It all started with a chicken farm. While she’s now a senior buyer at Serco, a leading provider of essential services for defence, justice, transport and other facilities, Amanda Tramontano was never intent on any particular career after high school – all she knew was that, despite the grades, university wasn’t for her.
“I started my working career as a chicken farmer for Baiada Poultry,” Tramontano says. “I worked on farms, became a farm manager and pretty much worked through the whole business. I worked on egg production farms, meat production farms. I worked in the hatcheries, and the processing plants, and eventually became what they called their live bird planner. So I was responsible for getting day-old chickens from hatcheries onto farms, plotting their growth, and then getting them into processing plans to fill sales orders.” Considering her journey, things have come a long way since farming chickens. After 13 years with Baiada, Tramontano would give the game away in search of something more intrinsically satisfying – a search that, via some detours, has led to her current role. “I asked myself the question: what’s your true love in life?” she says. “Mum and dad were both from families of 14 children, so I had heaps of aunties and uncles and even more cousins. Family get-togethers are always huge, they’re always a whole heap of fun, and they always revolve around food.”
Along with the ever-present food, openness to change seems to be a constant theme in Tramontano’s life. She talks of “falling into” jobs or taking “a sideways step” and, in her next move, her family’s foodie heritage would lead to owning Mash, an award-winning cafe and fine diner in Glenbrook on the edge of the Blue Mountains, NSW. Only ever intending to run the front of house, it was her chef suddenly quitting that would prove fateful for Tramontano’s next big move. “I turned up and did a shift in the kitchen,” she says. “And you know what? I really loved it. I enjoyed the adrenaline rush that you get from a busy service.”
I’ve had this discovery where the left hand doesn’t always know what the right hand does, and I want to make them hold hands tightly.”
Tramontano would end up chasing that rush all around Australia, selling Mash a few years later for the life of the itinerant chef, living and travelling in a caravan for three years before eventually landing in Perth. Here, another pivot – this time, into a catering assistant role with Serco. Tramontano is aware of her charmed run, and giving back some of the skills she picked up along the way has been one of the rewards of working in-house with Serco catering.
“In Clarence [Correctional Centre] in the catering department, we were pushing out up to 5000 meals a day, so we use the work in the kitchen to facilitate training inmates, like Cert II in Hospitality Kitchen Operations,” she says. “We can service this facility and they’re also
gaining qualifications, which is cool.”
With a jump into procurement (“It’s different but I think the skills are transferable,” she says) and a recent 50th birthday, Tramontano is keen to turn over a new leaf, turning ambition into contentment, at least for the time being. “I’m still very driven to do my job well, but I’m not looking too far ahead,” she says. “I’ve had this discovery where the left hand doesn’t always know what the right hands does, and I want to make them hold hands tightly.”
