Constituency Statement – Enio Troiani

Mr PITT : Today I rise to acknowledge the passing of Enio Troiani. Enio passed away unexpectedly on 19 August at the age of 64. He was the beloved husband of Marianne and the dearly loved father and father-in-law of Natalie and Tyson, Pia and Chris, and Gabriella and Andrew.

Enio was a former workmate, colleague and friend, better known to me—and pretty much everyone in the sugar industry—as ET, for obvious reasons! At his funeral, I learned some things about Enio that I didn’t know before. With a name like Enio Troiani, he was obviously an Italian migrant, and, where I come from in Bundaberg, there are a lot of people with that sort of heritage. I never knew this, but Enio arrived in Australia at the age of three with his parents after a four-week boat trip. They were trying to find a better life, and they immediately moved out to a farm. In his eulogy, one of his children discussed Enio’s first day at school at the Welcome Creek State School, which, I have to say, even by standards then, was very, very small. Enio didn’t speak a single word of English. He went off to school, and, when the bell rang for lunch, he went home because he didn’t know any different, and he thought it was over.

Enio went on to become an individual who, in grade 10, told his parents that he was going to be an engineer, to which their response was, ‘We can’t afford that, and you need to work on the farm.’ He said, ‘I’ll get a scholarship,’ and he did. Enio went through the University of Queensland and, throughout the sugar industry, he was known for his skills and knowledge. He will be sorely missed. In fact, I spoke to one of my good friends and colleagues, Kelly Ryan, who is now the chief engineer at the Isis sugar mill and he said that ET was one of those engineers that, when you picked up the phone, you could talk to him about any sort of technical issue you had, and he could give you an answer. He didn’t have to wait to design it and put it on CAD and send it in an email and confirm it through the lawyers. He’d say, ‘No, make that plate thicker,’ or ‘Put this on here,’ or ‘Do this type of weld,’ and he would get things running. It’s an industry in which production matters and how much downtime you have matters, and what matters to every individual who works in that industry is that safety relies on the design of these facilities. Too many times we have seen incidents from explosions, boilers and steam loss—things that just shouldn’t happen—and it was designers like ET, who ended up as the general manager of the Bundaberg Walkers engineering at the end of his career, who ensured these things didn’t happen as often as they might.

He is a great loss and, as Kelly said, he’s one of these guys who was a joy to be around. He was a genuine individual, and I have to say I never gave a thought to the fact he was an Italian immigrant. He was just our mate who knew his stuff and whom we liked to work with. He is a great loss to his family, and I know that they will miss him dearly. His passing was incredibly unexpected. So to all of them, to all of his workmates and to the sugar industry as a whole, I say: this is a great loss. Vale ET, Enio Troiani.