TRANSCRIPT
The Australia Day 2024 Honours list has been announced by Governor-General David Hurley.
The awards seek to recognise outstanding service or exceptional achievement, and particularly, the country's unsung heroes.
This year, 1,042 people are receiving honours - including 20 recipients of awards in the Military Division in the Order of Australia, 224 Meritorious awards, 59 Distinguished and Conspicuous awards, and 49 Australians being recognised for their contributions to Australia's COVID-19 pandemic response.
Among them is Dr Francis Nii Lanteye Acquah, who is being made a Member of the Order of Australia in the General Division.
For almost 40 years, Dr Acquah has been working to reduce stigma around mental health in African, refugee and migrant communities.
“We are providing a range of services, mental wellness programs, disability support, drug and alcohol, from the garden to the table, bike riding and art work. And also doing some drumming and dancing. So it's about finding other programs that really bring the community together, but also improve the well-being of everybody, and especially people from refugee and migrant background where they may not have all the supports that they require within the community.”
He's now developing a mental wellness hub, just an hour outside of Melbourne.
Through his work, Dr Acquah assists not only newly-arrived refugees to Australia, but also staff, to help understand migrant needs.
“For example, the person was not eating, not sleeping, or standing by the corner of the bed. And I get invited to go and provide education to the staff and changing the small things such as, okay, give her some food that she can eat with her fingers or for that matter, sleep, instead of a bed, sleep on the mattress on the floor. And of course, just simple things like this. Within days, the person's mental health starts to improve.”
Any Australian can nominate someone they respect and admire through the Order of Australia's honours and awards system.
The Governor-General in this year's announcement emphasised diversity and inclusion and an effort to increase nominations from historically underrepresented backgrounds.
Each nominations is assessed by the Honours and Awards secretariat, then considered by the Council of the Order of Australia before recommendations are made to the Governor-General.
Buddhima Indraratna is a Distinguished Professor in Civil Engineering at the University of Technology Sydney.
He came to Australia as a young lecturer at the University of Wollongong in the early 90s, and is now being made a Member of the Order of Australia ((AM)) in the General Division.
“I realised that Australia did not have much research at all going on in the area of railway track infrastructure. While there was significant research going on in the area of rolling stock, but there was nothing, basically nothing in terms of high quality research applied to railway tracks.”
Dr Indraratna pioneered research into this area, and by the time the 2000 Sydney Olympics was announced, he was reaching the forefront of his field.
“And that is just a time that the Australian railway, especially the New South Wales railway industry, got terribly excited and thought, 'Well, how are we going to cater for all these trains carrying so many people? And isn't it time to spend a lot of effort in improving the railway tracks?' And that's the time that this research really took off.”
Dr Indraratna has received many accolades throughout his career, but cites his proudest achievement as leading research into sustainability.
He says the industry cannot continue to use the granular rock field seen on railway tracks, both from a cost and environmental perspective.
“Then I realised that what if we can use waste materials to construct railway tracks? What about the used rubber tires? We discard about 50 million tires every year, and that's more than two times our population. And what are we going to do with these rubber tires? What about the waste materials that we discard from the coal mining industry and the steel manufacturing industry? Things like coal wash, fly ash, steel furnace slag?”
He since began looking into whether these waste materials could be substituted for conventional materials.
“And I started this research and it worked. And so we have now started doing field trials with the help of Australian industry, mainly Sydney Trains, and also in various projects the ARTC (Australia Rail Track Corporation) has helped us a lot. And we have tried to show through field trials that these waste materials can actually be used in the railway tracks to improve the performance of the tracks, especially for the heavy haul trains or the freight trains... And this is a huge saving, millions of dollars annually saving for the asset owners, and also it's a significant environmental contribution.”
Of this year's recipients 50.5 per cent were women.
Carmen Anne Garcia is the founder and chief executive officer of Community Corporate, a nation-wide diversity and inclusion firm.
She says it was her mother's firsthand experience that inspired her career in addressing unemployment rates among newly arrived refugees and migrants to Australia.
“So, my mum is a firstborn migrant from the Philippines, and I saw through my upbringing firsthand how her qualifications as a lawyer wasn't recognized and she was forced to take any job to make ends meet. And I feel like that really had an impact on her dignity and purpose. So I guess my life mission has been around how do we work through and challenge conventional thinking around recognising that migrants built this country. They have a strong history in bringing skills. And I think one thing we forget in Australia is that, unlike other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, Australia is one of the very few where migrants are actually more skilled than our native population.”
This helped spur over 20 years' of experience working in refugee resettlement, training and employment.
Through her work, Ms Garcia has seen many refugees go from survival jobs earning $800 on Centrelink to being put into $90,000 roles, with many even going on to buy houses.
She is now receiving an award in the General Division in the Order of Australia and says she hopes it shines a light on other quiet achievers.
“I think it's important that we reach into communities and we tap people on the shoulder to recognize what they're doing. I think naturally for women and also people from culturally diverse backgrounds, we're not self-promotional. That's not part of our culture. So I think the Governor General's message is really to every Australian, if you see someone doing amazing things, put them forward. Let's recognise there are so many diverse faces and people that make this country great. I definitely wouldn't have thought to nominate myself, obviously, for these honours. And there are some amazing people out there that thought me worthy and have put me forward and I feel like I now have a role in paying it forward and identifying those quiet achievers, those unsung heroes that really do contribute to Australia and how I can help shine a spotlight on them as well.”
