Wooden Boat Festival

Mr BASHAM (Finniss) (15:29): I rise to talk about an event that occurred at Goolwa over the weekend, that is, the South Australian Wooden Boat Festival. It was a fantastic event, and it is the 16^th year they have run it. They do it every other year, so it has been going for 32 years

I was proud to be involved in a couple of parts of the event, the first of which was the mayoral reception on the Friday night, where I was also pleased to have the Hon. David Ridgway from the other place in the electorate talking about how great an event it was, as well as a representative from tourism seeing how good an event the community of Goolwa actually run.

Last Saturday, 27 April, His Excellency Hieu Van Le AO, the Governor of South Australia, accompanied by his wife, Mrs Le, had the privilege of opening the event. Brenton Ragless from Channel 9 was the MC and, with his passion for everything steam, he was very much enthused by being there. He had his family with him as well. It was a great opening. The Governor spoke about the long-term connections previous governors of South Australia have had with naval activities, as well as many other connections with the water. He even pointed out that he had arrived on a boat when he came to Australia, so many interesting connections were raised.

The event was also supported by the attendance of the Royal Australian Navy and one of its helicopter squadrons. They had one of the new helicopters down there showing the audience how they can rescue people from the water. They had someone jump out of the chopper into the water and then extracted them back into the chopper while they were hovering over the water. It was a great sight to see just off the wharf at Goolwa.

There were also many activities available for the community, particularly the children, and one of them actually involved plywood. Teams built a boat to see whether they could race the boat and win an event. It is quite a challenge to build a boat out of nothing but sheets of plywood and then trust your building skills to see whether you can actually float it across part of the river and get it back to the shore again. It was great to see many people involved in that.

It was also great to see many activities for the children. There was a pirate trail, there was a River Murray maze and there was face painting and circus performances. Fantastic miniature steam trains were driving around through the car parks and around the wharf taking children and adults for rides. It was a credit to the operators of those little steam trains and the work they do to actually keep them running, putting their little shovel of coal into the furnace to keep the water boiling.

There were also demonstrations of boat building and restoration at the Armfield Slip. You could take rides on the paddle steamers, and the Oscar W and the PS Marion were down from Mannum taking rides out to the lower ends of the river. It was a fantastic weekend and a great credit to the community down there, and they have made it a free event. People used to have to pay for the event, but they have decided to bring more of the community and more of the public in by making it a free event.

Great fireworks concluded the first day of the event on the Saturday night. They even had an extra two minutes of fireworks donated to the event to make it even more special. There was also a lone piper who closed the day. It was a fabulous event and a great credit to those who put it on.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: Sir, I bring to your attention the state of the house.

A quorum having been formed: