Karate king Tino Ceberano and his daughter Kate have always shared a strong bond- but now they also share the distinction of having received Queen’s Birthday honours.

Adapted from interview with Danielle Buckley, Albert & Logan News, June 10th 2019 – rights attributed to the Logan Albert News.

FATHER of Australian karate Tino Ceberano Hanshi says he is on “cloud nine” after joining his famous singer daughter in earning Queen’s Birthday honours.

Ceberano, 77, has pioneered the martial art in Australia and taught more than 10,000 students over the past 53 years. Yesterday he received the Medal of the Order of Australia.

While many would know his famous songstress daughter Kate Ceberano — who received Member of the Order of Australia in 2016 — not many would know how to pronounce the family name. In their native Filipino Portuguese tongue, it is said with four syllables — Ce-ber-an-o.

Ceberano grew up on the Hawaiian garden isle of Kauai. The eldest of three children, Ceberano’s migrant father was an amateur boxer who taught him Filipino stick fighting, judo and how to box.

While there were no martial arts organisations in Hawaii, Ceberano said people learned the arts by “watching someone fight or by getting into a fight themselves”.

He moved to Honolulu when he was 15 to learn karate and trained under Sensei Masaichi Oshiro.

At the time karate was relatively unknown in Australia. “There was judo, a very much combative art as well as boxing, but nothing much of karate,” Tino Ceberano said.

At 17, he joined the US Marines and, after a tour with his squad to Australia, relocated his family to Melbourne in 1966 and started teaching Goju Kai karate under the direction of the Japanese grand-master Gogen Yamaguchi Hanshi. It was not long before he opened his first club or dojo in Canterbury, then Nth. Balwyn.

He was a founding member of FAKO which later became the Australian Karate Federation. He helped trained police officers and security workers and made regular appearances on radio and the Roy Hampson Show.

Today the Daisy Hill resident, who holds the nine dan rank, teaches classes around the world as Chief Instructor of International Goju Karate (I.G.K.) and works with disengaged students.

This morning, Tino Ceberano was still buzzing at the honour of receiving the medal for his services to karate.

“I am very, very much on cloud nine,” he said. “This is something I never thought would ever happen.”