to the end of the queue … It served me right for trying to be smart!’
Over many years of hard work, the young couple steadily built a successful construction and property development business. But by the mid-1990s, with an estate at Hallam nearing completion, Angelo started to lessen the intensity of his work and delegate more frequently to site staff and his professional services team. In addition, a move into building industrial parks gave rise to a potential partnership with Italian builders Frank and Nunzio Pellicano. Originally competitors, the Pellicano brothers and Angelo saw an opportunity to team up for a Dandenong development in a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Nunzio Pellicano recalls with a laugh the highly emotive original discussion about Dandenong: ‘I was actually quite angry when I called Angelo. We both wanted the same piece of land and I said, “I don’t know your position, but do we really have to compete?” He suggested I come to his office to discuss it. He offered me a cognac and said, “You southern Italians, you get so emotional. Enjoy the drink and let’s see where we go from here”. This is where he was forward-thinking. He said, “You have a building company and I’m at the stage where I no longer want the headaches of having a building company. Let’s set some guidelines”. So we mapped it out and set up a structure, a pattern that worked for both of us’.
But tragically, Angelo would be dead before they could start building on the land together. One Sunday morning in November 1995, Angelo took his Honda CB1100R to check on the site at Hallam. He was riding as usual down along the estate on Wedgewood Road when the driver of a garbage truck ignored a stop sign and drove straight through an intersection.
Sue recalls turning up at the estate: ‘It was a beautiful sunny day and Angelo had decided to ride that morning. When I arrived, I remember thinking, “Oh, that looks like Angelo’s bike on the ground. Smashed”. At the same time I got a call saying there had been a serious accident’.
Sue immediately rallied friends and family. Len Harrison remembers that he and his wife were travelling in Italy when he got the call from Sue: ‘She said Angelo has been hit on one of his bikes by a garbage truck and she was understandably in a state of panic. Angelo was in an ambulance and Sue was asking, “Where is the best place to take him?”’ Bruce McPhail recalls, ‘The bike was a mess. At the time it happened, we knew it was serious, but we didn’t think it was going to be fatal’.
At the Monash Medical Centre, there were periods when Angelo was semiconscious, although he was not communicative. Suffering the effects of blunt injury to his abdomen and the rupture of his pancreas, he ultimately fell into a coma from which he never recovered. After Angelo had spent a month in intensive care, Sue made the heartbreaking decision to turn off his life support. It was November 1995—Angelo was fifty-three years old.
Sue is factual in her description, but fresh tears appear as her eyes tighten in pain: ‘Danielle and I turned off the machines together. It took about twenty minutes for his heart to stop beating’. As Angelo’s dynamic life ended, Sue mourned quietly while Danielle lay with her father’s body and sobbed. The vestiges of Sue’s sadness again intensify as she explains, ‘When we turned off the machines my daughter was hysterical. That was the beginning of the end of Danielle’. Sue thinks that Danielle never really recovered from the loss.
Sue used all her strength in the midst of her grief to pursue justice—the garbage truck driver had fled the scene of the accident and disappeared: ‘I knew I owed it to Angelo, after he died, to find this person, to track him down’. A private investigator hired by Sue found the itinerant driver in the Northern Territory. A New Zealand national with prior convictions, the man was found guilty in the Coroners Court of Victoria and fined. Sue’s eyes are steel and her face expressionless: ‘He never said sorry. I wanted to kill him. When I was waiting outside, while the court had a recess, he was boasting, talking about how they’d paid for him to come down and he’d caught up with all his relatives in Melbourne. If my looks could have killed, he would be dead’.
Sue went overseas for a few weeks to grieve privately and reflect: ‘I just needed some time out to think about what I wanted to do, away from people who knew me. I was heavily involved in so many charitable things and we had more than the construction business, we had other businesses we were involved in. We had more than 300 contractors to pay and about eight development projects underway. There was just so much going on’.
When Sue came back to Melbourne, she picked up the reins and tried to get on with life. However, with Angelo’s death, Sue had lost some of her bounce, her trademark sparkle. ‘She was lost for a while’, her brother Richard remembers. ‘She was terribly lost. She wanted to spend time with me, so we talked, met up for lunch, went to events together and that sort of thing. She wanted time to grieve with people who mattered to her, to be in a comfort zone, a place that was real and would stay that way.’
Her devoted assistant Elda Basso remembers Sue’s disorientation immediately after the accident, but also recalls that her grief and confusion quickly transformed into comforting those around her, especially Danielle, and taking care of her staff. Elda’s voice is soft but firm, her eyes unblinking: ‘She is the most amazing stalwart. Sue is compassionate; she loves humans in general. She never compromises her generosity to others’.
Dansu was thriving and the responsibility of leading the business fell to Sue: ‘We had staff who relied on us. I couldn’t just fold the business. I couldn’t let people go unpaid. We had very human responsibilities. My decision was about whether to take the lead or not. I decided I could, but the first barrier was that I needed to be a registered builder, so I had to get my builder’s licence, which was no easy task’. Working eighteen hours a day and calling on support from her trusted lieutenants in the construction business, Sue went back to school and eventually gained her builder’s licence. She sat up the front of the class, absorbing every piece of information given out. In doing so, she became a pioneer as one of the first female registered builders in the state of Victoria.
Sue says that one of the early challenges she faced was knowing who to trust: ‘I had no-one really to turn to, but one of our tenants had mentioned a syndicate group that he belonged to. I made some inquiries and he introduced me to the group’. Sue says she joined the CEOs at their weekly meeting in the city: ‘We met every Monday morning and I did that for two years. That really helped me. There were people from all different types of industries, all men, and I was the only one in the building industry. Gosh they were fantastic. I could share things with them I couldn’t share with anyone else. It saved my life because I’d been suddenly thrust into a leadership role I never anticipated. All of a sudden I faced so many decisions that had to be made’.
Sue adds: ‘And the banks were circling. Well, they lived to regret that …’ Her smile gives licence to a cheeky charm, but then she’s serious again, admitting that she couldn’t have managed alone. It was not to be the only time Sue was to face a devastating loss and have to front up almost immediately to life’s duties and pressures, but her forte is finding solutions.
In response to the immense pressure to carry on, Sue worked with a gritty intensity. Running Dansu Constructions meant proving herself in a male-dominated world: negotiating with powerful trade unions and consolidating her business as a major player in the Victorian property development market. At the same time, she continued to make her mark with the JDRFA internationally by establishing the organisation locally as a strong and vocal force.
The easy part was charging ahead with being ‘busy’; the tough part was working out how to fill the hole left by the absence of someone she’d loved so completely. By their middle age, Sue and Angelo had become relatively independent within their marriage—he with the property developments and she with the charity work. But thirty years of teamwork and a close partnership had nonetheless shaped many aspects of Sue’s life, and her identity.
Over the years, Sue and Angelo had successfully completed a number of substantial commercial and industrial property development projects, especially in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. In the majority of cases, these were design and construction projects undertaken on behalf of major Australian and international companies. Each project involved unique combinations of space, facilities and staff amenities, and through them, Dansu became acknowledged as one of Melbourne’s most capable builders.
The deal-making had been Angelo’s area, while tenancy was where Sue’s skills came into play. Their preferred approach was to buy their own land and pre-lease the development, rather than speculating. As Sue explains, they ‘liked to line up the tenant first’. But what she doesn’t spell out is how integral her relationship skills were to the business model. Nunzio Pellicano notes that it was Sue’s strong connections with real estate agents that brought many development objectives to fruition. He even goes so far as to say that Sue was not just the ‘back room’ of Dansu, she was the backbone of the business.
Prior to Angelo’s accident, Nunzio and Frank Pellicano had met Sue socially but had not dealt directly with her. But they now did so regarding the innovative Dandenong property deal. They offered Sue three options: sell the Alberti share, buy the Pellicano share, or work together and progress the development as planned. Nunzio recalls Sue saying, ‘It was my husband’s wish to develop this’. The three then agreed to proceed as Angelo had planned. ‘We became 100 per cent partners and started to develop the estate’, says Nunzio. ‘We knew Sue was a good person, very generous, and we trusted her.’
Nunzio says there was only one issue between them: ‘We are Collingwood supporters and she is a mad Western Bulldogs supporter and we couldn’t agree on what to put in the time capsule when we launched the estate. So we decided to put both a Collingwood jumper and a Bulldogs jumper in it! I’m not sure if anyone has ever found it’. Nunzio smiles. ‘That was our first joint venture. We enjoyed the relationship so much that we bought another property with her and went in again fifty-fifty.’
In discussing the pre-lease partnership arrangements, each of which spanned ten years, Nunzio describes Sue as the type of person that anyone would want as a business partner. In nominating the personal characteristics she exhibits, he grins: ‘Very determined. Also very knowledgeable, and if she believes in something she will make it happen’. Nunzio and his brother appreciated Sue’s values throughout their joint ventures: ‘She would never impose her authority or be unreasonable. She is very cooperative, she will listen. She is very determined in pushing forward. She does her research very well, so when she expresses her opinion, she is not shooting from the hip. Yes, she is outspoken when she is passionate. But she controls her emotions very well’.
Nunzio clearly took pleasure in dealing with Angelo as well as Sue: ‘We used to muck around with Angelo. We are from southern Italy and we’d tell him, “You northern Italians are so Germanic, no emotions. We southerners are expressive!” We had a lot of fun’.
Sue had lost her life companion but found people she trusted and enjoyed working with. She regrouped and forged ahead with Dansu, all the while supporting her daughter and battling to find a cure for diabetes. Her determination to press on was all the more striking considering that, in the same year as her husband’s accident, Sue was wracked by the deaths of two other people in her innermost circle.
In January 1995, Sue’s mother-in-law Georgia died at the age of eighty-seven. She passed away less than a year before her son died. ‘Georgia was a beautiful person and very entrepreneurial. She was ahead of her time’, says Sue. Then, that July, Sue’s mother Aileen suffered a massive stroke at the age of eighty-three. Sue describes it as a terrible death: ‘She had been smoking since she was twenty-five. She started when she was socially quite shy. Mum would smoke when she was anxious and the doctors had told her if she didn’t give up cigarettes she’d have a stroke … I remember when she was in hospital for a month and I had to move her, all she could say was, “I want to go home”. But she didn’t understand that she couldn’t. She was gone’.
Sue bought nine family plots at Springvale Cemetery that year. She has a moment of grim humour: ‘It was a good real estate deal, nine plots in one. I made sure that I bought a north-facing corner’.