Condolence

Parbo, Sir Arvi

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:00): On indulgence, I wish to recognise the significant contribution Sir Arvi Parbo made to our state during a life of enormous achievement and great industry leadership. Following his passing yesterday at the age of 93, Sir Arvi is being recognised as a giant of the Australian mining industry in the 20^th century. It is with considerable pride that we can record that South Australia provided both the start to his outstanding career and its crowning achievement.

Sir Arvi was born in Estonia and became a refugee towards the end of the Second World War. In 1949, he reached Australia. For a time, he worked in an Adelaide quarry before undertaking studies at the University of Adelaide, which gave him the opportunity to join Western Mining Corporation in 1956. In more than 40 years with Western Mining Corporation, he was instrumental in the company's golden era of exploration across our nation. Its most important outcome was the discovery of the giant Olympic Dam copper, gold and uranium deposit in 1975.

As chairman and managing director of Western Mining Corporation, Sir Arvi steered the negotiations with the South Australian government that produced the Olympic Dam Indenture Agreement and enabled the mine to begin production from 1988. As honourable members will recall, this was a period of some political turmoil around whether uranium should be mined, but Sir Arvi won the respect of all sides of politics for his leadership and the integrity and humility of his approach.

He was a man who never forgot the early opportunity he was given as a migrant to create a career of outstanding value for our entire nation. I offer my sincere condolences on behalf of the parliament to Lady Parbo and their three children.

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (14:02): I would just like to second the remarks made by the Premier in mourning a great South Australian and a great Estonian. Today, there was a mixture of sadness and pride at the Estonian Club in North Adelaide, where Sir Arvi was a life member and, indeed, a legend.

His book On Estonia and Estonians holds pride of place at the club, written as it was by Sir Arvi in 2007 for his three children and six grandchildren. He writes in the book of the importance of a sense of continuity with the past. To that end, he has always been keen for his Australian-born family to visit the country of his birth, where regular pilgrimages were made. His own journey as a refugee and young adventurer took him to a postwar Germany in 1944 and then to South Australia in 1949, where his first job was as a jackhammer operator at a quarry south of Adelaide.

He wanted to complete his mining engineering studies and managed to be transferred to a factory at Kilkenny within bike-riding distance of the Adelaide University, where he studied part time. His remarkable mining career spans the entire second half of the 20^th century. As the Premier noted, he started at Western Mining, which was then a small gold producer, and built it up into a major enterprise. In 2006, prime minister John Howard said of him: 'Nobody understands and knows more about the mining industry in this country than Arvi Parbo.'

As chairman of Western Mining, BHP and Alcoa, he was a mining giant. The Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy noted recently that Sir Arvi Parbo was not only a lifelong pillar of Australian mining but also one of the people who created Australia as a prosperous economy and free society. Throughout that extraordinary career, he maintained a love of family, history and heritage. Our condolences to his wife, three children and six grandchildren and to the local Estonian community.

For all people who have a connection to postwar migration, particularly displaced people in the late forties from the Baltic community, as clearly I do, too, this is a sad loss not just for the Estonian community but also for the Baltic community of South Australia. Our thoughts are with them, but particularly with the family.