Page 459 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 18 March 2014
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each other’s hearts and minds happy and healthy. The Heart Foundation walking group the Groovy Grannies celebrated eight years together last Thursday, and I was very happy to join them for a coffee and a chat at a celebratory breakfast at Birrigai Cafe, Kangara Waters, in Belconnen.
I want to thank and congratulate the members of the Groovy Grannies walking group. At the breakfast last week were Edna Kauffman, Frances Noble, Jean Richens—and I will come back to Jean in a minute because there is an important connection to this story—Vicki Bray, Ella Hankinson, who is a 94-year-old member of the Groovy Grannies, Margo Irons, Dorothy Luckman, Rosemary Myers, Colleen Perriman, Kath Wilkinson, Graham Wright, and me. Other members of the Groovy Grannies include Margaret Bailey, Marjorie Emery, Ann Gould, Ann Lancaster, Suzanne Lyons, Sam Morgan, and Carmen Prieto.
I would also like to acknowledge, as part of the Heart Foundation walking group, Mr Bill Catty, who is the ACT walking project officer, who tells me that we have 500 walkers across the ACT and region. There are 60 groups, and he encourages people to join up to a local Heart Foundation walking group in their area. I can tell you from my own experience, from talking with these people and finding out the connections within your community, that there is no better way than doing it on an early morning walk around your local suburbs.
Getting back to Jean Richens, we had a lovely breakfast at the Birrigai Cafe, but they could in no way compete with Jean Richens’s scones, which are famous across the ACT. I know that anybody—perhaps yourself, Madam Deputy Speaker—who has tried Jean Richens’s scones at the UnitingCare monster garage sale would agree that they are the best scones in Canberra. I would encourage everybody to go down and have a go at a bake-off. There is no recipe. She says it is all just magic; it is all about how you knead the dough, and she is not willing to share what that recipe is,
It is really lovely to hear stories about people like Jean Richens and their connection to the community through their walking groups, through their church and through their community groups. We all come together on one morning once a week to chat. Fair dinkum; we sound like a gaggle of geese when we are walking along through the Umbagong park at Latham. It really is a lovely way to start the day, and I encourage everybody to join up to their local Heart Foundation walking group if they can.
International Mother Language Day walk
DR BOURKE (Ginninderra) (4.47): Tonight I would like to thank Canberra’s Bangladeshi community in particular for organising the inaugural International Mother Language Day walk in Canberra on Friday, 21 February. I also congratulate all those from all communities who walked the walk to promote the right of all peoples to speak their mother language.
We met at the international flags on the lake foreshore with an acknowledgement of Canberra’s traditional owners and the Bangladeshi martyrs who died in 1952 protesting for their mother language, Bengali, to become their national language. The event was a great success, with 300 people taking part in the early evening walk from
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