Page 1631 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 14 May 2019
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Small businesses and the people who own and run them are integral to the health and wellbeing of our community work. I wish great success to all the entrepreneurs involved in any way with Scullin Traders. I strongly encourage the residents of my electorate of Ginninderra to stop by, have a look, and support this inspiring community effort and maybe even sign up for a shift or two.
Canberra—heritage festival
MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (6.41): I rise today to speak about the 37th annual heritage festival, which concluded on 5 May. It was a month or so of wonderful activities, a chance to reflect on our history as a city and, indeed, as a whole region.
It is good for us to learn from our history. It is something we should value: to think about where we have come from, what we have seen and what we have done, and how that affects us in the current time and into the future. To quote the poet Robert Penn Warren:
History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
There were many great events during this period. I will talk today about one of the ones I attended, a tour of the Tuggeranong Schoolhouse Museum. I would like to thank Elizabeth Burness.
I know that you, Madam Speaker, have visited the schoolhouse on occasion. It sits on an acre of land on Simpsons Hill in Chisolm, where it was built in 1880. It was an active schoolhouse, teaching kids from the area for 59 years until 1939, when the school closed. It then became a private residence. It was opened to the public as a museum and it has been run by Elizabeth since 2011. It is in beautiful condition.
Elizabeth welcomes many school groups there and takes them through what it was like to be a schoolchild, and life in general, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The museum is all about interacting. The kids can dress up in period costume, the teachers can dress up in period costume, they simulate what happened in the classes and they enjoy being shown all around the property. Efforts by people like Elizabeth Burness are what make heritage in our city great. It makes it accessible for everyone, for children and adults. It helps to understand.
I was a little disturbed by the number of things that were familiar to me, partly from my grandmother’s house. I recall playing vigoro as a primary school student at a New South Wales public primary school in the 1970s, because apparently at that time girls were not able to play cricket. We were not capable of playing cricket and we played vigoro instead.
All of history can be a beautiful story, and Elizabeth was a fantastic storyteller. It is obvious that she loves what she does, and she is able to impart that love of those historical objects and what happened in the schoolhouse to other people. Look at her
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video