Welcome to the Melocco Bros Virtual tour:
1908 - 1961

The Melocco Brothers

Tony, Galli & Peter

The legend of the three brothers Melocco is a saga of multicultural Australia before there was even talk of such a phrase. These Italians dealt in beautiful stone and in great public works; in projects that glorified the spirit that had helped Sydney grow from a provincial colonial outpost to a cosmopolitan city. Francis Ford Coppolla said that when he made the Godfather films he was not making a movie about gangsters but that he was expressing what drove Italians and that was first, now and always - the family.

Family was the key to the success of the Melocco brothers. The bond between the brothers brought them together to this city and the ties and trust of brotherhood allowed them to survive the vicissitudes of the turbulent twentieth century in which they lived.

The brothers were unashamedly Italian to the core. However they embraced and loved Australia and saw artistically that the future of this country was in its assimilation of many different cultures.

Take for instance the floor of the State Library in Macquarie Street in which Italian artistry handed down over a millennium has been applied to a map drawn by a Dutchman of a new continent in the second largest mosaic work of its kind in the world.

Or perhaps take Peter Melocco’s masterwork, the crypt of St. Mary’s cathedral where inspiration from Sienna and other Italian churches has been applied to Celtic iconography in a masterpiece of devotional art.

Ninety percent of the marble, scagliola and terrazzo work which was done in Sydney between 1910 and 1965 was the work of the Melocco's and their studio. It is only that the city has been cursed by rapacious property development that more of their artistry hasn’t survived.

For most of this century the lives of Sydneysiders was everyday touched in some ways by the Meloccos. People arrived at Kingsford Smith airport and took the main thoroughfare into the city down Botany Road laid by Galli Melocco or they caught the train, booking their ticket under the glorious frieze and mosaic work in the Central Station ticketing office, they read the daily newspapers that came from the Fairfax building on Broadway with its magnificent marble foyer and they bought their books at Dymocks where the entrance displayed the Melocco craftsmanship and they shopped amidst the marbled marketplaces of David Jones and Mark Foys. Sydney was entertained in the glorious picture palaces of which only the State and the Capitol sadly remain. The wheels of commerce were turned under scagliola columns perfected by Tony Melocco especially in the Commonwealth Bank but also in the unfortunately lost State Bank in Martin Place. They drank in the opulence of the Hotel Australia or the Tattersals and they aspired to live on the Harbour in Boomerang whose interior so recently made famous by Tom Cruise was designed and crafted by the Melocco Brothers.

It was not just the icons however that the Meloccos bequeathed to Sydney but in their concrete business the very fabric that ran through every aspect of the city - all those quaint old cement mixers came from the Meloccos, most of the marble cladding and the mosaic work in churches and houses throughout the inner city is the legacy of these three brothers.

The Melocco family can be traced back to the 12th Century. But it was in 1725 that this story starts; when Peter Melocco, great-grandfather of Peter, Antonio and Galliano established the family in Toppo, in Friuli, an area which traditionally supplied mosaic workers to Venice and France nearby.

At the end of the 19th century Pietro, the eldest son of the new generation of Meloccos was despatched from Toppo to further his career in America where he settled with his aunt and uncle in New York City. He was disappointed in the weather, the corruption and the massive division between the classes that he found there and he resolved to try his luck on the other side of the world.

In early 1908 Peter Melocco aged twenty-five arrived in Sydney and while quarantined on a boat in Sydney harbour, fell in love with this city. He found work within two days and within six months had set up his own workshop and begun the Company which was to become Melocco Brothers.

In early October 1908, in a tiny rented shopfront by the railway line in Redfern, Peter began work on his first Australian commission — the intricate, Celtic-inspired mosaic floor for the Irish Chapel in Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral.

Poring over an already well thumbed copy of the Book of Kells by gaslight at night, Peter woke each morning to refine and execute his designs, finally lugging the finished slabs of marble and terrazzo mosaic across town to the cathedral by wheelbarrow and by tram. Peter was to work on the cathedral on and off for the rest of his professional life. The profit he made on the job allowed him to set up on his own, mostly designing and building interiors in the Eastern suburbs.

Within a couple of years Peter was sending back word to Toppo that Australia was the place to be and his brothers Tony and Galli came out.

Galli was sent to school and Tony joined his brother in the family business. Tony had studied mosaic in Paris from one of the great masters and was already a committed craftsman. Peter and Tony returned to the work which dominated the company’s early years — the installation and design of terrazzo bathrooms in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. Melocco Brothers introduced terrazzo to Australia and it quickly became popular as a bathroom material. During these years, the brothers lived frugally and often still transported their materials by foot or by tram.

By the 1920s the Brothers had bought their premises at 1 Booth Street Annandale, down the road from the houses Peter built for the family, in which their sisters and mother lived.

Galli was keen to see the world and joined the merchant marine for some years before buying into the business in the late twenties. While Galli admired and respected his brothers’ terrazzo and mosaic work, he focused on expanding the business into concrete and later road works.

For the Government Savings Bank (now the Commonwealth Bank) in Martin Place, Tony resurrected the old Italian technique of scagliola in 1928. Scagliola is an imitation marble made of keen cement. Peter travelled throughout Italy and the United States researching the technique. He found no one who could help him in Italy. An artisan with some experience of the material was located in America and later brought to Australia, however his craftsmanship was deemed insufficient and it fell ultimately to Tony to perfect the Meloccos Brothers formula. Tony spent days and nights in the Melocco Brothers’ workshop refining both the technique and formula until he developed the much prized scagliola which became a Melocco Brothers’ trade secret. Indeed, during construction, the columns in the bank were surrounded by hessian screens to preserve the secret. Melocco Brothers also completed some of its most elaborate plaster and marble work for the Bank's interior.

Fraternal solidarity played an important role in then success of the Meloccos. When one arm of the business was struggling in the Depression, then another part flourished. Galli at one point moved to Queensland to open a division there because there wasn’t enough work in Sydney.

Most of all, the brothers had a massive pride in their work. All their children remember their fathers’ idea of a Sunday outing was to cruise around the current projects. They certainly made sacrifices for their work but their families prospered and the children held their fathers in awe.

The Melocco Brothers rose to considerable prominence in Sydney through the '30s and they were one of the first Italian families to make an impression on corporate Australia. They were involved in the cultural life of the Italo-Australian community but they also were known and respected in all levels of government.

With the outbreak of war with Italy in 1940 Peter Melocco was interned for five weeks at a camp in Orange but was liberated by the Australian Ambassador for the US and members of Federal Cabinet. Ironically back in 1934 Peter Melocco had designed and built the interior of the War Memorial which stands in Hyde Park with its magnificent bronze sculpture from Raynor Hoff at the centre.

As soon as the war ended, the Melocco brothers began to organise an humanitarian relief effort. Through the Red Cross and other agencies, they channelled aid to a devastated Italy and they tried also to assist the increasing numbers of refugees from Italy arriving in Australia.

That same year, work began on the mosaic inlay floor of St Mary’s crypt in Sydney. Peter Melocco’s design, in the shape of a Celtic cross, was created in consultation with the late Rev Dr W Leonard, a theologian at St Patrick’s College, then in Manly. This was the last and greatest work of Peter Melocco and is considered one of the finest mosaic floors in the world.

In the post-war years, Peter Melocco worked closely with Immigration Minister Arthur Caldwell to bring out artisans from the Friuli district back in Italy. Indeed almost every able-bodied mason from Toppo or Friuli ended up at Booth Street Annandale. It was important to Peter that the crafts and history of his art were kept alive in Australia. He made frequent trips back to Italy to check on technique, materials and to refresh his inspiration from the great masters of northern Italy.

Tragically, Tony Melocco died of Parkinson’s disease and didn’t see the firm flourish in its last phase. The post-war boom was a gift to the concrete business and then in the 1950s the marble and terrazzo also blossomed with the massive burst of corporate construction in Sydney and Canberra.

For Peter Melocco his labour of love between the end of the war and its completion in 1958 was the crypt of St. Mary’s Cathedral. In these last decades he focused on increasing the level of artistry and craftsmanship in Melocco projects. This can be seen in the sandblasted scagliola in Central Railway.

For Galli the post-war years were reaping the growth that came from the toil of the brothers youth. By the end of the 1950s Melocco Brothers were purchasing a thousand tons of aggregate a day from BMI. When the company secured the lease on the its own supply of gravel and sand, BMI made Melocco Brothers an offer they couldn’t refuse.

In 1961 with Peter grievously ill, Melocco Brothers became a subsidiary of Blue Metal Industries Ltd.

It has to be said that the Melocco name has always been synonymous with quality. However, once the original family members gradually left the company, its character did change. The work of Melocco Brothers up until 1961 was a quite personal fusion of Italian and Australian culture and arts.

This then is the story of how a family can live in a place for two hundred years and then transport that rich culture to the other side of the world. This is the story of how Sydney came to be how it is. It’s a story of multiculturalism at its best. But mostly it’s the story of three brothers who loved their families and loved their work and that devotion was set in stone.