Vale Neale Daniher

Neale Daniher grew up in our neck of the woods, on a sheep and wheat farm at Ungarie, born at the old West Wyalong Base Hospital and raised as the third of eleven kids in a Catholic farming family that bred footballers and fighters in equal measure.

A country boy who went on to play for Essendon, coach the Demons for nearly a decade, and then take on the toughest opponent of his life when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2013.

Rather than going quiet, he turned a death sentence into a movement, co-founded FightMND, slid down the ice at the MCG year after year for the Big Freeze, and raised more than $115 million for research into a disease that, until he started talking about it, almost no one understood.

He gave Australian families living with MND something they had never had before, hope, money for research, and a country that finally cared.

To Jan, his four kids, his ten brothers and sisters, and the wider Daniher clan still farming and still going at it, thank you for sharing him with us.

The best way we can honour Neale Daniher now is to finish the job he started. Motor neurone disease is still not a notifiable disease in this country, which means we have no complete national picture of who has it, where they are or how fast it is spreading. If we want a cure, we need the data, and that starts with making MND notifiable.

Vale Neale, play on.