Senior Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese has detailed his journey to find his father for the first time on national television, admitting the process was "overwhelming" and "very emotional".
As first revealed in an authorised biography written by journalist Karen Middleton, Mr Albanese believed his father was dead until he was about 14 years old.
His late single mother, Maryanne Therese Albanese, had told her only son she had married his father overseas and he had died in a car accident.
"From an early age, that's what I believed," he told ABC on Tuesday.
Once Mr Albanese reached an age his mother believed appropriate, at 14, she told him his father may actually be alive.
Mrs Albanese had met Carlo Albanese on a four-week ocean voyage and fallen pregnant but he told her he was engaged to a girl in southern Italy and could not marry her.
She returned to Australia and raised her son alone.
"I think she was very concerned that I would feel somehow less about her," Mr Albanese explained about why telling him the truth was difficult for her.
"I think that whole guilt associated with having a child out of wedlock in 1963 as a young Catholic woman was a big deal.
"Hence, the extent to which she had gone to in terms of adopting my father's name, she wore an engagement and wedding ring."
Mrs Albanese died in 2002 and five years later he started the journey to see if he could find his father, using a photo of Carlos and his mother on the cruise ship.
Enlisting the head of Carnival Cruises, Ann Sherry, he tracked Carlos down.
"It is a moment I will never forget," he says.
After a series of letters, Mr Albanese met his father and learnt he had a brother and sister.
"So all of a sudden with the exception of my son, Nathan, the three closest blood relatives to me in the world who I had never met were standing in this room."
Carlos died from cancer in January 2014 but Mr Albanese got to say goodbye on a visit to Italy in 2013.
"During the 2013 election campaign Kevin Rudd knew that at any time I might depart to farewell him," he said of his funeral."
