Susan Alberti keeps proving why she’s best on ground
SUSAN Alberti has fought more personal battles than three women put together. But ahead of tomorrow’s AFLW Grand Final, she can stop smiling.
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Susan Alberti is at the podium, powering through her life story. She has to speak fast because there’s an awful lot to fit in.
Her speech isn’t the only thing that’s crowded. So is the Kyneton Town Hall. The Zonta Club’s annual International Women’s Day dinner is always popular with locals. They’ve had some worthy keynote speakers in previous years — ex-police commissioner Christine Nixon, former Labor MP Mary Delahunty, bank executive Nicole Devine and astrophysicist Rachel Webster.
But never before have tickets sold out so fast. Within three weeks of going on sale, there
was a waiting list of scores who missed out. There were men who wanted to go, but had
to be turned down.
The venue could squeeze in 220 people, but there were only sets of crockery and cutlery for 150. A couple of days out, they were still 45 forks short, so organisers bought them from
the local op shop.
Alberti’s steam train speech slows after 20 minutes. She pauses. She looks up, scans the tables and pushes her notes aside.
She’s been chatting with Kyneton Football and Netball Club president Rob Waters, she says. (He and her husband Colin North are the only men in the room.) She says there’s clearly a need for more funds — country sporting clubs can never have enough help.
Especially now that there’s a new breed of AFL player — women — here in Kyneton.
“So …,” and she pauses again, as if toying with the idea of changing her mind. Not a piece of cutlery tinks in the hall. “I’m tonight going to give (pause) $5000 to the club.”
The women — and Waters — erupt into a fury of applause. It glides to standing ovation and lasts beyond a minute. Oh, the things they can do with $5000.
Alberti is incandescent. She looks off to the side and gives a cheeky “did-you-see-that?” wink. Now THAT’S how you pump up a country crowd.
This champion of women is no feminist in the popular sense. She believes in women making it because of their talent, not because of sympathy or quotas.
She was the first woman elevated to AFL corporate level, for years the vice-president of the Western Bulldogs. And she helped energise the AFL Women’s competition into being.
Tomorrow she will watch the Grand Final between the Crows and Lions. The popularity of this new phenomenon has made Alberti much wanted on the speaking circuit.
It isn’t easy to find time in her diary. She’s never been busier, nor more proud of her successes. This is her time.
ALBERTI has had more battles than three standard women. Toughen-up training started by the time she was 35. It was an era when high heels were still allowed on construction sites. Not because they were considered suitable footwear, but because there’d never been a need to outlaw them — in those days, sites were female-free zones.
As her late builder husband Angelo’s business partner and backroom support person, Alberti learned the art of sturdy play. She handled the company’s negotiations with building unions.
One conflict stands out. The company was in the middle of a concrete pour in the eastern suburbs. Work halted. At issue were soap supply and a pie warmer for the workers. They were just being picky, she says.
“I rushed out to the site. The delay might have cost us $100,000. We could ill-afford that.”
She arrives on the site with hard hat, heels and stockings. The shop steward ushers her through to the shed. It is the first time they’ve had a woman on site. They rip down girlie posters from the walls and dust off her seat.
Alberti sits with her feet crossed, demurely, and ready to talk. That’s the way she’s always done things.
“I was dignified, ladylike and polite. I explained we weren’t a big company and we were just making our way. I spoke common sense.”
Within half an hour the men have their pie warmer and soap. The concrete starts pouring. Crisis is averted.
“Union leaders found it very unusual to deal with a woman,” she says. “Particularly a strong woman. If I didn’t agree with the unions for one reason or another, we’d sit down straight away and work it out. None of this over-the-phone stuff. I’m a great believer in sitting down, one-on-one.”
In the context of a life peppered with tragedy and success in equal measure, Alberti vignettes like these are abundant, comparatively minor, but important. The early ones help show how this woman, who turns 70 this year, quite literally lived to tell the tale.
SHE says it lightly, but it is no joke. Alberti got sick of going to the Springvale Cemetery to
bury family.
Angelo was killed in 1995 after he was knocked off his motorbike. For three weeks he was on life-support. As 48-year-old Alberti switched off her husband’s machine, she took over the building business. She was one of Australia’s first women to become a registered builder.
In 2001 her daughter — her only child — died from type 1 diabetes complications. Danielle, who had earlier inspired her to set up a foundation to help find a cure for the disease, fell gravely ill with kidney failure on an extended study stay in New York, prompting two friends to offer their own kidneys for transplant.
“They weren’t compatible, but I was. So I sold a property to raise the money to pay her medical bills from the hospital and flew over to bring her home for the kidney transplant,” Alberti says.
The story of that last journey with her daughter, though well-known, is always unsettling. Danielle, 32, died on the international flight to Australia. She suffered a massive heart attack and lay, still, under a blanket beside her mother for nine hours. There was no bringing her back.
“I didn’t cry till after her funeral. I didn’t eat and sleep. I thought a lot about what I’d been doing. What could I have done to prevent this from happening? Where did I go wrong as a mother? I was tearing myself apart.
“Everybody I knew said, ‘Sue stop beating yourself up.’ I knew I couldn’t have helped what happened to her, but I felt responsible.”
The year after Angelo was killed, Alberti’s mother, father and mother-in-law died.
“I bought plots for nine at Springvale (cemetery). I have them all there together. And there is room there for me. Facing north.”
Three times she almost needed her own. Hodgkins lymphoma and type 1 diabetes were diagnosed in one day, within a year of Danielle’s death. Potential complications from either disease were worrying — together might have been deadly.
Soon after her cancer treatment ended, Alberti had a heart attack during a heart test. The next morning in open-heart surgery they found she had five blockages. (“I didn’t know
I had that many parts to be blocked.”)
She was in intensive care for 10 days, unable to function, but hearing every word spoken around her.
But even in her post-operative haze she understood “kidney failure”.
Alberti was down to 12 per cent kidney function and at the zenith of her weight gain.
She wonders how she might, too, be dead if one of her kidneys had been transplanted to her daughter.
The words of Danielle before she died kept returning: “Mum, have a good look at yourself. You need to lose weight. You’re a hypocrite.”
THE cafe display cabinet is jammed with sandwiches. Ready-made foot-long wraps. Focaccias the size of dinner plates. She’s distracted from the interview by the lunch queue.
Alberti has had nothing but a macchiato in two hours. No sugar. She leans back and shakes her head.
“Look at those serves. They’re enormous. You don’t even need half of that food. People eat far too much,” Alberti says. “Children are getting type 2 diabetes because they’re eating the wrong food. We need to get them off their couches. Get them active.”
Do a Google image search on Susan Alberti and you’ll see two versions of the same woman.
One is from just seven years ago, the time she stood up to The Footy Show clown Sam Newman in a public defamation case on which she “refused to back down”.
“What I was fighting for was recognition of the contribution women make to the clubs, equal, respectful treatment — nothing more, nothing less.” Channel 9 settled with Alberti for $220,000 and legal costs before it went to trial.
Another Google image shows her portly in Western Bulldogs colours, by now vice-president of the club whose “red, white and blue will run through my veins till the day I die”. In both these photographs she is 118kg.
“I had a male oncologist, endocrinologist and cardiologist. But, on June 4, 2014, it took
a woman — my kidney specialist — to give me this advice: lose weight or you won’t last long.
“She’s the only person apart from Danielle who gave it to me straight.”
Alberti remembers walking out the door. Her mouth was set in a line. She went home and cried all night. “I felt very sorry for myself.”
By morning she’d distilled it all into one question: How can I do everything I planned
if I’m dead?
“The truth hurts. What Danielle had said about my weight was the truth.
“How can I live by example and be a leader if I can’t do it myself?”
The health scare started a weight loss process of The Biggest Loser proportions. She started eating only healthy food. She cut her food intake in half. She walked for sometimes hours each day, five or 10km. She walked up and down steps. And then she did it again.
That’s where the second image in the Google search comes in. But for her smiley eyes and
her elegant upward swoosh of fair hair it is easy to mistake her in recent shots for her own younger, livelier cousin.
In just two years, Susan Alberti has lost half her body weight, but is twice as alive.
Her kidney function has risen now to almost 60 per cent — not too far off the norm for
a 70-year-old. And her daily insulin dose has dropped from a height of 45 units to six.
Her specialists are astounded.
COLIN North was there for that transformation. His relationship with Susan was for years from afar and business-related.
Angelo Alberti and his trusty sidekick wife built North’s first property in 1987. From the moment the deal was signed, he was added to backroom Susan’s database. Nobody ever drops off her database.
From then, he was invited to all of the Susan Alberti Medical Research Foundation fundraising balls. He recalls his admiration for her drive.
“Six weeks after Danielle had died, Susan was there speaking at the ball, dealing with
it. Just so stoic. She didn’t want to let people down. When she finished, tears were flowing,” North says.
Years later, in 2002, North’s second marriage ended and he told Alberti’s assistant he wouldn’t be going that year as he didn’t have a partner.
“Come and sit at a table with us,” he was told.
He says, “The next thing we go out to Donovan’s on a date and we both chose corned beef.” It must’ve been fate.
“Susie is what you see. She’s single-minded — on about 20 different things at once.”
Alberti always aims high. For decades she’s had three dreams. Two are now reality — to see her beloved Bulldogs win a premiership and for women to play AFL. Only one remains —
to find a cure for type 1 diabetes.
“That’s what drives me every day. If we find a cure, I’ll be able to die happy.”
The Susan Alberti Medical Research Foundation’s Mother’s Day Luncheon is on May 11, Leonda by the Yarra, Hawthorn.
Bookings: susanalbertifoundation.org.au
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