Julie-Ann Campbell (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On 16 May, I found myself uncomfortably spinning inside a blue teacup. I was with my daughter, Margaret, and we were at the Sherwood festival. The Sherwood festival is a very, very special community event in my local community on Brisbane's south side. It was started in 1995 as a street festival, and now it brings everyone together in a big celebration of what makes us tick.

I want to particularly thank and congratulate the president of the volunteer organising committee, Sophie Julian, as well as all of the volunteers at that event, because it's had a rough trot of it in the last few years. It has been rained out a couple of times. This is a community that is not only tenacious but resilient, and we've gotten back up on our feet. Thanks to those fantastic community organisers, it went ahead this year with four stages, entertainment, free rides, stalls, food—so many different community vendors. It was very specially held at the Sherwood Arboretum, which is one of only three botanical gardens in our entire city.

I and Minister Aly had the great pleasure of being in Moorooka, not too long ago, at the African Village, which is a community organisation in the heart of my electorate. It's headed up by Beny Bol OAM, and Faysel Ahmed Selat, who's the president of the Queensland African Communities Council. It's got a focus, just like an African village does, for Australians of African heritage, of mentoring young people, of connection to cultural heritage and of assisting people to overcome systemic barriers. When Minister Aly and I were there, we enjoyed traditional coffee and we enjoyed fantastic local musical artists. I'm so proud of the African Village, because we've been able to inject $4.4 million from the Office for Multicultural Affairs, under the African Australian Communities Program, to support participation in our local community.

Kuraby is from an Indigenous word meaning 'a place of many springs', and Kuraby State School has so many beautiful springs in the form of children from across different ethnic backgrounds in my local electorate. I want to thank Principal Kerrin Cridland for hosting a fabulous Harmony Day celebration on 29 April this year. There were some 366 students from across 50 different cultural backgrounds celebrating with a kaleidoscope of different traditional national food and dress, and an excellent culinary taste testing that represented the best of what our local multicultural community has to offer. It was a family and community event with involvement from so many different groups in our community, and it's an absolute bedrock of who we are.

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