Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to talk to the House about The Bunyip, which is a local paper in the town of Gawler. It is a paper with great heritage in the town. The former Speaker's grandfather was an editor of the paper, so it has an illustrious history in that regard as well. Sadly Natalie Vikhrov, who is a journalist with the newspaper and who has covered many stories which I have been in and many stories around the town, is leaving the paper and going to London. I take this opportunity to thank her for her work as a journalist in the town and for The Bunyip newspaper. She is off to London—which is a bit of a rite of passage of all young Australians, I suppose—and no doubt she will have a great time working in the media over there. I want to wish her well from Canberra.

One of the important community events I participated in last weekend, and last year, was the Indigenous Marathon Project's Seppetsfield fun run. It is a great event organised by Jo Weaver, who is a resident of Greenock. She puts it on every year, and the community comes out to have a fundraising dinner on the Saturday night in the Greenock pub—which I would recommend to anybody if they are ever in the Barossa Valley—and the next day you get out there and run between Marananga and Seppetsfield in the Barossa Valley. There are a number of hills—it is a very beautiful area and I would certainly recommend that any of those opposite go and try the port at Seppetsfield winery or some of the reds at Whistler Wines; it is a truly wonderful place—but I would not recommend that you run up and down the hills. It is pretty arduous, particularly with the summer heat coming on in South Australia. I think it is going to be 35 degrees in Adelaide today and it is a few degrees hotter when you get out past Elizabeth. I would not recommend necessarily running there unless you are pretty fit.

That said, we went out there and we had a great fundraising night and many of the Indigenous Marathon runners, former graduates of the Indigenous Marathon Project, were there. Adrian is the first Indigenous man to go to the North Pole—indeed, it was the first time he had ever seen snow. It was an extraordinary achievement for him to run the North Pole Marathon. Charlie was one of the first graduates and he ran the New York Marathon. Ruth ran the marathon I think in 2012 and is now working in the health sector in the APY Lands. Jurgen is a proud Torres Strait Islander from Saibai Island who has now come to South Australia, so we are lucky. He was a bit unlucky—his chance to run the New York Marathon got delayed by Hurricane Sandy so he ended up running a Japanese marathon in the winter. I think it was minus two or minus three degrees when he ran that, so you can imagine going from the Torres Strait to that sort of cold. Daniel is running the New York Marathon this year. Daniel is an extraordinary young man from Murray Bridge. He is working 12-hour shifts in the mines each day and then training for the marathon after getting home.

These young Indigenous leaders—and that is what they are—have shown extraordinary commitment and it is a tribute to Rob de Castella for taking on this really ambitious idea. We have talked before in this chamber about the Indigenous Marathon Foundation. It is an ambitious idea to take someone from Central Australia or even urban Australia, train them for six months and get them to not just run in the New York Marathon but complete it. Obviously we need more Australians to go out and do the fundraising for this project—it is reliant on government funding but they do have ambitions to do more. I urge everybody to, if you like, emulate Jo Weaver, put together a fun run and put together a fundraising night, because you really can change an Indigenous person's life—you can send them to run the New York Marathon but you can also create leaders for the Indigenous community in the process. I think that lifts everybody's spirits in terms of our reconciliation with Indigenous Australia. I said on the day that it is a bit like we are running a national marathon—we have some pretty tough stuff in our rear-vision mirror but we have to keep going and we have to put the Indigenous people of this land at the forefront of our national life and our Constitution and our hearts.