Celebrating a lifetime of taking care of Adelaide’s parks
At 71 and 75, two brothers are set to celebrate a combined 100 years of working in the same job together and have no plans to slow down.
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With a combined 100 years in one job, two brothers are giving true meaning to long service.
Antonio and Carmine Lepore have worked in Adelaide City Council’s horticulture team for 60 and 40 years respectively.
They moved to Adelaide with their family from Campagna in the 1950s.
As a 15-year-old, Antonio walked into his job at the council and now at 75 he still isn’t quite ready to put the tools down.
His first job was to help transform Rymill Park – which at the time was a place of olive trees, cows and horses.
“For me, it feels like it was just yesterday that I started here,” Antonio, of Maylands, says.
“It’s strange to imagine where it’s come from. You’d come here and see horses and the olive trees and now it’s a beautiful grassy park with a rose garden.”
Almost 20 years later, his younger brother Carmine – now 71 – joined the team and the brothers have worked together ever since.
“I was going to retire at 65 but we love working together and he (Antonio) convinced me to stay,” Carmine, of Beulah Park, says.
“We don’t argue, we don’t get sick of each other. I pick Tony up in the morning and we’ll drive in together and work together all day.
“We do take a lot of pride in what we do. Wherever we’ve been we always try to improve it.”
Carmine was instrumental in establishing the Himeji Gardens on South Terrace and worked with Japanese gardeners to master their traditional techniques.
One important skill was learning to bonsai – cultivating miniature trees that mimic the shape and scale of full-size trees.
“It was very different to anything else I’d done, but now I’m the only one in the council that knows how to bonsai, and it’s very difficult,” Carmine says.
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Carmine admits he has thought long and hard about retirement.
For the moment, though, he and Antonio have one big project to complete – establishing, with encouragement from Adelaide City Council, a garden within Rymill Park that acknowledges the Lepore legacy.
It will be marked by a commemorative plaque, recording the century of service that two Italian brothers have given to tending their adoptive land.