Page 816 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 29 March 2006
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Canberra Institute of Technology—fashion parade
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (6.07): Mr Speaker, in the spirit of Youth Week, I want to talk about an event that I went to last Saturday. I also have a cuddly toy here because I was on the stairs talking to some members who are anticipating that, with the success of my motion, we will soon need to have lollies and toys in the Assembly. I just want to show that it is not only children who play with toys. That was given to me by a constituent who probably thought I would need it from time to time.
I went to an event on Saturday night that highlighted the creativity of young people in the ACT. It was called “Forecast: art and fashion” and it was a joint project of the National Gallery of Australia and students from the CIT fashion design course. There was a very large crowd of people there. It was a modern event, which means that you had to stand for hours, and there were quite long gaps between the young people coming on and showing the fashion.
The fashion was on the theme of weather, based on the Constable exhibition which is on at the gallery at the moment. This does show, first of all, what happens when some of our national institutes merge with, in this case, our local educational institutions and the resources of the gallery were available to everyone who went. We were all able to go and look at the Constable exhibition. It provided a theme and a very classy venue for those young people to display their design work. It just had to be a real morale booster for them to see their work shown in a space like that.
The fashion parade was interesting in that it was not on the traditional boardwalk, with people going on and then going off. Quantum Leap, the youth choreographic ensemble, modelled the clothes and did so in the form of dance. It was absolutely spectacular to see. I went with my 16-year-old daughter who, I am sure, would exercise the right to vote if it were made available to her, though I think it is quite possible that it will be too late by the time she gets there. She also gave a young person’s approval of the event, and I think that is really important.
I just want to commend those kinds of collaborations. I hope that we will see a lot more of them. It is something that the ACT government will support and, indeed, coordinate and instigate in the future.
Italian immigration
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (6.10): Mr Speaker, on 11 December 2001, in my maiden speech, I began like this:
On the Pacific Highway, just south of Woodburn, there is a simple stone memorial flanked by the flags of Italy and Australia. This is the site where in 1881 a score of Italian families made a new life on land given them by Henry Parkes. They called it “New Italy”.
On Sunday, 9 April the descendants of the New Italy settlers will celebrate the 125th anniversary of the arrival of those families on the Richmond River and 125 years of Italian migration to that region. As members would know, I am one of the ancestors of
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