Dr STONE (7:45 PM) —I want the Australian nation to take note of the life, and now the tragic death, of a very special man who, despite his own great suffering under the regime of Saddam Hussein, was able to bring great comfort and emotional support to so many fellow refugees who also had to flee from Iraq to Australia. Mr Adnan Alghazal, a Shepparton man and a proud Australian citizen, began his life in Basra, Iraq. Sadly, he died in Mecca after a peaceful evening and after his prayers on 8 November this year. Adnan had suffered terribly as a Shi’ite during the Saddam Hussein regime. As he explained to a journalist on the Age in 2003, ‘I was not armed or involved in the uprising. I was just demonstrating when a hand grenade was thrown.’ When Adnan regained consciousness he found he was in jail, where he remained for six months without medical treatment for the very serious shrapnel wounds he had. These injuries continued to cause him great suffering for the rest of his life.

Adnan fled from Iraq in 1997. He arrived in Shepparton after a two-year journey through Jordan, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Hong Kong. He spent another three years bringing his wife Ikhlas and daughter Lubna to his new and peaceful home in Shepparton. Ikhlas and her daughter travelled through Jordan and Syria on their journey to Australia, which included six months in jail in Jordan. It is hard to imagine how stressful that waiting time was.

You can imagine someone growing bitter and not wanting to engage any more with others in a community that he was finding so different to his one in Iraq. But Adnan welcomed with joy his new son, Ahmed, born in 2004, and already at that time he was working in the community of Shepparton to be, as he said, the voice of harmony. He understood very much that a lot of the new Iraqi refugees were finding it a strange land and he acted as their interpreter. He was in fact a professional interpreter. He was president of the Iraqi Association of Shepparton District and a teacher’s aide at Wilmot Road Primary School, which has a big refugee community including Middle Eastern people from Iraq and Jordan. He was a multicultural worker for Uniting Care Cutting Edge and a volunteer worker in the community.

‘Adnan was not a normal person,’ said family friend Fatima Al-Qarakchy as she spoke about the sad death of Adnan. ‘He was our oldest brother,’ she said. That very much sums up the way the community felt about Adnan Alghazal. He was very often in my office, always extraordinarily polite and gentle, quietly spoken and often obviously suffering very poor health. But he was always there with a concern about a fellow citizen of Shepparton, usually someone newly arrived or just made a citizen, almost always from the Middle East. He was constantly in search of better ways to explain how best we could ensure there was integration, community harmony and interfaith support.

The community is now mourning and there have been the traditional three days of grieving in one of Shepparton’s mosques soon after his death. Adnan was buried in Iraq and his family flew there to be with him. It was a very sad day, not just for the Iraqi community, because Adnan had also been instrumental in the Kialla United football club, which includes Afghan, Congolese and Sudanese people as well as Iraqis and Australians, the old-fashioned fourth and fifth generation Australians. Even when Adnan was in hospital, as he often was, he would make sure that the football club knew he was available to be consulted, to interpret, to be a hands-on member of the club. I have to say that that club is one of the major ways that we have interracial, interethnic and intercultural harmony promoted in our part of the world.

I will miss Adnan dreadfully. He was a dear, dear friend and I think it is important that we note the loss of such a great man in this place.