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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-04-29 Daily Xml
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Day in the Dirt Event

Ms PRATT (Frome) (15:58): Women hold up half the sky, and on Sunday just past we were dancing as hard as we could to make that sky deliver a lot of rain to the communities of Owen, Balaklava, Mallala, and pretty much anywhere across regional South Australia. I took great delight in having the honour of addressing over 100 women who had convened on the dusty Owen football oval—that has not been in circulation since about the eighties—and it was the perfect place for a day in the dirt. For over four hours we had nonstop music. We had DJ Sparks, otherwise known as Tony Clarke, who for people born in the seventies and eighties would have had him as their DJ for their twenty-firsts. I am sure he is doing fiftieth birthdays now. But there was not anyone dancing harder or playing harder than DJ Sparks, Tony Clarke.

This was an initiative that really went to the heart of what our country communities are battling at the moment and that is the drought. This opportunity that I take now is to recognise those people in the community who understand that, when an initiative is community led, then it is trusted by locals, and they come along understanding that they are going to be in a safe space to let their hair down and to shake off some of the woes and worries that we certainly carry with us as we step our way through this year's season hoping for the rain to break. As I said, women hold up half the sky and we were hoping that that sky would send down a bucket of rain, and we still anticipate that that will happen.

An event like Sunday's Day in the Dirt does not happen without coordinators, and two very special women Abbie Tiller and Melissa Smith of Greater SA, took about 16 days, no more, to pull together an event that brought women from all over the Mid North, from Jamestown, from Owen, from Balloch, from Orroroo and districts to roll up in their caravans, their camper trailers, their tents, to have a designated driver, to pack an esky of soft drink or other, to enjoy a barbecue, to grab a honey-flavoured Golden North Giant Twin ice cream and soak up the ambience and to come together.

I know that some of the sponsors included NTS Rural. Certainly there was a contribution from our Primary Industries on the ground, serving drinks, serving water. Applying some sparkles to the skin to give us a bit of joie de vivre was the Mallala and District Lions group, and it is a community that is well served by them as well. So not only did Abbie and Melissa pull this together in just 16 days but I think they captured the essence of what we were trying to achieve by this one line: 'We weren't just dancing, we were planting joy on dry land,' and we did that for four hours, dancing to the beat of any song that DJ Sparks wanted to play for us. It could have been We Want to Party by Vengaboys, we had Footloose going, we had Grease the Musical, we were linedancing and bootscooting and the atmosphere was electric.

I want to thank Marie Tapscott for her photography and drone work, as well as recognise a group that was being beautifully branded with the pink baseball caps and that was the Adelaide Plains FarmHers. So my gesture back to Abbie, Melissa, Greater SA, and everyone who was involved in coming along from Worlds End, to Burra, to Balloch is: what a fantastic day it was and this speech and my recognition goes out to all the FarmHers that were there.

One of those FarmHers included a lovely friend of mine called Alex Thomas. She has established a business called Plant a Seed for Safety. She donated a voucher which was won by Tracey Angel, but Alex and her family are grieving at the moment having lost a lovely member of their family, Dr Ashleigh Thomas AM, an RFDS doctor, who for over 30 years serviced our regions and our remote areas based out of the Port Augusta base. Our RFDS doctors are extraordinary, but Ashleigh was one in a million; long hair flowing, fast car driving, a lovable man who as a doctor looked after Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. He will be sorely missed. We farewell him on Friday. Vale.

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