Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to make some remarks this evening about a dear friend who passed away a short time ago at age 95 after a life well lived. Kingswood resident, Max Harrison, christened Neven Maxwell Harrison, came to Australia with his family. His parents were Scottish. The family originally came here in 1892. Max was born in 1925.

Max Harrison was one of my original Liberal Party preselectors in 1997. That was how long we had known each other. He was an extraordinarily talented singer, which wasn't well known; he got himself a scholarship to the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. In 1934, when he was eight years old, he starred in a movie made by Charles Chauvel called Heritage. But, as was often the way in those days, with his brother he left school when he was 14 to pursue an apprenticeship, first on a dairy farm and then as a butcher. Then, as with so many men who grew up in the twenties and thirties, the Second World War took his younger years. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force to become an aircraft fitter. Ultimately, he was also involved in the difficult task of recovering his fallen mates who had crashed with their planes on the battlefield.

The conclusion of the war saw Max return to training at Kapooka in Wagga Wagga. I'm told he was ultimately spared deployment to the Korean Peninsula because, after an altercation with the camp butcher, he ended up with a broken arm. I suspect the rest of that is history, and that's where it will stay!

I heard in reminiscences about Max recently that Don Chipp was apparently the best man at his wedding, in those early days. He then became an entertainment director at the Army training centre, where he met his second and beloved wife, Dulcie Ruth Bourne, 'the most beautiful girl in the world'. He told everyone he spoke to, man, woman or child, that Dulcie Harrison was the most beautiful girl in the world.

They lived in Western Sydney from the mid-1950s, starting in Mount Druitt. In their home in Kingswood, where I was always welcome, they started their family with children Maxine, Joanne, Glen and David. They now have 17 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. It's an extraordinary family story.

In both home and public life Max was incredibly engaged, always looking to better the lives of his children and give back to his community. As his son David said at his funeral service recently—COVID-safe, just with family—he worked multiple jobs with Dulcie to support his family. He was the P&C president of his children's local primary and high schools, because it mattered how a school looked after his kids. He was a devoted freemason, something he would have shared with my own father. He was a distinguished member of Rotary, becoming a Paul Harris Fellow. He was a tireless supporter of our great Liberal Party and served as the long-time president of the Chifley conference. If you know Western Sydney at all, being the Liberal Party president of the Chifley conference is not exactly a rewarding task. But Max took every drop out of it with his passion for the Liberal Party. But he never allowed ideological persuasions to deter him from fighting for very practical advances for his community, whether it was rallying against plans to rezone the well-known Featherdale Wildlife Park, fighting for better health services in Mount Druitt and making a case for the then polyclinic centre to become a hospital—and a hospital it did become, opened by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1982—or establishing a neighbourhood centre in Kingswood, which he worked for over eight years to get the funding for. Today that neighbourhood centre is the beating heart of community groups, the local chapter of the University of the Third Age and the Nepean Domestic Violence Network. Fittingly, Max was awarded an OAM in 2012 for his work in establishing the centre.

He was extraordinarily witty and he would make extraordinarily ripostes in any conversation. He had a fondness for thrift and homemade keepsakes. In fact, when he became a Member of the Order of Australia, he thought he might borrow a champagne glass from the Government House ceremony to mark the occasion. He was a great larrikin and a man with a deep Christian faith and an incredible capacity for kindness. There aren't many people in the Western Sydney community of Penrith that I call home who did not know Max or who have not, in some way, been the beneficiary of his labours. He loved his Penrith Panthers, and I think he was profoundly disappointed that they didn't win the NRL Grand Final.

There is a picture of Max and Dulcie standing proudly outside the Kingswood Neighbourhood Centre behind my desk in my Parramatta electorate office. When I see this, I'm reminded how lucky I am to have had a friend like Max Harrison, to be friends with his family and, most importantly, to have known the contribution he made to Western Sydney, to New South Wales and to Australia. Vale, Max Harrison.

Senate adjourned at 21:56