austraLasia #2872
 
Fr Frank Bertagnolli SDB, OAM

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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