Sydney Awards 2025: Leo Patterson Ross, L-Fresh the Lion among Unsung Hero nominees
A renters’ rights advocate, a hip-hop artist and a coastal ecologist are among the first nominees for awards celebrating the city’s “unsung heroes”. Here’s your chance to add a name to the list.
NSW
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A renters’ rights advocate, a hip-hop artist and a coastal ecologist are among the first nominees for the Committee for Sydney’s awards celebrating the city’s “unsung heroes” – the men and women who are making a difference and making little fuss about it.
Tenants’ Union NSW CEO and Sydney Awards nominee Leo Patterson Ross is quietly celebrating a major victory, after new laws protecting renters from no-grounds evictions officially came into force last month.
The reforms – which also make it harder for landlords to lock pet owners out of the market by forcing them to provide a valid reason to refuse an animal in the home – have come to fruition in part due to the Tenants’ Union’s advocacy on the issue, in front of TV cameras and behind parliamentary office doors.
“We’ve been trying to show governments and the broader community for a long time, that renters really needed to be given this level of fairness and dignity in their homes,” Mr Patterson Ross said.
“Families are renting, older people are renting – it’s a reality that more people are renting their homes and for longer periods of their lives, and our system has not been set up to support that.
“The (political) parties are recognising this much more, and frankly, that’s because political staffers are renting, journalists are renting, all the people involved in having these community discussions are renting much more commonly than they would have been 20 or 30 years ago.”
Sharing the list with Mr Patterson Ross are Campbelltown-based musician Sukhdeep Singh Bhogal – better known by his stage name L-FRESH the LION – and Macquarie University’s ‘living seawalls’ project lead Professor Melanie Bishop.
L-FRESH has been nominated for his ongoing commitment to mentoring and nurturing emerging artists in the southwest Sydney hip-hop scene, including his leadership of the Campbelltown Arts Centre program Conscious.
Now in its sixth year, the “bespoke career development program” is about helping up-and-comers “build sustainable music careers in the current landscape,” the rapper said.
“Record labels (were) moving away from their development roles in the artist journey, and investing in artists who are already having some sort of success,” he said.
“That was a safer business option, I guess, but it just left a lot of artists who were on the precipice in the lurch – particularly artists from Western Sydney.
“There are already so many barriers trying to access the music industry in Australia, and that shift just made it even more challenging.”
Professor Bishop, a marine scientist and “coastal ecologist”, has been nominated for her work for the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, in collaboration with Sydney by Kayak and North Sydney Council, to place 3D-printed Rockpool habitats on the Lavender Bay shoreline helping native marine life thrive.
Readers of The Daily Telegraph are being urged to nominate their own unsung hero for the wide-open category “celebrating the people who go under the radar, yet play an essential role in making Sydney the best city in the world”.
Nominations for the 2025 Sydney Awards are open until June 19, with finalists to be announced in August and winners declared at a gala dinner on September 24.
To submit your nominations go to https://sydney.org.au/c/sydney-awards/
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