Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On Sunday I attended two Holi Festivals of Colours in the Parramatta electorate. The first one, hosted by Hindi Samaaj, a regular event at Upjohn Park, was its usual wonderful family gathering. People came together in the tradition of Holi to laugh, play, forgive and repair broken relationships. They sat together for quite some time playing traditional music and singing. Of course, the traditional covering of each other with colours was undertaken. They were very bright, with red, yellow, blue and green all over their faces and their bodies in a wonderful celebration of a very old festival. Then I went to North Parramatta for a second festival hosted by Hindi Gaurav, which is one of our leading Hindi magazines. I thank Anuj Kulshrestha, the editor, for the invitation. It too was a wonderful event, with a very large area and lots of mainly young people getting very brightly coloured and smearing the colours on each other. One of my close friends there told me that the Festival of Colours also represents everyone accepting each other for who they are, separate from the colour of our skin, where we are all the same underneath. For him, the spreading of colours represents that we are all human beings and we are all equal. It was a lovely story that he told. He was covered in colour from head to foot at the time. I thank everyone in my community for sharing with me one of their great events.