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Race for remission By Abbey Cannan
Noosa local Sophia Marian and her best-friend, Leila Jacob, who will be competing at Tatts Finke Desert Race. (Abbey Cannan: 477080)
After tragically losing her dad to brain cancer, Noosa local Sophia Marian, 21, is honouring Bruce by giving back to the foundations that helped her family during his final weeks. Her best-friend Leila Jacob, 20, has been by her side the entire time, and now she’s helping raise funds by competing at Tatts Finke Desert Race in Alice Springs, which is classed as one of the toughest off-road events in the world. So far, they’ve raised just over $1000, and they need the community’s help to reach their $20K target before the 460km race on 6 June. Sophia said, “We’re honouring my dad, Bruce Marian, who passed away just 10 weeks after being diagnosed with terminal Glioblastoma. It is a highly aggressive type of brain tumour with no known cure.“ “My dad passed away on my birthday last year. That was something that a lot of people looked at me and they were like, ’How are you going to be able to deal with that?’ I said, ’Honestly, I couldn’t have been gifted with anything better. I’ll have him with me every year.’“ In her dad’s final weeks of his life, he was told to start ticking off his bucket list. With this, Bruce smiled and said, “I’ve been doing that my whole life”. Sophia said his final days were full of music, food, beer, and ocean breezes — his kind of love. Having fulfilled his bucket list long before his passing has been something that inspired the girls. Continued page 6
Funding locked in By Margie Maccoll After a two hour special meeting Noosa Council last week voted 5:2 in favour of continuing its funding of Tourism Noosa (TN) with a one-year agreement reducing its annual payment from $2.5m to $2m, the transfer of events management and funding from TN to Council, the inclusion of a roadmap guiding future operations and new KPIs related to identifying new revenue sources.
Everyone agreed TN was a well respected, highly successful tourism marketing organisation though the meeting acknowledged the community had mixed opinions on council’s continued funding of TN and held concerns about Noosa’s over-tourism and traffic congestion. Only Crs Tom Wegener and Nicola Wilson voted against supporting the agreement and raised issues on council’s finances and shortfall on strategic direction.
Cr Wegener described council’s situation as a “financial bind“ an did not believe and agreement to pay TN $2m was “financially responsible“. “We’ve just been through numerous financial meetings doing the budget,“ he said. “We’ve painted ourselves into a budget corner. We should have raised rates two years ago and last year and now we are in a bad spot and I think it is just terrible financial management to be paying $2m to TN when we know what’s going
to come ahead of us with rates so I cannot support this. “What would happen if we didn’t support TN?,“ he asked. “Well, TN is a very strong organisation. They have a great board. They have a substantial membership. They get grants. They’re a fine organisation with enormous history that we all respect and love.“ Continued page 4
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