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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-11-12 Daily Xml
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Remembrance Day

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:27): Yesterday was of course Remembrance Day and, probably like most members here, I attended a wonderful Remembrance Day service down at McLaren Vale run by the local RSL. A representative at Kingscote on Kangaroo Island, Darry Fraser, also laid a wreath. Normally when we go to Remembrance Day we think back to Beersheba, Gallipoli, the Western Front and to those conflicts where so many men and women have served our country and many have paid the ultimate sacrifice. I was thinking about those people from those conflicts in World War I, World War II and then more recent conflicts, but what came over me during yesterday's ceremony, particularly during the minute's silence, was a more recent example of the wonderful work of our armed forces.

I was thinking of the wonderful young men and women—mainly young—who came to Kangaroo Island in our hour of need back in January this year. I was catching the ferry over to Kangaroo Island on the morning of 6 January, and there were troop carriers going over there and Army officers, some of whom looked quite young, who were part of that contingent. It was a little surreal to be in Australia and to have Army personnel there mixing in with the community, as we saw over the ensuing four, five or six weeks. More than 1,000 men and women from around Australia came to the island in various capacities, and in the middle of January it peaked at 650 personnel.

The Joint Taskforce 1111 Emergency Support Force on Kangaroo Island completed more than 500 discrete tasks that were undertaken by both the regular and reserve members of the Royal Australian Navy, Australian Army and Royal Australian Air Force. I would also like to acknowledge the valuable contribution made by foreign defence force personnel, most notably the C-130 Hercules air crews from Japanese Self-Defense Force and members of the 2nd Engineer Regiment of the New Zealand defence force.

There were so many contributions made by these people. I think one of the greatest contributions, as well as all the physical work that was done, was the boost to the mental health of people on the island. You could not miss these men and women from the Australian Defence Force. They were literally everywhere.

They had Army vets—as in veterinarians, not veterans—and veterinarian nurses who were helping with the wildlife, so I have wonderful pictures of these people in their fatigues with washing baskets with koalas in them as they were treating them at the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park near Parndana. We had generators donated by generous people like BankSA and the Hotels Association, and the Army took control of those and made sure that they were serviced, and then another section delivered them to very grateful people who had lost everything in the bushfires.

Leader of the Opposition, Peter Malinauskas, and I were at the SA Water depot where the Army worked with SA Water engineers from around South Australia to get them to the desalination plant to make sure that potable water could be provided to the people of Kangaroo Island because so much infrastructure had been burnt and it was not safe to get back out to the desalination plant without some sort of protection. So they were ferried out there in these Army vehicles that made it safe.

They cleared hundreds of kilometres of roadside vegetation that had been burnt and had fallen onto the roads. They worked side by side with the BlazeAid people to help rebuild fences and they buried thousands and thousands of head of stock that were killed on farms across half of Kangaroo Island that burnt in those terrible fires in January.

But the great memory that I will never forget was from early February when the Army put on a concert for the people of Kangaroo Island. To have John Schumann singing I Was Only 19 and Army people with their arms wrapped around locals, whether they were CFS volunteers or ambulance officers, all swaying and dancing with the young children, is something that we should all be very proud of. To all those men and women of the Australian Defence Force who came to Kangaroo Island, on behalf of the people of the island, we thank you from the bottom of our heart.

Lest we forget.

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