Community mourns loss of a ‘champion’
A Sicilian immigrant who overcame extreme adversity to forge a family dynasty has been remembered as a legendary North Queenslander and proud Australian battler.
Mario Torrisi, “Ingham’s last canecutter”, was laid to rest after a moving service at St Patrick’s Church attended by about 450 mourners on Tuesday. He was a month shy of 92.
Mr Torrisi, who is survived by three children and five granddaughters, was a tireless campaigner and fundraiser for issues that he believed adversely affected others, last making newspaper headlines when a car rolled in his front garden on his 90th birthday.
“Of course, it happened to Mario,” daughter Yolanda said at her father’s home on Davidson St on Wednesday.
“We always used to call him ‘Mario the Media Man’ and only he knew how to get into the media with his lobbying, his issues of the day, anything that he was passionate about or working on.”
Ms Torrisi said her father escaped post-war Italy as an 18-year-old in 1951, settling in North Queensland where he worked as a canecutter in the Herbert River districts.
It was brutal, back-breaking work, punctuated by fruit picking in the slack in Shepparton, Victoria, where Mr Torrisi met his future wife, in the Christmas of 1961, marrying three weeks later.
Ms Torrisi said her father was a fiercely proud Australian with a love for “Queen Elizabeth, who gave him a safe haven and a safe home in one of her colonies”.
“He was naturalised as a subject of the British Empire back then and he held that respect for the opportunities that this country and being an Australia gave him.”
Despite the poverty he had escaped in Sicily, he never forgot his homeland and was instrumental in erecting the Alpini Monument in the Keith Payne VC Ingham Botanical Gardens and the Rotary Park Clock gifted to the Hinchinbrook shire by the Ingham Sicilian Cultural Association, Ms Torrisi said.
Mr Torrisi, a staunch advocate for the ultimately successful relocation of the fruit bats from the memorial gardens, was also instrumental in the erection of the Canecutter Statue in Lannercost St.
For his efforts, as well as key involvement in the Italian and Maraka festivals in Ingham, Mr Torrisi was honoured for his achievements with an Individual Achievement Award by the Hinchinbrook
Shire Council on Australia Day in 2016. Mr Torrisi was again nominated for Hinchinbrook Shire Citizen of the Year Award this year, but fell ill just days before the ceremony.
He died peacefully on May 16.
“He only had a year 5 education, but he would help anybody who needed help,” Ms Torrisi said.
Federal MP Bob Katter attended the funeral service.
Hinchinbrook MP Nick Dametto said Mr Torrisi was a “community champion” and selfless man who not once asked for help for himself.
“Instead he used every conversation to advocate for others and improvements to the town of Ingham as a whole,” he said.
“I feel like Mario has already booked a meeting with the good Lord to make some suggestions.”