Annette and Malcolm Sky of Caniaba were foster parents and now guardians of Malachi Canning, T20 parathlete, and his brother Malcome. 15-year-old Malachi won the Junior Sportsperson of the Year Award on Australia Day in January this year. Just before devastation hit our region, Annette and Malachi flew to Sydney for the NSW Juniors Championships where Malachi achieved four PBs, won seven gold and two silver medals and set a new Australian record. Annette and Malachi shared their story with Sara Browne.

Malachi

I love being active, keeping fit.

Annette

He trains most days. He has a workout he does here at home. He’s got a chin-up bar out in the shed. He goes down to the tennis court, he’s got a ladder he rolls out, sprint training.

Malachi

I think running is going to turn out to be my thing because I don’t want to be known as the big guy, eating 20 big macs. Long jump is my thing. But I’m good at everything.

Annette

He loves long-jump. He’s pretty good at it. He holds the under 15 and under 17 Australian records.

Malachi

..and discus and shotput

Annette

4.95 is the best at comp. He’ll have to break his own record when we go to Sydney later this week.

Malachi

It’s always the bugs that get me. I don’t show the bugs but I get the bugs on the day. Nervous, like butterflies. I don’t show it much. I used to.

Annette

Probably his biggest is lack of concentration. I said to him, he needs not to be so chatty to everybody. You can be nice to people but concentrate on the job at hand. He gets a bit anxious, a bit cranky. You don’t want to know how his crankiness comes out.

Malachi

...a few colourful words, a few drink bottles thrown.

Annette

When we were in Sydney a couple of years back, Melinda Gainsford-Taylor was presenting Malachi with a medal. Cathy Freeman was an idol. Melinda was putting the medal over his head and he goes, so, can you beat Cathy Freeman?

Malachi

In my head I was thinking – I bet you can’t.

Annette

She was very good. She said, well I’ve run against her a few times and sometimes she’s beaten me and sometimes I’ve beaten her.

Malachi

I didn’t like that part, I like the Cathy Freeman part. I’d like to meet her, hell yeah. Cathy Freeman and Usain Bolt.

Annette

He used to say he wanted to change his name to Usain Bolt and go compete for Jamaica.

Malachi

And still do

Malachi's first day of high school

Annette

Malachi always beats everybody by quite a distance but all the para kids run against each other and they’re all different classifications so when the race is finished, Malachi’s time will be set against the world record time and he’s given a percentage. And that’s with every classification. At the end of the day, whoever has the highest percentage, gets the gold medal. So, Malachi can win every race but sometimes he doesn’t medal at all. That’s hard for someone with an intellectual disability to actually understand that. It’s hard to get your head around. Once you do get your head around it, it sort of makes sense.

Malachi

If I get a PB, I’m happy.

Annette

I told him it’s not about the medals, it’s about the PBs.

Malachi

Medals are better than PBs…just saying

Annette

Many a time it’s happened that he’s been on the podium to get a gold medal and they say oh no no no we made a mistake and they take it off him and give him a silver or a bronze. Once he just looked at them and he went ‘what is your *@#ing problem, don’t you know I won that race?’. I was there, camera ready! He came back up into the stands and I said, you can’t speak like that, he said ‘well what is their problem, Mum?’

One other time he won three silver medals and then got a fourth one and he said ‘I don’t want another one the same colour, I want a different colour.’

Malachi

At least, give me bronze.

Annette

They could have given him a purple, pink or orange one, it wouldn’t have mattered.

Malachi

I am a sliver person, as you can see from my chain, but I don’t like silver medals. It’s either gold or nothing.

Annette

At the moment, if we go away to comps, they start later and they finish later because it’s so hot. A day or two before an event are rest days.

Malachi

I just pray to God and hope for the best. I believe in God.

Annette

That’s not part of our family life, that’s just Malachi.

Malachi

God is always there for me.

Annette

Don McNamara is his throws coach. He trains with him three days a week. Glen Thacker is his long-jump coach but he lives in Coffs Harbour so we don’t catch up with him as much as we’d like to, especially since Covid. He does sprints as well. And then Gemma Codrington, she’s at uni now but when she’s home she does sprints and some long-jump as well.

Malachi

Mostly I just do it because I’m good at it. I’m born to do it. It’s in my blood.

Annette

We can’t say I’m his foster Mum anymore because just before Christmas we got guardianship. It took a long time. We’ve been together 12 and a half years. About a week after he turned three, he came here. And he’ll be 16 this year. The first 12 months we were at Dyrabba, that’s where I had my farm. Malcolm my husband has three boys and I have one and we were over here all the time because they were all quite sporty as well. He was going to uni to be a teacher and he was appointed out at Clunes and we thought, this is ridiculous, it’s too far, so we came for a drive. We thought somewhere along the backroad from Casino to Lismore would be a nice area and this was the only house we saw for sale. The boys had been with us just 12 months when we bought the place.

I was doing care when Malcolm and I met and he was also already doing foster care. Mine wasn’t in the system as such, it was a couple of family members that I’d had in my care from my late husband. It was sort of a natural process for us to do it. Back then they didn’t do a lot of training and stuff that they seem to do now. We know a little bit about Malcome and Malachi’s family background.

When Malachi started school, up here at Caniaba, the first athletics carnival you could see he had a love for it. And then when he was about seven, he had a paediatrician appointment and they’d said to me, he’s never going to excel at school. You need to find something that he’s good at. Everyone is good at something; you need find out what are his loves. And I said oh he just loves running. She looked at me and said, do you know he can compete as a para-athlete? I went, are you serious? He’s got all his arms and legs. Because to me then, that’s what a para-athlete was. She said no, no, no it’s much more than that. She actually got the paperwork – a paediatrician has to fill out part of it – and she helped me do it all. She’s a local, Jackie Andrews up at Goonellabah. It was all through her and he’s just thrived ever since. I didn’t even know anything about para-athletes until she mentioned it. We’ve got her to thank. She was brilliant.

There’s a lot of travel involved. He’s been lucky. A number of years ago, someone told us about Variety Heart Scholarships. They help disadvantaged kids’ families. They have a scholarship they give out every year and Malachi ticks all their boxes – disability, indigenous, out of home care – we’ve now had four scholarships and they’re worth five thousand dollars.

Malachi

I’m their favourite.

Annette

He was the poster boy last year. His face was splashed over everything.

Malachi

Everybody come see me, I’m famous.

Annette

You can nominate what you want to spend it on. We do accommodation, his airfares, it doesn’t cover mine, uniforms, any equipment he needs. I don’t know how we would have done it without it. They’ve been amazing.

We’re about to go to Sydney for NSW Juniors. We went to Perth a couple of years ago. At the end of this year is Adelaide.

Malachi

Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra. They’re all national comps.

Annette

National All Schools is in Adelaide at the end of the year. We’re going to Sydney next month for the Australian Championships which was supposed to be in Perth but they had to change of because of the border closure. This time next year we’ll go to Perth. We’ve got Adelaide in December.

I don’t have a job anymore. I’ve not really had a career. I’ve worked in school canteens and been a teacher's aid, I’m a bit of a jack of all trades.

Malachi

I’m in year 10. I’ll do years 11 and 12. Then I want to go to the Paralympics.

Malachi with just some of his collection of sporting awards

Annette

The next one is next year so he won’t be ready for that. But his throws coach here in Lismore has a 10-year plan for Malachi to compete at the Brisbane Paralympics in 2032. It sounds a long way away but it’s not. There’s Commonwealth Games in between and there’s World Games and whatever else if you’re good enough. At the moment we’re just going with the flow.

A lot of people say he has to start specializing but Malachi just enjoys all of it and while ever he can do it, why do we need to cut them out. This competition in Sydney coming up, the draft timetable came through and I wrote it out for him. It's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, three events each day. This is what’s on offer, this is the times, I left him a highlighter and I said you highlight what you want to do, it’s all up to you. He chose nine out of nine.

Malachi

100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, long jump, discus, javelin and shotput.

Annette

He loves javelin but he can’t do it at many events because they don’t offer it but at NSW Juniors and Australian Championships and ACT Championships they do. Last year he had the whole year off because he smashed his leg and he had to have a big operation. He’s got three pins in his leg now. He doesn’t feel pain. He did a front flip at a shopping centre at Coomera. He landed it but he must have rolled because they assume it sent a shock wave up the tendon to that knobbly piece just below the knee - that’s where the tendon joins – when it got to there, it tore that piece off but the tendon was still joined. It was just floating around in his leg. They were going to rush him to theatre but it took three days for the foster agency to organize their paperwork. We don’t have to deal with them anymore.

The worst thing was, he had a cast on and six weeks later when they cut that off his knee exploded like a volcano. It was a mess. He’d picked up staph. They had to rush him back to theatre and from that operation we were only home a couple of days and he got sick. I took him to the hospital and he’d picked up another bug from the second operation, a superbug that was attacking all the weak parts in his body and they were really concerned it was going to get to where the pins were. He was really, really sick. He was on crutches for four months. It wasn’t a good year but it’s all behind him now and he’s back bigger and better.

Years ago, the agency offered us adoption and we took them up on it. We met all the criteria at the beginning of that process and then nothing was happening and I called a meeting and they said we’ve withdrawn the adoption because they don’t support the adoption of aboriginal children anymore. So, they just took it away. I said, how am I going to explain that to two little boys?

Then I said we’d do guardianship, that was years ago, and they just wouldn’t do anything about it. So, we ended up going to the Department of Community and Justice and said this is what we want, we went over above the agency because they told me that when Malachi turned 18 they’d take him and put him in residential care. I said no you’re not. You’re not going to do athletics with him and follow his dreams. You’re just going to stick him in there and take his money or whatever. In the end that was my driving force, to get him out of the system so that wouldn’t happen.

I actually spoke to a mum just the other day, whose daughter has recently started athletics, she said it’s like it’s a sport for the rich kids. It is a little bit. We used to have to do up a financial plan for the agency so they knew how much money we were spending, why I don’t know. A lot of years it was between 7 and 10 thousand dollars, which is ok but I don’t know how we’d manage if it wasn’t for the scholarships. You do what you’ve got to do.

We don’t get down time really. I’m actually thinking that for the Perth comp next year, if Malcolm can take some long service leave, we make a family holiday of it. I don’t know what that will look like money-wise. I can’t work anymore since we took on the boys because I have to be available for Malachi. If he’s having a bad day at school, so it doesn’t get out of hand or if he gets suspended or anything like that, they just call me and I go pick him up. That hasn’t happened for a long time. That’s an understanding that we have with the school so it doesn’t escalate.

Malachi

I can see myself getting to the Olympics. Sweet gold medals.

Annette

It’s all about the bling around the neck. I think he likes the awards too. Truly the people he meets at events are probably his best friends.

Not long ago at Woolgoolga he met Kyle McIntosh. He’s moved with his family from Sydney, he’s in his 20s and he is aspiring to get to the Olympics. He’s a T20 athlete same as Malachi which is for intellectual disability. We went and introduced ourselves and Malachi said he was the same category as Kyle. We’ve been following him now. At the Australian Championships, we’ll see Kyle again.

All the training happens after school at 4 o’clock. Malachi loves school.

Malachi

My favourite subjects are recess and lunch.

Annette

He loves school so much that normally, when we fly to Sydney, we have to book the earliest flights back, and the uniform is in the car and he goes straight to school from the airport. I book months in advance to get the cheap airfares, as soon as the Friday Frenzy starts, I’m on there.

At the beginning of every year, I sit down with the calendar and I go through and I find out all the dates of all the comps and then I do bookings. If you wait until the last minute, everything triples in price. I do free cancellation bookings for accommodation and airfares.

Malachi

I have other hobbies. I like reading the bible.

Annette

Yes, he reads that a lot. He hates swimming but yesterday they had the school swimming carnival and he got age champion. None of the kids show up. He said to me when he had his broken leg, no-one even got age champion because no-one went, and I said to him this year – maybe you should go in everything and you might do okay – and he said why? I said maybe you could add a swimming medal to all your other medals.

He’s got football medals, AFL, he's represented the school for netball, he’s got soccer medals, cricket. I said you might as well add a swimming one. So, he went and there was only two of them and he beat the other kid at everything. What a hoot.

He used to go away for Nationals for cross-country but he’s decided he doesn’t really like the real long-distance events so he’s canned that. When he gets cranky at a competition, he likes to tell people that he doesn’t even want to do it – his mum makes him do it. That’s why I write it all out now and say – you choose. I’m not making you do anything; you can give it all up anytime you want. Your choice, not mine. I’ll support him but I’m not going to make him do it.

I have seen other parents who get really cranky with their kids. I saw one father hit his daughter and I thought, are you serious? They’re kids. There’s one at the moment, the daughter doesn’t want to do it and the dad gets cranky with her. At the last competition, he asked me to talk to her. I said give her some time and space, she’s a teenage girl, other things are more important. Give her 12 months off, she might come back to it.

I wasn’t really into sport when I was growing up. I used to swim but I was never competitive. My son was very sporty, he toured Singapore and South Africa at 16 for rugby union.

Malachi

It’s not in your DNA to be competitive. You don’t have the blood for it.

Annette

I’m not a competitive person. I had a difficult childhood. I had an alcoholic father. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere and there was no money to go anywhere, things were different back then. There were five of us so mum couldn’t leave, they didn’t have places back in those days to escape to.

Malachi thinks Dylan Alcott is pretty cool, especially when he got Australian of the Year.

Malachi

My award was much better than his. I’m not going to lie.

Annette

When he got Aboriginal Citizen of the Year, Jenny Dowell came along, she wasn’t mayor then but Malachi said to her – oh you were the old mayor – and she looked at him and said – yeah, the old the grey mayor ain’t what she used to be. Such a good come back line.

Every time we go and buy shoes, they have to be Nike shoes. And some Asics. I don’t know, I don’t even look, he just picks what he likes. All I know is they cost a couple of hundred dollars every time we have to buy a new pair of shoes. You’ve got to have long distance running shoes, then you have to have spikes for sprints. Then you need throw shoes. Then usually his old spikes become long-jump shoes. We have a shoe bag that goes with us.

We’ve had 24 foster kids. My husband died in 2001. We started being foster parents in 2000. We took on one of his family members. Then after my husband died, I took on one of his nephews. I had my own son as well.

Malcolm and I got together years later and he had three sons and he was doing respite care as a foster parent. Then we took on these two – Malachi and Malcome – and then we did respite care and we’ve had others come and go in between. Some of them we keep in touch with.

When we got guardianship last December I put in a letter of resignation. I’m too old. I’ve got grandkids now. It’s very time consuming and I don’t like the way they’re a money-making business now, they don’t seem to have the care for the children that they used to and that concerns me. You would swear that the money the government allows for the kids was coming out of their own pocket, they don’t pass it on.

We had many battles with them. And we’re still battling with them for money that they owe us.