geogger blogger

The St Paul's Valedictory

Sun, 22 Sep 2013 21:30:46 +1000

After a long wait, our belongings finally arrived from Houston on Tuesday this week. The house has therefore been transformed from an empty echoing shell into a chaotic, over-stuffed warehouse of randomly arranged, partially unpacked boxes.
In that context, it was lovely to have a break from the unpacking and attend, as an especially invited guest, the Valedictory Dinner for the graduating Year 12 students of St Paul’s Grammar School on Friday Evening.
In my capacity as a former Head of St Paul’s (having served there in that capacity from 1989 to 1997), I had been invited by the Head of School, Mr Paul Kidson, to deliver some remarks as a prelude to presenting one of the evening’s major awards. It was a great honour to be given this privilege in this, the 30th anniversary year of the founding of St Paul’s Grammar School.
It is now 17 years since I left St Paul’s, and very few of the people who were there at that time remain. Nonetheless, it was wonderful to reminisce with those long-serving teachers who were there, and to get to know many new faces.
It was also a privilege to be introduced to this year’s graduating group of students from China, and as you can see above, to be photographed with them. As the Chinese teacher, Mrs Ruby Li, and the Co-ordinator of Overseas Students, Mr Antony Mayrhofer, told the students, I was the one who initiated the program to bring Chinese students to St Paul’s on an ongoing basis following extensive negotiations from 1993 to 1997. I cannot begin to express how happy I was to see the program still flourishing after all these years and to meet this year’s fine group of graduating students.
At the end of the formal part of the evening, I was humbled by the comments of a parent I had never met before who came up to me to congratulate me and to thank me for my remarks. In essence, he said that when he first heard that a former Headmaster was to deliver a speech at the dinner, he inwardly groaned and wondered why such a person might have been invited to be part of the proceedings. After hearing my speech, he said it had been the highlight of the evening for him and his family, and he felt he was reflecting the views of many other families as well.
What were the remarks that provoked such a generous response? Here is a slightly edited version of my short speech:
“I would like to begin by thanking Mr Kidson for his very kind invitation to join you here this evening for this wonderful event. It marks an important life stage for everyone here – parents as well as students – and it is a privilege to be part of your celebrations this evening. The students here will be the only group in the entire history of the whole universe – past, present and future – ever to be able to say truthfully that they graduated from St Paul’s Grammar School in its 30th anniversary year.
About half the school’s history has now passed since I spent eight and a bit very happy, very challenging and very busy years as Head of this wonderful school. Most of my time since leaving St Paul’s has been spent as Head of international schools in various countries – New Zealand, Hong Kong (which is really China), and most recently, in the United States.
The opportunity to work overseas is something that I hope many of you will grasp in the years ahead. According to the statistical trends, most of you will do precisely that, and for some of you, you will move internationally several times. That is the reality of the world you will enter, and it is the kind of world that I believe St Paul’s has prepared you for extremely well, and that is so whether you have chosen the IB option or not.
Speaking personally, working internationally has given me totally refreshed view of our world, and I hope that it will do the same for many of you in the years to come. It has helped me to appreciate the significance of understanding and embracing the different perspectives that are found in other cultures, the importance of using unambiguous language to communicate, the potential for creative innovation when people from different backgrounds get together and pool their diverse insights, and the immense humanitarian needs and challenges in various parts of the world that we never hear about here in Australia. It has also helped me understand at a very deep level that irrespective of where young people come from, be it America, China, Russia, Israel, Palestine, Rwanda, Nauru, Syria, Western Sahara, East Timor, South Africa, or North Korea, they all want fundamentally the same thing – a more peaceful, a more prosperous, a more tolerant, a more sustainable and a more highly educated and better informed world.
Completing secondary education places you in the top few percent of the world’s population. In fact, being literate (as I’m told most of you are) places you in the top half of the world’s population, especially if you are girl (as I’m also told some of you are). My simple message is this – please don’t take your education for granted, and please use the opportunities it provides to you to make this world a better place. To quote Jesus’ words in Luke 12:48, which I am helpfully translating for you into English from his original Aramaic, “For those to whom much has been given, much will be expected, and to those who have been entrusted with much, even more will be expected”.
When Mr Kidson invited me to say a few words this evening (and knowing me well, he did emphasise the words “a FEW”), I immediately agreed on one condition. I wanted to meet some of the Year 11 and Year 12 students beforehand and get to know them by asking a few basic questions. I wanted to ask some Year 11 students what they would miss when the Year 12 students – you – had graduated. I wanted to ask the Year 12 students what they might miss about St Paul’s. I wanted to ask what they especially had liked about St Paul’s, and I wanted to ask if they were Head of School for a day what they would change. In summary, I wanted to know whether the students at St Paul’s today were as brilliant as the students were back in the days when I was Head of School. Are they as motivated, as curious, as articulate, as engaged, as studious, as respectful, as involved, as compassionate, as confident, as humble – and indeed, as good-looking, as the St Paul’s students I knew when I was here.
I would love to share what I found out with you., It was quite mind-blowing and I learned a great deal, but sadly, Mr Kidson has instructed me to confine myself to just a very FEW words for my address this evening . I will say this, however. While I naively thought that the graduating students might miss the canteen food more than anything else, that proved not to be the case.
So, what will you miss? I learned that more than anything else, you will miss each other; the relationships you have with each other and with your teachers. I heard you will miss the sport, the arts (in which you have been very involved), and even your closeness to the other grades in the school – including, extraordinarily, I thought, the students in Year 9 – but more than anything else , it is each other that you will miss.
And, do you know what? The words I heard from the students when I visited a few weeks ago could have been word for word what I heard from my students here back in the 1990s. And that was really encouraging for me. It means that even though there are new buildings, new facilities, different teachers and a less handsome Head of School today than there was back in 1989, the fundamental spirit of St Paul’s lives on, and it has matured and it has developed. And I would like to congratulate Mr Kidson, the teachers and every one of you for the part you have played in maintaining that essential spirit of St Paul’s Grammar School as a very special place.
In that context, it is an honour for me to conclude my remarks this evening by presenting a special award. The award is for students who have shown great courage and fortitude in rising to meet the challenges of their studies. I am proud to present this award because I think it reflects one of the most important character skills in life, which is perseverance. It is a skill that every one you will have cultivate throughout your lives if you are to thrive in a changing world, as I have found myself over and over again in my career in various countries.
The words of the St Paul’s mission statement are deep and full of meaning: “Inspired by Christian purpose and hope, St Paul's Grammar School enables teaching and learning for the “whole of life” to serve the world.”. That is what St Paul’s has always been about, and as I have seen, it is clearly still the school’s purpose, in whatever words one might use to express it. This award, the Rubicon Award, exemplifies the St Paul’s identity. It is awarded by the Director of Students and Family Services to the students who consistently go above and beyond in all aspects of their schooling life and have left no stone unturned in preparation for life after School.
It is my honour and privilege to present the Rubicon Award jointly to Heath Joukhadar and Alana Bradley.”

The Blue Mountains

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 11:50:31 +1000

At the risk of beating a recurring theme to death, moving internationally is not much fun. Our furniture has still not been delivered, but at least we now have promised delivery dates, these being Tuesday and Wednesday of this coming week. It will be wonderful to have some chairs in the house at last.
The barren nature of our home became very apparent to us this week as our youngest son, Andrew, came from Canberra to stay with us for five days. He had to bring his own inflatable mattress for sleeping, and we often found ourselves carrying the two cushions we have upstairs or down according to where we wanted to sit and chat (or, almost as excitingly, to watch our new TV set that I installed on Tuesday evening). In the spirit of improvisation, I thought the three of us managed well by sharing our two plates, one mug and knife for the week.
Much of this past week was spent looking at refrigerators, window blinds, kitchen fittings and bathroom layouts, which I don’t think was Andrew’s original aspiration when he offered to come and visit us. To compensate for the week of drudgery in trying to set up our home in the absence of furniture, Di and I took Andrew for a day trip to the Blue Mountains on Thursday.
Located above an escarpment to the immediate west of Sydney’s outer western suburbs, the Blue Mountains is a beautiful area of heavily wooded, deeply dissected sandstone plateau. Some of the gorges are as deep as 750 metres (2500 feet), earning the area the nickname of Australia’s Grand Canyon. Of course, the canyons of the Blue Mountains are not as large as the Grand Canyon, and the green, heavily forested valleys are a stark contrast to the oranges and pinks of the Grand Canyon’s arid terrain, but there is a strong parallel in the processes that led to the formation of the two areas. Both areas were formed when tectonic uplift raised manifold layers of sedimentary rock upwards in an area through which an antecedent stream was flowing. In both cases, the rate of erosion by the river was greater than the rate of tectonic uplift, and so the river continued to flow along its course, cutting a deep valley through the ricks that were rising around it.
The Blue Mountains, which have now been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, were named because of the characteristic blue haze that lies over the area when seen from a distance. The haze is caused as volatile terpenoids are released into the atmosphere by the millions of eucalypt trees in the area, and the terpenoids cause mie scattering when hit by incoming sunlight, especially the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.
We had great weather for the trip to the Blue Mountains, with sunny skies and temperatures in the low 20s (Celsius). We began our explorations at the traditional starting point for Blue Mountains trips – Echo Point, which provides a stunning view of the Kanangra-Boyd Wilderness and the famous rock formation known as the Three Sisters.
We completed two short walks along the Prince Henry Clifftop Walk before driving into Katoomba, which is the main urban centre in the Blue Mountains, for lunch. After eventually finding a place to park in this beautiful ‘heritage’ town, we discovered a wonderful place to eat, the Yellow Café. The food was excellent, being fresh, organic, home-grown and home-made, as well as affordable. The atmosphere was a mix of Australian bush heritage and Nimbin hippiness, and the ambient music was good enough for a concert in its own right. I have made a mental note to return whenever I visit the Blue Mountains in the future.
We spent so much time lingering in the Yellow Café that the remaining sightseeing time was somewhat limited. Our intention was to take Andrew for a ride on the Scenic Railway, which is the steepest railway in the world with a 52°incline.
The last time I went on the Scenic Railway (maybe 40 years ago?), it had tiny open-topped carriages with chain wire for sides. It is now a thoroughly modern, glass-topped vehicle – arguably considerably safer than the daredevil experience of rising the train in the past. Unfortunately, it was not possible to buy a ticket for the railway only; only combined tickets were available for the Scenic Railway, the Scenic Skyway, the Scenic Cableway and the Scenic Walkway. Although these experiences would have been undoubtedly “Scenic”, we simply didn’t have enough time before sunset to do justice to them all – hence my second mental note for the day; next time, get to the Scenic Railway in the morning and spend several hours exploring.
It is several years since I have had the opportunity to visit the Blue Mountains. My ‘taster’ on Thursday has convinced me that I need to return more often and for longer periods of time.

St Pauls revisted

Sun, 8 Sep 2013 21:40:05 +1000

On Friday afternoon this week, I visited St Paul’s Grammar School in Penrith at the invitation of the Head of School, Mr Paul Kidson.
St Paul’s was my first headship, and I served there in that role from 1989 to 1997. During my time at the school, the school population grew from 570 to 1225 students, we opened a primary school on the campus and – much further afield – we opened an upper secondary feeder school in north-east China. We also introduced the International Baccalaureate Diploma and we completed five major building programs.
It was a heady, hectic and exhilarating time. At the time I left, St Paul’s was still a young school, just 14 years old. Although student numbers have declined a little in the intervening years, the school has added some wonderful new buildings, facilities and courses, it has attracted an outstanding teaching faculty, and it is now celebrating its 30th anniversary.
The reason for my visit was that Mr Kidson has invited me to deliver some remarks to the departing Grade 12 students at the Graduation Dinner that will be held in a few weeks from now on 21st September. I agreed to do so provided I could chat beforehand with some Grade 11 and 12 students in order to understand what today’s students thought of the school, what they valued, what they would change if they could, and what they thought they might miss after they left.
I had a great meeting with several students who graciously agreed to speak with me even though that would mean sacrificing some time from their class – they concealed their distress at missing class time extremely well with huge smiles and a thoroughly relaxed manner - no doubt simply to assuage my guilt.
That I was impressed with the young men and women with whom I spoke would be an understatement. They were a very impressive group of students – polite, articulate and well-spoken, confident without any hint of arrogance, curious, inquisitive and informative. When these students go forth from St Paul’s, they will be superb ambassadors of whom the school can rightly feel extremely proud.
Happily, my visit on Friday also coincided with the final meeting of SPOSMaC, the St Paul’s Overseas Schools Management Corporation. This was a body that the St Paul’s school board and I set up jointly 19 years ago with the specific purpose of facilitating the establishment of branch schools overseas, to strengthen international links and international understanding, including supporting the initiatives to establish sister school relationships in several countries. As an important component of building mutual international understanding, SPOSMaC also worked to help find talented potential students overseas who could benefit by coming to Australia to attend St Paul’s Grammar School.
SPOSMaC has done a brilliant job over the years in accomplishing its purposes, the most notable achievements being the establishment of the Light of the World School in Harbin, China, in 1996, and the subsequent recruitment of significant numbers of wonderful students from various parts of Asia (especially China) who have attended St Paul’s over the past two decades and who now provide vital links between their home countries and the school.
I had not been able to attend a meeting of SPOSMaC since 1997 due to my work commitments overseas. It was wonderful, therefore, to have the chance reminisce with members of the SPOSMaC board, and more importantly, to express my gratitude to them for honouring the vision of the organization over the past two decades. Is a measure of their faithfulness that most of the original members of the SPOSMaC board have continued to serve for all 19 years of the organization’s existence, and were present for the meeting on Friday afternoon.
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For those friends who are following the progress of Di’s and my move back to Sydney, we have now moved into our home in North Ryde. However, our shipment of furniture, books and other belongings from Houston is unlikely to be delivered for another week and a half according to the latest estimate. We are living in our largely empty house with just two items of furniture – a new bed that we have purchased, and an old sofa that one of our sons has discarded (thank you Phillip!). It is a relatively effortless way to achieve a not-so-trendy form of minimalism.
We still do not have phone or internet, but I have made arrangements for these and I am hoping they will soon be installed. Meanwhile, I am accessing e-mail each day (and uploading this blog!) by making a daily visit to Macquarie Shopping Centre, which has free wi-fi available in the food court (thank you Macquarie Centre!).
As I have said before, and as I will no doubt repeat in the future – moving internationally lost its novelty value a long while ago!

Power and passion in politics?

Sun, 1 Sep 2013 21:12:17 +1000

Di and I have made some progress towards re-settling in Australia this week – which is encouraging as it is now a week and a half since we arrived. We are still staying with friends as our house is not yet available, and although we are hoping to move into our home this week, all the indications are that it will still be two or three weeks before our furniture can be delivered.
On the positive side, we now have a car, we have arranged for electricity and internet (both of which should become available this week), and we have ordered a bed (also for delivery this week). We have been looking at other necessary items, such as a refrigerator and a letter box, and less necessary but desirable items, such as a television set and coffee maker.
It has been great to catch up with our family since returning. Di and I have spent good quality time with all four of our grandchildren as well as two of our own children, and we are hoping to catch up soon both with our other children and with my elderly mother who lives in Queensland.
The photo at the top of this blog shows one of these encounters. We met our daughter Liesl and her son (our grandson) Noah at a park beside Sydney Harbour. Noah loves to play shopkeepers, which is what we were doing when the photo was taken. However, as some of my Facebook followers are already aware, I feel that I need to work harder at developing Noah’s negotiating skills, as he agreed to pay me an imaginary $23 for an imaginary avocado sandwich. Feeling guilty, I naturally then gave him a truly bargain price on the imaginary bottle of pineapple juice that I also “sold” him.
It has been interesting to return to Australia in the middle of a national election campaign. Officially, the campaign has only been running for a few weeks, but given the state of Australian politics since the last election three years ago, most people feel that the campaign has been underway in a de facto sense ever since that time.
Having endured the marathon of a Presidential campaign while living in the US, and having been underwhelmed by the quality of debate and analysis of issues during that campaign, I was hoping for something better here in Australia. In that, I have been fairly disappointed, as all the parties seem to be repeating the banal slogans and conclusions of focus groups rather than engaging in genuine and visionary debate about important issues.
Maybe my bar has been set too high. I can still remember as a boy being enthralled by Menzies’ eloquence, and in later years, Whitlam’s grand vision and expansive energy, Hawke’s good-natured rascality and Keating’s sharp-tongued vindictive. By contrast, the two serious candidates for the Prime Ministership this time are positioning themselves as what I would call ‘low-profile targets’, avoiding as many specifics as possible which might become challengeable. As a consequence, neither candidate seems to have captured the imagination of the voting population.
There is an old saying in Australian politics that I remember first hearing in the 1970s, which is that “oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose elections”. If the opinion polls are to be believed, that adage is likely to be repeated on election day in six days from now. And if that is so, then in the words of one veteran political commentator, “Those among us with a morbid desire to witness political train wrecks will have been disappointed by this disciplined election campaign, but it won't be long before the lid blows” (Source).
I wonder how today’s political scene in Australia will be described by commentators, not so much in the next month (I think that is fairly predictable) but in a generation from now. This question came to my mind as I was recently watching the brilliant two-part ABC documentary called “Whitlam – the Power and the Passion”. Chronicling what has become known as the Whitlam era in Australia, the documentaries (to quote the official ABC blurb) describe the period in these words:
“It was a time of power, of passion, which divided us as a nation in a way that hadn't been seen before, nor since. As a great orator, with a brilliant mind and bulletproof self belief, Gough Whitlam spent over 20 years fighting civil wars inside the Labor party before eventually leading them to power. He was hailed as a Labor messiah – with a greater downfall than any politician in Australian history.”
The documentary described Whitlam’s arrival on the political scene as “an Orpheus in a bogan underworld”. The documentary also described the tragic saga in which Whitlam was let down repeatedly by the incompetence and treachery of his subordinates while not being supported (and in fact being undermined) by those whose duty it was to listen and accept his advice (principally the Governor-General).
The legacy of that experience still haunts Australian politics, and this is so not only for those of us who were in their formative years when the events unfolded. The Whitlam story showed that even the strongest, most visionary and most capable leader can be let down by incompetent subordinates and the treacherous undermining of those whose duty ought to have been to support the leader and provide stability. Many have argued recently that the tradition of internal treachery within political parties is alive and well in Australia today.
Sadly, I have seen the same thing happen in schools, where the consequences can be at least as destructive because, in the case of schools, the precious futures of young people are at stake.
The focus through much of the current election campaign has been on the leaders, and perhaps rightly so. However, my hope is that the subordinates of whichever leader wins this Saturday’s election will prove to be more proficient than many of their media performances have hitherto shown them to be.
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If you are interested in watching “Whitlam – the Power and the Passion”, a preview can be seen online here and purchased through several sources including this one
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On a totally different and more light-hearted note, this is something I wish I had seen three years ago before I moved to the US: http://bigstockblog.squarespace.com/blog/20-british-words-that-mean-something-totally-different-in-the-us
I could also add a few extras of my own that led to some some significant though fortunately usually hilarious misunderstandings.

Seeing my new book in Sydney

Sun, 25 Aug 2013 18:05:51 +1000

This is my first blog since returning to live in Australia. It may take a while for these blogs to become as regular as my earlier blogs from Hong Kong and Houston, as we are not yet in our home and we do not yet have internet access organized.
Since returning to Sydney, Di and I have been staying with some very good friends of ours in the suburb of Leichhardt. Our own house is not yet vacant, and even when it becomes vacant, we will still need to wait for a few weeks before our furniture and household goods arrive from Houston. They seem to be on a particularly slow boat, even when the vast size of the Pacific Ocean is taken into account.
We have made some progress towards re-settling. I transferred my driver’s licence to New South Wales yesterday morning, and we have arranged to buy a car, which we will collect this Tuesday. We have bought a bed, and that will be delivered on Tuesday next week, enabling us to move into our own home, even though the bed may well be the only piece of furniture in it.
The novelty of moving internationally wore off several moves ago. Hopefully this will be our last Big International Move.
Two days after arriving in Sydney, I paid a visit to Pronins, the distributors of the books I have written for the past decade or so. As well as making contact with some folk who have become good friends over the years, it enabled me to see a copy of my latest book for the first time.
The new book is the 7th edition of “Planet Geography”, a book I have written to support the IB (International Baccalaureate) Geography course. The first edition was released over a decade ago (in 2002), and the latest edition is almost unrecognizable from that 1st edition. Indeed, it is even vastly different from the previous (6th) edition, so great are the changes, the updates, and the extent of new or expanded sections.
In some ways, writing a book is a bit like having a baby. The gestation period for a book (for this book, anyway) is actually a little longer than nine months, and like giving birth, you don’t really know what the finished product will look like even though you provided the genetic input for it.
When I saw my first copy of the 7th edition of “Planet Geography”, I was immediately delighted, and I understood the enthusiastic comments of those who had seen it before me while I was travelling back to Australia. The printers did a superb job. The photos look great, the paper has a beautiful sheen to it, and the all-new layout looks just as modern and effective as I had hoped.
In some ways, “Planet Geography” is the documented culmination of many of my experiences as a geographer. The 1400 photos in the book are, with just a tiny handful of exceptions, all ones that were taken by me when travelling or while undertaking fieldwork. Much of the material was also gathered by me while in the field, travelling either with students or solo.
The IB, with its emphases on global understanding, academic excellence, genuine enquiry, open-mindedness, reflective learning and appreciating others’ perspectives, provides a brilliant framework for expounding geographical insights. It has been a privilege to help support geography in the IB for over a decade now by doing what I love most – sharing insights and perspectives with young people who will without doubt be the leaders of the next generation.