Former South African President Nelson Mandela told a news conference at the Sydney Media Centre today he believed Australia had the men and women to ensure a future for this country without racial disharmony.

He said that although the situation had been different in the struggle against apartheid in his native South Africa, ‘there are to be found in all circumstances and in all communities, good men and women with a desire to see that this happens’.

Mr Mandela was at the Sydney Media Centre as part of the ‘What Makes a Champion?’ seminar, the first of what it is hoped will be a regular intellectual component of future Olympic Games.

He was joined on stage by a diverse group of high achievers including champion athlete Herb Elliott, Australian diplomat Richard Butler, the conqueror of Mount Everest, Sir Edmund Hilary and controversial magistrate, Pat O’Shane.

All rose to applaud the arrival of the 83-year-old Mr Mandela.

Suffering the effects of a bad cold, Mr Mandela told the audience:’I am the master of my own voice, and I am going to force it’.

He strode onto the stage without the aid of a wheelchair, and stood at the podium to accept a message of good wishes and a gift from Australia’s living legend of cricket, Sir Donald Bradman.

Sir Donald, himself not in the best of health, did not attend, but had his message and gift passed on by actor Jack Thompson.

Sir Donald’s greeting hailed Mr Mandela as ‘a champion of humanity and a man with a compassion for mankind’.

In response, Mr Mandela said that in cricket-mad South Africa, where the game was played for the Gods, Sir Donald was ‘one of the divinity’.

On the issue of reconciliation, Mr Mandela said it was not so important to change society, as it was ‘to change yourself’.

In negotiating peace in South Africa and the end of the racist apartheid regime, he said, it was vital to ‘talk with your enemies’.

‘What is the point of us slaughtering each other, I asked them.

‘If we had not done so, the flames of civil war may have still been burning in South Africa to this day’.

Outspoken magistrate Pat O’Shane told a news conference at the Sydney Media Centre today that she believed most athletes competing at the Sydney Olympic Games will be on performance-enhancing drugs.

Ms O’Shane said it was part of a wider problem in society, and linked with ‘the role money plays in sport as entertainment’.

‘It is’, Ms O’Shane said, ‘part of the win-at-all-costs attitude that pervades sport’.

But her words to a packed conference room brought a sharp rebuke from Olympic gold medallist Herb Elliott, who was seated close by.

Elliott asked for the chance to refute that claim.

He said: ‘I’d be very surprised if any more than one or two athletes at the Olympic Games were using banned drugs.

‘There must be some. But I know most members of the Australian Olympic team, and they are not banned drug users’.

The pair carried on their conversation on the subject well after the official conference had ended.

They were still debating the subject of performance-enhancing drugs and the Olympic Games as the group prepared to leave the Sydney Media Centre.

Acclaimed Australian actor Jack Thompson, celebrating his 60th birthday at the Sydney Media Centre today, had any number of reasons to celebrate.

The first was the opportunity to make a presentation on behalf of Sir Donald Bradman to former South African President, Nelson Mandela.

The second, he told a gathering of news media, was that he’d won a part in the next Star Wars epic playing Anakin Skywalker’s step-father.

The star of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Breaker Morant, and The Sum of Us said he was off to Tunisia for the shoot tomorrow.

‘It’s a role that gladdens my son’s heart, I can tell you’, he said.

Source: Sydney Media Center