Each year on 17 September it is Australian Citizenship Day. Addi Road Community Organisation was honoured to welcome Tony Burke MP and over 200 people to take part in their citizenship ceremony in Sydney today – as well as celebrate the 75th anniversary of the ceremony as a vital part of Australian life.
Fragments and tears; big feelings in each silence that falls between the words. Maria Fotiadis has had a long history with Addi Road, going back to the early 1970s when the Greek community began gathering here in Marrickville, bringing to life what would be formally established as the Addison Road Community Centre in 1976. She remembers the other communities that allied with them, the Turkish and Yugoslav and Italian people in particular, the nights they’d organise to sing, play music and dance and celebrate each nation’s unique culture and history…
Last night we gathered together again as one when our film ‘Die. Or Die Trying: Escaping the Taliban’ won a NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Award. Our successful nomination was in the Public Interest Award’s category for “outstanding public interest journalism upholding the NSW Multicultural Principles”.
Community can be a strange and unexpected thing. You can’t always advertise and promote or express it easily. Then something special happens – like last night – and everything about what do and who we are comes together without us even trying. We hope you feel some of that spirit in our newly-formed and somewhat loosely gathered ‘Addi Road Band’ doing their fine version of Waltzing Matilda.
Colombian students shopping at Addi Road Food Pantry Marrickville: “This place here… it’s a really good place.”
The Federal Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Giles MP, came to our Gumbramorra Hall to launch the Multicultural Framework Review, acknowledging Addi Road’s role as a birthplace to multiculturalism 5O years ago.
Yarrie Bangura says she is always glad to have come to Addi Road. “Everything good started here.”
Congratulations to Safdar Ahmed for winning both Book of the Year AND the Multicultural NSW Award at the NSW Premiers’ Literary Awards last night. Safdar was a very recent guest at our Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2022 this last weekend.
Osmond Chiu, Chairperson for Inner West Multicultural Advisory Committee, sits down for an interview with Addi Road on ‘International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’.
It’s 2.37am and a message pings through on Addi Road’s Instagram feed. Someone is awake late into the night, and they want to communicate with us. We won’t see the message from the Royal Prince Alfred (RPA) Hospital in Camperdown till the following morning. “I am a midwife on the Postnatal floor,” it says….
