Page 2212 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 1 August 2017
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paths again last year. I first met Val in about 1999 when my grandmother passed away. Val, with his role in the RFS, played an instrumental role in helping my family carry out my grandmother’s wish to be spread from the highest peak in the region, which was Mount Tennent. Val piled us all into one of the RFS troop carriers and took us up to the top of the hill to do that.
As life takes its many twists and turns, my grandmother’s husband, my dad’s stepfather, later married Lena Jeffery, who is Val’s sister. So, whilst it was not really publicised last year, Val and I are, through some obscure marriages, family. That made a very interesting case when the 2012 election came around and both Val and I appeared on the Liberal ticket running alongside each other down in Brindabella. As all of us in this place know, Hare-Clark elections are not necessarily Liberal versus Labor versus Green; they are Liberal versus Liberal versus Liberal, and Labor versus Labor versus Labor. So the fight is always inside the ticket. The feeling in the family was, “There’s a two out of five chance. One of you has got to get up.” The betting people in the family backed Val, after his performance in 2008. I, as most people in this place recognise, was the dark horse of that election and came through. But the opportunity to have served alongside Val for the very brief period he was here last term was certainly very special for me.
Val’s contribution to the Canberra community spanned his whole lifetime. His commitment to reminding us of the significance of rural villages, particularly his beloved Tharwa, is unrivalled. Val has been described by many as a warhorse. I think that this is a pretty apt description. He took the fight to whoever was in charge on a range of issues that affected not just him but the broader community around the Tharwa region. One of the biggest battles he waged was on bushfire preparedness or, rather, the lack thereof. Val saw firsthand the legacy of being ill-prepared in the face of our fire vulnerability and never ceased raising awareness and reminding us all of lessons from the past.
Val fought long and hard alongside fellow Tharwa villagers to keep the Tharwa primary school open. Its closure was a devastating blow that the village never quite recovered from, similar to the closure of the Cuppacumbalong homestead, another nail in the coffin for rural villages around the ACT. The preservation and restoration of the heritage-listed Tharwa bridge was also high on the priority list for Val. Again, his determination to see the bridge restored in the wake of poor government decision-making was applauded by fellow villagers and indeed the wider community. It was nice to see at his funeral the tie-in: that parts from the original Tharwa bridge were used to prepare Val’s coffin, which was crafted by a couple of local artisans in the Tharwa Valley Forge and in the woodworking shop down there—the makers of the Assembly’s mace, so some very talented craftspeople.
I often went out to visit Val in Tharwa. My connection with him, as I have described, went well beyond the walls of this building and our common connection and affiliation to the Liberal Party, so there was always something to talk about. You always knew you were in for a big chat when the conversation got moved from inside the shop to outside in the shed. That is where all the big decisions were made and all the important topics were covered with Val. It was a great privilege to have counted
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