Unionists, friends and family celebrate Nando Lelli's life

That is how fellow unionists have remembered Ferdinando Lelli, the late Illawarra union leader better known as Nando, who died earlier this month at the age of 90.

A celebration of Mr Lelli's life was held on Wednesday afternoon, with family, friends and former colleagues gathering to pay tribute to the man famed for triggering transformation in the region's union movement and helping save the Port Kembla steelworks in the early 1980s.

Read more: Vale Nando Lelli, fighter for those without a voice

Mr Lelli served as first assistant secretary and then secretary of the Federation Ironworkers Association's Port Kembla branch, and later as president of the South Coast Labour Council.

"Nando became a symbol of working class organisation and progress, and an ability to bring the community together for the things that matter," SCLC secretary Arthur Rorris said.

Mr Rorris said he would never forget seeing as an 18-year-old Mr Lelli speaking with such love and passion for the rank-and-file at one of the massive meetings held at the Wollongong Showground.

Andrew Whiley, the former president of the Port Kembla, South Coast and Southern Highlands branch of the FIA/Australian Workers' Union, said the election of Mr Lelli and the rank-and-file team to the branch's leadership sparked great transformation and for employers, things were never the same again.

Mr Whiley said Mr Lelli was "a force to be reckoned with against some of the best legal minds in the country" in the courtrooms and tribunals, when he went in to bat for the workers.

Also present at the event was Mr Lelli's longtime friend Andy Gillespie, who served alongside Mr Lelli as assistant secretary of the FIA and later became secretary himself.

First elected to the union leadership team in 1971, Mr Gillespie said he and Mr Lelli faced five "nasty" elections and won one by five votes to one, such was his friend's popularity.

"He was a man who had a heart the size of the world, and he didn't have a bad word to say about too many people, he saw the best in people," Mr Gillespie said.

He remembered his friend as not only a fierce unionist who fought for workers, but a man who was enormously proud of his family.

"I'm proud to know him as my mate," Mr Gillespie said.

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