Full list of Australia Day Honours recipients for 2025
Laurie Lawrence, the coach behind many of our Olympians, has finally been recognised on the Australia Day Honours list. See the full list, vote in our poll and have your say.
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Laurie Lawrence, the larger-than-life Queensland swimming coach known for his exuberant celebrations after Australian Olympic successes, heads a dream team of sporting names recognised on the Australia Day honours list.
The 83 year old was made an Officer of the order of Australia (AO), while more than a dozen athletes who won gold in Paris last year were awarded medals of the Order of Australia (OAM).
They included swimmer Cam McEvoy, who ripped up the training rule book to win the 50m men’s freestyle final, Shayna Jack who won four gold medals in Paris, BMX rider Saya Sakakibara, whose path to the top of the podium was such a poignant family story (after the brain injury sustained by her brother and fellow BMXer Kai in 2020), and swimmers Alexa Leary and Callum Simpson, who wowed the country with their wins in the Paralympics.
Leary said the honour was so incredible, “it’s honestly hard to put into words”.
“It’s such a special recognition of all the hard work I’ve put in, the challenges I’ve faced, and the amazing people who’ve supported me along the way.”
The award was “something I share with everyone who has been part of my journey,” Leary said. “I feel so proud and so grateful.”
It’s not hard to imagine Laurie Lawrence yelling and whooping with delight over every Australian victory in the pool – but to those who think his success as a coach was just a product of him being some sort of cheerleader-in-chief, think again.
“You’ve got to do the hard yards. You’ve got to do the work as a coach; you’ve got to be there in the morning before the kids arrive,” he said.
Lawrence declined to name any one swimmer’s success as a career highlight.
“Oh mate, you’re not going to get me into trouble,” he said. “I’ve put 20 or 30 athletes on Olympic teams; I’m not going to say ‘This was the fun one’.
“But I’ll tell you what, I’m glad I’ve got this honour, because now I can throw it back at those bastards that I coached that have got the honour themselves. Some of them used to say ‘We’ve got this, you never had one of these’. Well now I have, so they can go and get stuffed.”
Lawrence’s poolside celebrations were legendary; after Duncan Armstrong won gold in the 200m freestyle in Seoul the incredulous coach slapped a TV journalist in the face out of sheer excitement. His successor in the fervour stakes is surely Dean Boxall, whose almost out-of-body celebrations after Ariane Titmus’s gold in Tokyo made news bulletins around the world.
But Lawrence warned Australia “has to look after, recognise and appreciate” coaches of Boxall’s calibre to ensure continued success in the Olympic pool.
Matildas ‘legend’ Clare Polkinghorne was also recognised for her contributions on the soccer field.
‘Stoked to be recognised’: Arisa Trew
The future in another Olympic sport – skateboarding – seems pretty assured, thanks to our youngest-ever gold medallist, Arisa Trew, who is now also the youngest recipient of an OAM.
Trew, who just days ago won the Vans Pool Party competition in Orange County, Los Angeles, said she was “stoked to be recognised”.
While some have suggested the recent fires could imperil LA’s ability to host the Olympics in 2028, Trew said she was sure the city would be ready.
And she’s also got Brisbane in 2032 in her sights.
“I’ll definitely try to get those Olympics as well,” she said. “My goals for the sport are to do more competitions, learn new tricks, create new tricks, have fun, and try some crazy things.”
‘I want to do this forever’: Kelli Underwood
Similar levels of enthusiasm came from Fox Sports commentator Kelli Underwood, awarded the OAM for services to broadcast media.
The first woman to ever call an AFL match, Ms Underwood said she had been privileged to be at the forefront of changes to Australian sport over the past 20 years, especially the explosion in interest in women’s competitions. The AFLW, she said, “was an absolute game-changer”.
She nominated a round 17, 2009 game between the Geelong Cats and the Hawthorn Hawks as an all-time favourite to call. A rematch of the 2008 Grand Final which the Hawks won, the Cats had the opportunity to square the ledger – but with scores pegged at 98, it all came down to Jimmy Bartel and one final kick at goal after the siren.
“[Veteran commentator] Tim Lane said to me ‘This is your time, this is your opportunity,’” Ms Underwood said. “My voice was all over the shop, because I was so raw, but the ability to call that game in that moment, it was the greatest thrill. Electricity was pulsing through my body. I walked away that night, going: ‘Whatever happens, I want to do this forever.’”
[For the record, Bartel kicked the point.]
Leaders and legal eagles on the list
Scientists, policy experts and dedicated volunteers were also included among the names of the 732 Australians recognised on the honours list. The six Australians made Companions of the Order of Australia (AC) included the late indigenous leader Galarrwuy Yunupiungu, the former UN Assistant Secretary-General, Emeritus Professor Gillian Triggs, the High Court Justice James Edelman, and the legal Professor and Voice advocate Megan Davis.
Four federal politicians were honoured, including the late Kevin Andrews and James Short from the Liberal Party, and Duncan Kerr and Nick Sherry from Labor.
Recognition for world-conquering soft rockers
Fans of Little River Band were outraged last year when the world-conquering rockers were left out of Yacht Rock: A Documentary.
As global fascination grows with the “soft rock” genre of the ’70s, the recognition of original Little River Band members Beeb Birtles and David Briggs in this year’s Australia Day Honours offers some justice to loyal fans of the seminal Aussie band.
Birtles, who is based in Nashville, said the honour was particularly special as the band celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2025 and welcomes a new generation of fans courtesy of the “yacht rock” trend.
LRB was the first Australian rock band to enjoy commercial success on the American charts with their 1978 album Diamantina Cocktail. They also conquered the UK, Europe, Japan and Asia.
“I don’t really understand the yacht rock thing but I am going to go with it,” Birtles said.
“I thing Cool Change would be the ultimate yacht rock song.”
The recognition also puts the spotlight back on the original line-up, which included Glenn Shorrock, after an extended legal feud over the rights to their name, with the Little River Band now featuring an all-American line-up.
“We have so many fans who just love what they call the classic line-up of the band,” Birtles said.
‘World class’ entertainment industry figures
Another entertainment luminary to be recognised in the 2025 honours is revered playwright Joanna Murray-Smith, who has authored 27 plays.
Murray-Smith enjoyed huge success with the acclaimed production Julia about Australia’s first female prime minister leading up to the famous misogyny speech, starring Justine Clarke in the titular role.
As a screenwriter, Murray-Smith also penned the script for the 2019 film Palm Beach, directed by Rachel Ward and starring Bryan Brown, Sam Neill, Greta Scacchi and Richard E. Grant.
Geoff Jones, the CEO of major Australian live events promoter TEG, said he was “very humbled” by his inclusion on the honours roll.
Jones said he took great pride in putting beloved Australian performers including Delta Goodrem, Human Nature and Keith Urban on the country’s biggest stages, and celebrating the “world-class” theatre productions of Hamilton and the upcoming MJ The Musical.
“Australian artists are as good as anybody worldwide, our acting talent in musical theatre is among the best in the world, and in everything we do in live entertainment, Australia punches well above its weight and we should never lost sight of that,” Jones said.
Songwriter Paul Begaud, who co-wrote tracks for Human Nature, Goodrem and the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony song Dare To Dream performed by John Farnham and Olivia Newton-John, was also a recipient of the Order of Australia medal (OAM).
Honours for Australia’s “space race” guys
When Apollo XVI astronaut John Young radioed the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station near Canberra from the surface of the moon in 1971, saying he could “do with a swan”, electronics engineer John Saxon had no idea what he was talking about.
There was “a huge amount of noise on the downlink,” Mr Saxon said, but it took a while to work out the NASA astronaut was actually asking for a beer.
“He had been down to Carnarvon station [in WA], in the early days of the Gemini missions, before Apollo – and he grew to like Swan Lager,” Mr Saxon said.
“Eventually I said ‘If you come down here, we’ll keep them cold for you.”
The incident was one of several examples Mr Saxon and his former colleague Michael Dinn gave of the little misunderstandings intrinsic to Australia’s work with NASA in the heady days of the space race.
The two men have just been awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for their crucial work at Honeysuckle and Tidbinbilla stations on NASA programs such as Apollo, Skylab, Voyager and even SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence).
The work was grand in scope, but occasionally little things got lost in translation.
Mr Dinn said the word “redundant” created confusion, with Aussies using it to mean “unnecessary,” while for the Americans it had the connotation of “backup” or “spare”. And when he told NASA executives a piece of work had been “tabled”, “they just about fell off their chairs, because ‘tabled’ in some American contexts means ‘put to one side,’” he said.
The Australian outposts played an “incredibly important” part in the NASA missions, Mr Saxon said – never more so than during the harrowing attempts to bring Apollo XIII back to Earth after its aborted attempt to land on the moon.
“We had two spacecraft on the same frequency; the lunar module, which they were using as a lifeboat, and the third stage of the rocket,” he said. “It was pretty tricky.”
While the 2000 Australian film The Dish was set in Parkes rather than Honeysuckle Creek, Mr Saxon said it took some liberties with the reality of the work undertaken at the Australian tracking stations.
“They wanted to make The Dish at Tidbinbilla when I was director there,” Mr Dinn recalled. “They said ‘We want to rollerskate on the dish,’ and I said, ‘No, sorry, you can’t do that; it’s a very precisely engineered thing.”
In the end, filmmakers shot a scene with workers playing cricket on the dish. But that didn’t happen either, Mr Saxon said.
Anyone can nominate any Australian for an award in the Order of Australia. If you know someone worthy, nominate them now at www.gg.gov.au.
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