Page 4221 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 26 November 2013
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One of the other lasting legacies, I hope, or one of the other things I would like to see us deliver on, is the dollars for Dili campaign. We set ourselves a challenge to raise $1 for every Canberran to go and support community capacity building projects in Dili, with our friendship city hat on. To date, we are still short of $200,000. I am not sure that we are going to reach $360,000 in this calendar year but I am determined to deliver on that commitment to the people of East Timor and we will continue to raise funds for dollars for Dili into next year, if that is what is required.
There have been a number of other events. The Centenary Trail is a fantastic initiative that has come out the centenary and will be an ongoing legacy for generations to come. I have started walking the Centenary Trail. It is a 145-kilometre trail that links Canberra up in seven different stages. You can ride it or walk it. The stages vary from 20 kilometres to 30 kilometres. It is very achievable and I think it will give people a unique view of Canberra, which is why I am determined to walk it as soon as I can. I have set myself the challenge of one stage per month, heading out early to do the walk. I think it is important that we understand the environment in which we live and where we represent different communities. Certainly, for someone who has lived here my whole life, stage 1 took me through areas of Canberra that I have not been to before and showed me views that I had not seen before. I think that is an important and lasting gift from the centenary.
On Friday we were able to right a wrong and address the fact that Marion Mahony Griffin probably has not been as well recognised as she should have been for her role in winning the design competition for Canberra with her husband, Walter Burley Griffin. Being able to declare the view from Mount Ainslie as the Marion Mahony Griffin view has reminded us in the centenary year of Marion’s role in the story of Canberra and has made sure that that is appropriately recognised.
Going to the National Arboretum, I think it is, and will be, the most significant piece of infrastructure that represents Canberra in the centenary year when people review the centenary year in years to come.
Mr Smyth: It may well be but it wasn’t what it started as.
MS GALLAGHER: Perhaps in our 200th year they will have a look back at the National Arboretum. No, it did not start off as a centenary project, but from very early on, as community support for the project grew, despite the best scare campaign by those opposite, who sought to squash it into oblivion from day one, the National Arboretum has now had 450,000 visitors in its first 10 months of operation. It is extremely popular and Canberrans love it. It formally signalled the launch of the centenary year back in the first week of February, at dawn, when we formally opened the National Arboretum. I think it will proudly stand there as a lasting legacy of decisions that self-government and local government have taken to protect the future of our city and also to look at how we project ourselves out to the rest of Australia.
In terms of whether we have achieved what we set out to do, on some levels there are things that I would do differently, having gone through this year now, but I think that is the same for everything you do at work. Once you have been through a process, you
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