The coordinating body for the Australian of the Year Awards and Australia Day celebrations across the nation is the National Australia Day Council (NADC).
The NADC heads a network of state and territory Australia Day affiliate organisations and local Australia Day committees and is designed to inspire national pride and spirit, and to enrich the life of all Australians. It aims to promote the meaning of Australia Day through activity, education, reflection, discussion and debate and to promote good citizenship, values and achievement by recognising excellence and service to the nation.
The NADC offices are housed in Old Parliament House, Canberra. The Chair is Adam Gilchrist and the Chief Executive Officer is Graham West (commencing early September 2012), former minister in the Keneally government in NSW.
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“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the “tough guy;” today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
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—D.H. (David Herbert)
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—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“There by some wrinkled stones round a leafless tree
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Twelve ragged men, the council of charity
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—Allen Tate (1899–1979)