Anthony Albanese reveals his family secret about his father

LABOR MP Anthony Albanese has given a candid interview about his family’s past, and how he discovered who his father was.

FEDERAL Labor MP Anthony Albanese has given a candid interview about his family’s past, and how he discovered who his father was.

On ABC 730, Mr Albanese told host Leigh Sales that his late mother, Mary, told him the truth about who his father was when he was a teenager.

As a child, Mr Albanese was told by his mother that she met his father, married him overseas and returned to Australia. But he died in a car crash.

The federal member for Grayndler said that when he was 14 or 15 years old, she finally told him what really happened.

She recalled how she met him overseas and later fell pregnant, but then lost contact when she came back to Australia.

As a child, Mr Albanese was raised in public housing in Sydney’s inner west by his single mother.

“We sat down just after dinner one night and she — it was very traumatic for her, I think, to tell me that in fact that wasn’t the case, that my father might still be alive, that she’d met him overseas, fallen pregnant with me, had told him and he had said, basically, that he was betrothed to someone from the town in Italy where he was from,” he told ABC 730.

Looking back, Mr Albanese said he thought his mother didn’t tell the truth from the start because she was very concerned that he might “feel somehow less about her”.

“I think that whole guilt associated with having a child out of wedlock in 1963 as a young Catholic woman was a big deal and, hence, the extent to which she had gone to in terms of adopting my father’s name, she wore an engagement and a wedding ring, she — the whole family just believed this story,” he said.

After his mother died in 2002, Mr Albanese decided to look for his father. He began his search based on a photograph of the cruise ship where he worked as a steward.

His mother met his father on a ship that was going from Sydney to London.

“I realised that the ship cruise line was essentially taken over by Sitmar, which had been taken over by P&O, which had been taken over by Carnival and I knew Ann Sherry, the head of Carnival Cruises, and asked her if there was any assistance that she could give,” he said.

He said that Ms Sherry agreed to see what she could do.

“She talked to a maritime historian, this wonderful man, Rob Henderson, who is just fascinated by maritime history,” Mr Albanese said.

“It really was a needle in a hay stack, (finding) the company that had since dissolved but was based in Genoa.

“There was a box in an old warehouse — most of it had been destroyed — but the box actually had the workplace details and the address of my father ... and he was living at the same address many years later.”

His name was Carlo Albanese.

Mr Henderson told Ms Sherry. She then rang Mr Albanese to tell him the good news.

ABC 730 host Leigh Sales talks to Albo about his family secret. Picture: Supplied

“It’s a moment I’ll never forget,” he said.

“I was in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices, I was about to chair a dinner of the Australian Transport Council.

“I got this phone call just as we were about to leave and she — it was very short conversation — she said ‘we’ve found him’, and it took my breath away because I didn’t think that would happen.”

Mr Albanese then contacted the Australian Embassy in Rome, and wrote a letter to the family saying that he would be visiting and that he was the son of Mary Ellery, who wanted to meet Carlo.

At this stage, he did not mention that he was his son.

A lawyer contacted him back, saying Carlo would like to meet him. Mr Albanese then flew to Italy.

“I made it clear that I didn’t want anything except to meet Carlo, who I thought was my father, that I wasn’t there to ask for money or inheritance or anything else, I just wanted to meet him,” Mr Albanese said.

Mr Albanese then described the moment he met his father as “extraordinary”.

“It was extraordinary. The bell rung ... and the door opened, he walked in and opened his arms to me and we embraced,” he recalled.

Still from ABC 730 of a photograph featuring Anthony Albanese with his father Carlo. Picture: Lisa Golden

“It was quite — it was incredibly generous of him, I think, and it was a very poignant moment.

“He immediately said that, yes, he knew my mother and understood the circumstances.

“So, given that he ... he married the woman, as his wife, as he had told my mother he would, and had been with her ever since, it was remarkable, I think, the generosity with which he responded.”

He said he also met Carlo’s son and daughter.

“All of a sudden, with the exception of my son Nathan, the three closest blood relatives to me, in the world, who I’d never met before were standing in this room and we sat down and conversed for about an hour and a half,’ he said.

“It’s hard to put into words ... how I felt. It was just completely overwhelming.

“I felt a connection to them and I felt like a gap had been filled, the fact that there was no doubt either or no questioning was a great sense of relief.”

While Carlo died from cancer in 2014, Mr Albanese said he and his family regularly visited him in Italy after they met.

“He died in January of 2014 and I was very pleased that I was able to have that final engagement with him. He was lucid and he told me — the last conversation we had was that he was glad that we had found each other,” he said.