Page 1356 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 March 2012
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I would also like to congratulate the RMHC Canberra board members—Con Kourpanidis, Mark Creelman, Ben Stockbridge, Kate Beohm, Craig Coleman, Tim Gavel, Hani Sidaros and Bob Samareq.
I congratulate all those great people who were involved in putting the night together. It was a fantastic night. At the last count I saw it had raised over $250,000 and was nudging towards $300,000, which is a fantastic contribution towards setting up Ronald McDonald House.
I look forward to the whole community getting behind the board and the people associated with Ronald McDonald House to make sure that it is a success and provides for those young children and their families who are suffering from an illness.
Mr Lincoln Hall
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.58): I would like to take the opportunity tonight to say a few words about a prominent Canberran who passed away last Tuesday, the mountaineer, Lincoln Hall. Whilst I did not have the good fortune of knowing Lincoln Hall personally, his story is a remarkable one that warrants a focus in this place.
Lincoln was born in Canberra, grew up in Red Hill and went to school at Telopea Park high school where he had his first introduction to climbing at Booroomba rocks in Namadgi national park. Lincoln is most well known for having gone on to tackle the ultimate peak on the planet and for having survived an unimaginable ordeal there. But many Canberrans will remember him for his time with the ANU Mountaineering Club, which I was a member of at one point, where he developed his climbing skills on the walls of ANU buildings.
Lincoln started mountaineering with club expeditions to New Zealand and then at Dunagiri in the Himalayas where he played a pivotal role in the summit push and lost some toes to frostbite. He went on to join and lead numerous climbing adventures around the world, including three expeditions to climb Everest, including the first Australian expedition in 1984, the first ascent of Mount Minto in Antarctica in 1998 and other notable peaks such as Annapurna II. Accounts of these climbs will show that Hall partnered on these trips with Tim Macartney-Snape and Greg Mortimer, names that are very familiar to Australians who were inspired by these pioneering trips.
Lincoln Hall was, of course, most well known for his miraculous survival near the summit of Mount Everest in 2006 when he was left for dead and survived the night. Here I take up the story from the obituary in the Canberra Times on Saturday by Malcolm Brown. I would urge anybody that missed it to have a read. He picks up the tale and says of Hall:
On May 25, when descending, he was struck by altitude sickness, causing him to hallucinate. His climbing companions waited with him for two hours but he was not breathing and had no pulse. Expedition leader Alexander Abromov ordered them to return to camp. A statement was released announcing his death. But Hall decided his time had not come.
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