The following has been reproduced with permission from “Banyule Banner” July 2007
City of Banyule Council’s Director of Community Programs, Sauro Antonelli, has been named a Member of the Order of Australia in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
Mr Antonelli, 59, who lives in Hurstbridge, is in charge of Council’s human services, a budget of $31.6m and 525 staff delivering everything from child care, youth services and aged care to immunisation, health, sport and recreation facilities, festivals and arts programs.
An official citation said the honour was “for service to the Italian community through a range of church, welfare, aged care and arts organisations, and to multicultural and migrant assistance programs.”
Mr Antonelli was born in the small northern Italian village of Lucignana in Tuscany – 60km north of Pisa, near the beautiful walled city of Luca and 10km from Collodi where author Carlo Collodi created Pinocchio in 1883. His father Alfeo, who was a farmer, emigrated to Australia in 1951 in the wake of WWII. Sauro, an only child, followed with his mother Anna the following year. Sauro was educated at St Joseph’s College in East Brunswick and won a scholarship to study for a Commerce degree at Melbourne University then worked at the ANZ Bank for six years.
At 21 he joined the Italian Catholic Federation Youth Group through his church parish. It was the start of a life of working to help Italians within the Victorian community. “It awakened a social justice side in me,” he remembers now. Mr Antonelli became state president and later served eight years as national president.The youth group also put Mr Antonelli back in touch with his Italian heritage.“When I was growing up it was ‘one size fits all.’ You were expected to be a dinky die Aussie and as a teenager you wanted to conform.” Sauro played football, but kept his Italian going with classes on weekends. In the mid 1970s he joined Premier Rupert Hamer’s new Ministry of Ethnic Affairs, working with community groups, developing grants programs and coordinating service delivery between government departments. It was the birth of multiculturalism in Victoria.
He oversaw the establishment of Victoria’s first interpreting and translating service and established a range of programs to train health, legal and other professionals to work with clients from non-English backgrounds. He developed programs to help migrants with workplace rights, work safety and learning English on the job.
In 1973 Sauro married Lilian with whom he has two sons. He got involved in Italian welfare organisation Co As It – the Italian Assistance Association – and is still on its board. Mr Antonelli left the State Government in 1992 and worked with the Assisi Centre which he had helped found – providing residential care for the Italian aged. In 1991 the Centre raised $4 million to buy the former Sisters of Mercy Convent on four hectares in Rosanna Rd Rosanna. Mr Antonelli later served as honourary secretary then president for five years and is still on the board. I n 1993 Mr Antonelli moved to local government as Director of Community Services at the Shire of Diamond Valley.When Diamond Valley, Eltham and Heidelberg were amalgamated to form Banyule City Council in 1994 Mr Antonelli became Director of Community Programs – the position he still holds today. In local government he says: “The great advantage is that you can get things done more quickly and easily.You see things happen and can be responsive to residents in a more immediate way.”
For 10 years Mr Antonelli has travelled to Italy several times a year to represent Australia on the Tuscan regional government that offers language and culture programs and scholarships for Tuscans.
Update Jan. 2021. Mr Antonelli was the subject of an oral history interview by the City of Whittlesea in 2000. The interview, transcription and photograph (LHC152) taken at the time form part of the Mill Park local history collection for Yarra Plenty Regional Library. Mr Antonelli spent his youth in the suburb of Lalor before his family moved to Hurstbridge.
