My Maltese ancestry and proud Australian heritage
I’m proud of who I am and of the people who came before me. My great-grandfather Amletu Spiteri was one of the great voices of Maltese Għana. My cousin Lino Spiteri was Malta’s Minister of Finance, Chairman of the Central Bank, journalist, novelist and is still remembered with affection and popularity in Malta today, due to the great impact he made. My grandfather Frank Cefai helped build homes and infrastructure for thousands of families in western Sydney, and did countless favours for the community along the way. And my maternal grandfather Joseph Spiteri gave a lifetime to the Greystanes Maltese festa and to keeping Maltese culture and traditions alive in Sydney.
My Maltese family, from Malta to Sydney
My family history runs from the stonemasons and singers from Qormi (the Spiteris) and the builders from Żebbuġ, Gozo (the Cefais) to the Maltese community of western Sydney. Greystanes is where I grew up, and it explains a lot about me, from my love of history and culture to the habit of building things properly. It’s where my family brought their faith, their traditions and their festa, and their trades too.
My wife, my kids and my parents
A small thanks
My grandparents, my parents, my wife and my kids made me who I am. If it wasn’t for them, I would be nothing. This page is a small thanks to them for the simple and humble life I have.
The first wedding at OLQP
My parents, Dominic and Mary, were the first couple to be married at Our Lady Queen of Peace in Greystanes. It’s also where they met.
Nannu Frank Cefai was building the church, together with my father Dominic, and Nannu Joseph Spiteri was painting it for him. That’s how my mother and father found each other, and how the Cefai and Spiteri families came together.
The people who shaped me
My parents shaped me and inspired me to be who and what I am today. Everything I’ve done started with them.
Greystanes and the west
My childhood in Greystanes is where my roots are, and always will be. I have fond memories of Greystanes, South Wentworthville, Parramatta, Merrylands and the whole area around them.
I feel privileged to have caught the end of what really were the good days and the good times.
Frank Cefai: from a Gozo orphanage to building western Sydney
Frank Cefai’s father, known as Skaldi, was one of the builders who worked on the Ta’ Pinu Basilica in Gozo. Carpentry and building run through the Cefai family all the way back to medieval times, as referenced in the Cefai surname history held at the National Library of Malta in Valletta.
Frank carried on that tradition. In 1949, a year before he emigrated, he built the roof of the Fratellanza at Knisja ta’ Cefai, the Cefai church at Għajn Għammar (locally also called Għammieri), directly opposite the Ta’ Pinu National Shrine in Għarb.
An orphanage, a trade and Rita
Frank was born Fortunato Cefai in Żebbuġ, Gozo, in 1924, and is known in Australia as Frank Charles Cefai. His father died when he was six, and Frank and his brother George were placed in an orphanage in Għajnsielem, where they stayed until he was 16. He went back to his mother, then crossed to Malta to work as a carpenter, living with his uncle John.
When conscription came, he found work with the Royal Engineers at St Andrew’s Barracks for three or four years, then worked for his grandfather repairing war-damaged theatres. In 1945, while fixing the windows and doors at her aunt’s house, he met Rita. They married after the war.
“Don’t worry about putting a tie on, son”
Frank had watched his mates leave for Australia, and the Australian government was calling for tradesmen. He went to his interview at the Australian consulate straight from the joinery, still covered in sawdust. The officer shook his hand and told him: “Don’t worry about putting a tie on, son. You’re the type we want in Australia.”
Frank, Rita and their three children left Malta on 26 March 1950 and arrived at Pyrmont on 1 May, after six and a half weeks of rough seas on a crowded ship where many children fell ill. Their youngest was three months old.
Starting from nothing
They lived in Victoria Street, Smithfield, for six months before Frank bought a block on the Horsley Drive and built his own house, with sheets for curtains at first. He worked on the hostels at East Hills, taking his push bike on the train each day.
When he and his brother fitted two doors and two windows in one day instead of three, the foreman told him to go out and start his own business. That’s exactly what he did. Weekends went on converting sedans into utes and cutting hair, and as people watched him build his own home, the work kept coming: sheds, half-houses, roofs.
Building Greystanes
From 1956, Frank worked on the Greystanes parish every single year. He built the first wing of St Simon Stock at Pendle Hill, eight classrooms and a church, the first Greystanes church for the Carmelites under Father Paul Knuppel, and then the new Our Lady Queen of Peace church, where my father Dominic was the first to be married. The technical, art and science blocks and the primary school followed.
He also built the Patrician Brothers’ monastery in Granville, the convent and presbytery in Smithfield, schools and a Carmelite monastery in Wentworthville, and around 26 projects in Holroyd Council. Some of his tradesmen stayed with him for 25 to 34 years.
The altar cross
In Malta, Frank also crafted the altar cross for the original St. Julian’s parish church, the one that came before today’s St. Julian’s Parish Church on Triq Lapsi.
The cross isn’t on display in the new church. It’s kept in storage and brought out each year for the parish feast processions in late August, with the main feast day on the last Sunday of the month.
La Valette, the festa and the war memorial
Frank built the La Valette club on Walters Road, Blacktown, beside the Maltese retirement village he also built. The club’s foundation stone was laid by the President of Malta, Agatha Barbara, and the Bishop of Malta came for the blessing. He renovated the Maltese club in Liverpool, built the Cumberland Catholic Club and, in the Bicentennial year, put up the war memorial on Civic Avenue, Pendle Hill.
As soon as his first building at Pendle Hill was finished, the Maltese began celebrating the feast of Our Lady of Victories there: the festa my grandfather Joe would go on to lead for more than 50 years.
“The opportunities are there, not only for me but for everybody… It’s a great country, and still a future, for whoever is determined to work hard.” — Frank Cefai, 1991
The newspaper tribute
When Frank died in July 2023, aged 99, the Parramatta Advertiser and The Daily Telegraph published a tribute to him by Joanne Vella, calling him “the King of Greystanes”. It’s republished here with permission.
Open the tribute as a PDFFrank Cefai in his own words
Recorded on 12 June 1991, when Jane Camilleri interviewed Frank and my grandmother Rita at their home about coming to Australia and the life they built here.
Joseph Spiteri and the Greystanes Maltese festa
50+ years leading the Greystanes festa
My grandfather Joe was born in Qormi and came to Sydney as a young man. In 1966 he was one of the founding members of the Maltese festa committee at Our Lady Queen of Peace in Greystanes, and he became its longest-serving president. The festa still brings thousands of people to Greystanes every year.
An interview with Joe Spiteri
My grandfather Joe Spiteri talking about his life and the Maltese festa in Greystanes.
Amletu Spiteri and the Qormi roots
One of the great voices of Maltese għana
My great-grandparents, Ġanmarì Spiteri and Maria Carmela (née Mamo), were both from Qormi. Maria Carmela died at just 23, giving birth to twins.
Ġanmarì, nicknamed Amletu, was a stonemason by trade and worked on the foundations of St Sebastian’s Church in Qormi. He was also a renowned singer of għana, Malta’s traditional folk singing, and loved working proverbs and idioms into his songs. He was the uncle of Lino Spiteri, and he sang around Malta for the Labour movement and to promote the young Lino.
Amletu’s voice also lives on through another branch of the family. His sister was the paternal grandmother of Kevin Borg, the Maltese singer from Floriana who won Swedish Idol in 2008 and went on to write and produce for some of Japan’s best-selling artists, including Arashi, with platinum records in Japan and Sweden. At the first Festgħana in Floriana in May 2026, Kevin sang a selection of Amletu’s songs, chosen from the surviving reel recordings with guitarists Karol and Jorge Aquilina of Nofsillejl, in a show called Il-Legat ta’ Ġanmarì Spiteri Amletu (The legacy of Ġanmarì Spiteri Amletu).
Read Amletu’s story in Maltese and English →Aqra l-istorja ta’ Amletu bil-Malti u bl-Ingliż
Triq Amleto Spiteri
Qormi named a street after him, so he is remembered both as a folk singer and as a worker who lost his life on the job. Festivals Malta has also paid tribute to his legacy.
A workplace accident and the interdiction
Amletu died on 3 June 1962, when a ceiling collapsed on him while he was repairing a building. He was given extreme unction, but once it was known who he was, his family was told the sacrament did not count because Amletu was a Labour activist.
During the interdiction, those ‘interdicted’ could not receive the sacraments and, when they died, were buried in unconsecrated ground, in a part of the Addolorata cemetery popularly called by the pejorative term Il-Miżbla, the dump. Several Labour Party activists were buried there with Amletu. In 2011 he was one of the seven people named and remembered when a monument to the Labour members who suffered during the dispute was unveiled, as The Malta Independent reported.
He was even denied burial in the Spiteri family grave, as MaltaToday recorded when it named “Amleto Spiteri, uncle of the late Labour minister Lino Spiteri” among those buried in the Miżbla. The wall separating the Miżbla from the rest of the cemetery was only removed in 1969.
On 2 November 2019, Archbishop Charles Scicluna blessed the graves of the Miżbla and asked forgiveness for the wall that had been built between them and the rest of the cemetery, a gesture the Times of Malta called the boldest step ever.
In 2012 I took my grandfather Joe to visit Amletu’s tombstone for the first time in his life.
Lino Spiteri (1938–2014): politician, journalist and novelist
One of Malta’s sharpest economic minds
Lino Spiteri was born in Qormi in 1938 and elected to Malta’s parliament in 1962, at just 23. Amletu sang għana around Malta promoting Lino and helping him build support in those early years.
The interdiction touched Lino too. Because of his Labour activism, the Church would not give him a proper wedding at the altar. Like other Labour figures of the time, he married in the sacristy of St Paul’s in Rabat, and the ceremony was conducted in English, as if he were a foreigner rather than a Maltese Catholic. MaltaToday and Spunt have both written about it.
He joined the Central Bank of Malta in 1970 and later served as its chairman, as The Malta Independent noted when he died in 2014.
Lino served as Minister of Finance from 1981 to 1983 and as Minister for Trade and Economic Planning from 1983 to 1987. He was also a journalist and novelist, writing novels and short stories and a regular newspaper column.
The Lino Spiteri Foundation
The foundation carries on his work, helping people who face long-term unemployment, including people with a disability, into work.
The life of Lino Spiteri
Lino’s life story, told for his 70th birthday at the launch of Lino: A Tribute, a Festschrift in his honour. Produced by Norman Vella and narrated by Clare Agius.
Lino Spiteri commemoration, 2015
An evening commemorating Lino, held in 2015 by the Tumas Fenech Foundation for Education in Journalism.