Awards

The David Helfgott Award:

One of our Awakenings traditions is the David Helfgott Award; which is not necessarily awarded every year, but is to be awarded to someone the team coordinators recognise as extra special – someone who has elevated Awakenings by their tireless effort in some aspect of our festival. The citation on the award reads “for outstanding contribution to the Awakenings Festival”. In selecting this year’s winner, the Awakenings team was unanimous in their decision.

This year’s winner was the Wimmera 4 Wheel Drive Club who have been part of the festival every year as part of the Outdoor Adventures program. If you haven’t been on one of these adventures into the wild with these guys, you have missed a treat. Every year the Club unhesitatingly fuels up, checks the tyres, gets out the maps and takes our participants on the adventure of a lifetime.

In receiving the award, Rosie Shipsides and Faye Connell commented that the club members get such a buzz to see the sea of smiling faces that beam at them in their rear vision mirror as their vehicles clamber over rocks and boulders, through sand and over hills! Congratulations to the Wimmera 4Wheel Drive Club!!

The Badger Award:

This award is to encourage Awakenings participants in memory of Badger, a regular Awakenings participant and a very special person who passed away in 2003.

Badger's parents wanted his memory at Awakenings to be maintained and decided to donate $100 to be awarded to a person or a group who fill all the ideals of the 'spirit of Badgerism' - enthusiasm, persistence, joy of performance, patience, determination, love of life and his fellow beings and so on. Badger encouraged participants to strive for what for many of them seemed impossible. He encouraged them to push through that invisible wall that surrounds so many. And he encouraged people to come to Awakenings and show off their talents and their enjoyment of life.