HOBART: 15 June 2011 -- On Monday, 13 June 2011, the
Australian Government released the traditional Queens
Birthday Honours list for 2011. Amongst those awarded the
Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) was Fr Frank
(Ferruccio) Bertagnolli SDB, currently the Rector of the
Salesian community in Hobart, Tasmania. The citation
was for his "services to youth and to the Order of the
Salesians of Don Bosco".
Fr Bertagnolli, from the Diocese of
Trento, Italy, came to Australia in the late 1950s,
following his novitiate in Chieri (Villa Moglia). He has
thus spent his entire Salesian life in Australia, and has
exercised many a prominent role at key moments in the
Province's history - is still exercising such a role as
Rector of the Tasmanian-based community with its very large
school and parish complex. Frank has been Rector on
several occasions in Communities in Melbourne, Sydney and
Hobart and has been Provincial, and Provincial Economer.
He came to Australia at a time when many
young men were sent from the Italian missionary-training
formation Houses, and at a time when the country was still
formally listed as a mission country. A number of these men
are likewise prominent and active in the Province and in the
Australian Church. Frank has remained in touch with others
who eventually found other paths, and is also highly
regarded by the Italian community, a very large community,
in Australia generally. He is a frequent contributor
to La Fiamma, the Italian-language newspaper in
Australia, and to SBS Italian language radio programs.
The mission-mindedness of the new OAM
recipient has never diminished, including his close interest
in the history of Italian missionaries who came to Australia
in the early years of the various colonies that were set up
after the British founded their first settlement in
1788. One of these stories has been of particular
interest to Frank - the life of Fr Angelo Confalonieri
amongst the Australian aborigines 1846-1848. Just two
years of a brief life, but what two years they were!
Confalonieri was the first Trentino to arrive in
Australia. Last year, Frank came to Trent as part of
the presentation of a book on this early missionary, to
which he had contributed significantly, including visiting
the priest's grave in the far-flung and remotest parts of
Australia's North. The introduction to the book has the
following to say by way of thanks:
"Thanks especially to Father Ferruccio Bertagnolli, a
'Trentino' by birth and active in Australia over the past
fifty years. He was amongst the first, after Cimadomo
(1850) to take up interest in the story of Don
Confalonieri, and it is through his initiative,
encouragement and perseverance that this intrepid trentino
missionary was rediscovered. Father Bertagnolli has been
superior, administrator (provincial economer) and rector
of various Salesian works in Australia and the Pacific.
The Salesians arrived in Australia in 1923 as missionaries
for the vast diocese of Broome (Kimberley, north-western
Australia) where the majority of the population was
aboriginal. The diocese returned to the Pallottines in
1927. In the 1980s, when Fr Bertagnolli was Provincial,
the Salesians were asked to take up two missions in
northern Australia. This is where his knowledge of and
interest in Confalonieri came from originally...".
austraLasia joins many
other well-wishers in congratulating Fr Frank Bertagnolli
OAM!
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