Local news for local people
Australia Day Address 2026
January 29, 2026
This was the address given by Oberon's 2026 Australia Day Ambassador, Graham Ross AM, at the Australia Day ceremony.
See also - Photos and stories from the day
Thank you for the warm welcome to join you yesterday and today, Australia Day 2026.
Firstly, I would like to acknowledge we are standing on the traditional lands of the Gundungurra tribes who lived south and east of here and the Wiradjuri people, across the Macquarie Plains, for 40,000 years or more and their Yindyamarra way of life is at the heart of their culture and lifestyle. Which translates into respect, be gentle, polite, give honour, go slowly and take responsibility for Country and community. Awesome values.
They've have lived around and moved through these parts for millennia, a community of Aboriginal peoples, clans and nations who roamed across these lands long before European settlement. Their kinship groups remain across the region.
Your modern history began in 1813 when Govenor Lachlan Macquarie persuaded Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth to find a way over the Blue Mountains to open up the country to help establish a nation, chasing rich agricultural land on the Tablelands. Macquarie later held two major Corroborees with local aborigines nearby which were mutually friendly, and amiable gatherings.
As happened throughout New South Wales, regions once opened up, settlers quickly followed here with stock and land grants taken up along the Fish and Campbells Rivers by the 1820s, just seven years later.
The early pioneers passing through knew Oberon as Bullock Flat but permanent settlement didn't occur until twenty years later and the name village of Oberon adopted, yet another 20 years later in 1863. The name arose from a character in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream".
It then took 50 years to establish the township, no-one was in a hurry to officially recognise the area, surprising given its proximity to Sydney but maybe it was the ferociously cold winters (most of the council area is above 1000m above sea level). And your rugged boggy terrain didn't enthuse the early settlers who found warmer open country to the west and north.
But population booms DID happen with the discovery of gold in 1823 well before Hill End Sofala in1850 and Parkes in1870.
And there has been silver, copper mines here in the area and sapphires too which still attracts fossickers.
But while the 19th century was slow going around Oberon, the 20th increased pace with the founding of the Oberon Council at a public meeting in March 1906.
The wool boom helped push things along too.
The first houses built were wattle and daub homes and slabs of local timber, basic structures but an indicator of a future powerful industry, forestry.
So much hardwood timber was here that you supplied Broken Hill Mines with pit props in 1938 shipped by rail 1,000 km away.
But as the native hardwood petered out it was replaced with Californian Pinus radiata plantations for softwood and the Forestry Commission founded the timber industry which again further enhanced the population.
Those wattle and daub and slab huts have virtually all gone now but bricks and mortar did survive including the convent built in 1914, still occupied today. The old CBC bank now the NAB, St Barnabas Anglican Church from 1869, and two-story buildings including Ramsgate, 1906, and the Art Deco Malachi Gilmore Hall, 1937, still stand in Oberon Steet.
Fascinating to recall the Gilmore Hall is an architectural and social barometer of Oberon having been a ballroom, a cinema, a cabaret venue, a skating rink, a craft shop and a wool store. It is one of the few surviving architecturally significant buildings of this period in Australia.
Permanent water supply was another attractant when in 1949 the first stage of the Fish River Water Supply known as Lake Oberon was completed and the building of this important water supply to Lithgow, Bathurst, Oberon, and parts of the Blue Mountains brought many workers and their families to the district. The project was completed in 1958.
The town population of 200 in the 1880's grew to 2000 in 1980 and now stands around 6,000 with more than half living in town.
Agriculture is, after forestry, your biggest industry, potatoes, peas were big but now Brussels sprouts, broccoli and beef cattle and fat lambs along with tree nurseries, nut plantations, and bulb farms are all economic contributors.
Oberon has no major highways running through it and one or two minor arterial roads are still unsealed, I often travel on one with my tour groups on a picturesque journey heading to Mayfield.
Added to this is your mountainous terrain, reasonable rainfall and winter climate have created an isolated shire that retains its local wilderness including all of Kanangra-Boyd National Park, parts of the Blue Mountains and Abercrombie River National Parks and Evans Crown Nature Reserve are all partly within Oberon Shire.
The town is well serviced by shops, accommodation, hobbies, and professional trades and services.
You're unique, providing authentic experiences, projecting a strong sense of self confidence.
But all these achievements, aspirations and aims are nothing new for a formidable community.
These are the values that define and unite us all.
We are all celebrating Australia Day, for Everyone - Everywhere.
I'm enormously proud and grateful to be here with you today. There's no better historical, atypical place to celebrate Australia Day.
There are many qualities to protect in your region and of which you can be justly proud.
But I reckon all that, makes you the real norm for Australia, strong-willed, self-determining, free, self-governing, a liberated sovereign community, an autonomous people, amazingly today we're celebrating as one single nation of multiple origins. That makes Australia a unique place to love and treasure, especially this Australia Day.
In the 22 years I've been an Australia Day Ambassador and travelled the country celebrating with community's what it means to be an Aussie, no location could mean more to me than this one, historic, hard-working, sympathetic to your past having come into existence as the state and country was expanding but always focused on your future.
You started with a strong sense of pride in your heritage and the area's natural qualities, and your families, both Catholic and protestant, from Scotland and Ireland, emancipated convicts came here and stayed here, and welcomed others from around the world and you became one community.
And so independent, forthright, dedicated to the ideal of Australia and a Fair Go.
What does Australia Day mean to you?
A holiday, a day off, a barbecue in the park, a time to catch up with family, old friends and mates,…it's friendship, community, celebration, pride, remembrance, recognising achievements, acknowledgement, recognition. Yes, all of these things but so much more.
I like to think it is also a time for reflection, to see where we, as a nation, have come from and critically where we're going.
Maybe even consider changing course,….. Isn't that what New Year's Resolutions are about, trying something new, maybe the impossible.
In recent Australia Day Addresses highlights have included racism in our Australian community; Paralympic Gold Medalist and Marathon Man, Kurt Fearnley OAM spoke about the continuing difficulty handicapped people still have in our community. We're all reeling of the brutality of cowardly assaults on innocent people, woman in particular; mental illness is a major hurdle facing the nation. And then there's our national security. These may be some of those hard truths we have to acknowledge.
Drought, floods and fires, the worst in our history, have taken a toll on the land and its carers, especially farmers. We need to be alert and ask ‘how yah goin', are you OK?
We all have a role to play.
Australia is the oldest land.
We have the biggest rainforests, some of the biggest deserts, some of the biggest rivers and the tallest trees, the strangest animals in the world and the most diverse and curious flora. We now have the biggest bushfires, the biggest droughts and the biggest floods.
That adds up to UNIQUE in my books.
Even with our disastrous natural events we still manage to hold on to the tag the luckiest people, but you didn't need me to tell you that.
Our Aboriginal communities are the oldest continuous civilization on the planet dating from over 70,000 years.
As a modern nation we are one of the youngest, just 238 years old, 125 since Federation.
But this doesn't mean to say we have been slow or late to learn about our international responsibilities.
The 1915 Coo-ee March for World War 1 volunteer enlistments passed by.
We quickly became involved during the tsunami tragedy in Japan in 2011, Thailand 2004, Tonga 2022, and until recently, we've been in East Timor, The Solomon Islands, Bougainville, and earlier in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, and fighting bushfires in California and we had Aussies in earthquake ravaged Haiti. Volunteers helped fight tragic fires in four states on a regular basis across NSW, Western Australian, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia and volunteers in their thousands, 55,000 to be accurate, came out with brooms and shovels to help those under the mud and debris in Queensland's floods and later in Victoria's floods. The same happened again with these pan continental unprecedented recent Victorian bushfires and Queensland floods.
Our service as a nation overseas goes backwards to Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, North Africa, training in Canada and Scotland, action throughout Europe, and all the way to Anzac Cove and France.
We are a nation of doers, people who get involved, often regardless of the cost, taking on the challenges of life, but that is our nature.
Our sense of humour still confounds the rest of the world, although I think the Irish might have an idea as to what we are on about.
But nothing stays the same.
The world is changing at a cracking pace and we are all running to keep up. Information Technology, now AI, it's a staggering world today, in cities, suburbs and on farms.
This year the world will celebrated the 57th anniversary of the first man moon landing.
Well, you might find it interesting to know, being connected through your local Dish at Parkes, that the technology that put man on the moon, and more importantly got them off there and back to an orbiting space craft and then brought them all back to earth is smaller than the technology in that black strip on the back of your credit card.
It's all a bit frightening.
What is even more amazing is that as the Commander, Neil Amstrong of the Lunar Module called Eagle, was steering the aircraft towards the surface of the moon he had to redirect their movements many times to avoid very rough surfaces to prevent turning the craft over on landing. This he did expertly but used excessive quantities of fuel in the process.
After 21 ½ hours on the surface of the moon it became time to rejoin Michael Collins manning the lunar orbiting module Columbia to come home.
But in the intervening time NASA back at Kennedy Space Centre had determined that they had no reserve fuel to take off, they only had one second to launch off the moon to reconnect to Columbia orbiting above.
Now aware of the drama at the precise time to hit the launch button, a basic black, VW-like toggle switch, broke off when Neil Armstrong hit to start the engines. With only half a second to decide their fate to either stay on the moon, miss the connection with Columbia and spear off into distant space or take off, he grabbed his biro pen, jammed it in the vacant hole and pushed hard. The massive engines burst into life and the rest is history.
Years later in Australia when questioned about this alleged mishap or myth Neil Armstrong produced the biro from his pocket, "It never leaves me", he replied.
And in a few weeks man, and a woman, will head back to the moon with the most powerful rocket ever built standing 100m tall. Taking the politics away, this mission is one hellava human endeavor again.
On a personal level, this Easter, I will celebrate 46 years broadcasting at 2GB my radio program which is now relayed across the nation and around the world on the internet. This, I'm told, is a radio milestone in Australia.
I'm celebrating my 31st year of Better Homes and Gardens on Channel 7. On January 24th, 1995 when the first program went to air, I was offered a three-week contract.
My garden tour company has taken over 700 tours around Australia and the world.
We too have been lucky.
I had been told by experts never trust radio and television executives, they can tell little fibs, so always have a trade or profession and alternative work to fall back on.
I was a qualified horticulturist so the qualifications were ok but we started the Garden Clinic Club and our garden tour company as insurance policies.
Well the Club now has over 40,000 members and we've taken over 700 group tours overseas and around Australia. This makes a small family travel business in Sydney the world's oldest and largest specialist garden tour operation of its kind, based in Sydney. We too have been very lucky.
It's true though, the harder you work the luckier you become.
I mention these few statistics to confirm that personally we've taken the risks too, always said yes, and took on the challenges; you never know where you might end up. That three week contract at Channel 7 has lasted 30 years.
In November 2015 I launched the Australian Garden Council, an overarching Not for Profit charity to encourage more Australian's to garden, more teenagers to select gardening and horticulture as a lifelong career and to encourage global garden tourism in Australia.
You know, sadly we have become a nation of coastal huggers, over 85% live within sound of the surf and that is not good. It's no good for the land, the environment and it's especially bad for those 15% working their butts off keeping the rest of us, living in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed.
That is not the Australian way.
City folk mustn't forget our brothers and sisters in The Bush doing it hard with fire, drought, pestilence and flood and isolation to contend with.
That's what Australia Day is about, living a good and fair life and caring for and inspiring others, where possible, along the way.
Thank you once again for accepting me into your community today.
Enjoy Australia Day 2026 and celebrate that other great attribute of being an Aussie, we know how to party.
I hope you have a great day, and you will enjoy the remaining proceedings.
Thank you, Oberon Council and Thank you Australia
