SRC News

Harmony Week 2023

Our school has a beautifully diverse culture and so every year we make sure to dedicate time to celebrate and embrace our multicultural community. This year was no exception, from the 27th of February to the 3rd of March, the school's SRC and School Captains ran Harmony Week. 

Harmony Week at its core is about acknowledging and embracing our different cultures, traditions, background and ethnicities. We started the week, by launching a cultural wall, where students and staff could draw different flags, or write little messages in their languages to stick up, to represent the country they are from. This was a whole week event where the whole school got involved. On Tuesday during lunch, we had set up Henna stalls, run by our very own talented students, who designed and drew these works of art themselves. On Thursday was our much anticipated and greatly loved dress-up day. This was where students could dress up in their multicultural/traditional outfits or wear the colour orange to support Harmony Week. Everyone looked wonderful all dressed up, and it was beautiful seeing how diverse our school community truly is. The community spirit was palpable, students really got involved. Furthermore, during lunch we were joined by Mr Kano Ravalji, who used his experiences from moving to Australia from India at the age of seven, to empower us and encourage us to embrace our identity and culture. It was truly an inspirational speech for everyone. And so after an exciting week, to top it all off we finished with a few lovely performances from our K-pop and Bollywood dancers during lunch. We were also lucky enough to watch a beautiful Sri Lankan performance, Kandyan Dancing. Throughout the week, we had a Recipe Padlet up and running, on which our school community could add their favourite cultural cuisines to it. And so with all those entries, we are planning to create a recipe book of our own to share in the near future. To put some icing on this harmonious cake, we also played various songs from different countries at the end of the day which was well-loved and received by our community.

All proceeds from Harmony Week are to be donated to the UNICEF Earthquake Appeal in Türkiye and Syria, to support those in need. Overall, it was such a successful week, where we all got to celebrate our community and diversity. 

Finally, we would also like to introduce our new Year 9 executive for this year, Illiana Alam. Congratulations to Illiana for gaining this position and we cannot wait to see what we can achieve with her as the new addition to our Executive Team! 

Your SRC

Special IWD Breakfast

On the 24 February, the other school captains and I went down to Albert Park Golf Course for Mac.Robertson Girls' High School’s International Women’s Day breakfast. There, we met and mingled amongst the school captains of the other Selective Entry schools and engaged in conversation to do with our schools’ upcoming programs and extracurricular activities. 

The breakfast was mostly just us socialising with one another, and we had the privilege of  dining beside the principals of Suzanne Cory and MacRob. Following a delicious breakfast, we got the chance to listen to past MacRob graduates speak on this year’s International Women’s Day theme “Innovation and technology for gender equality”. One of the speakers talked about how even though Artificial Intelligence should not be biased to favour one gender over another, there are still biases because those programs run on past data, which have biases. We were then given the opportunity to ask questions from three different panellists, each of varying careers, ages and backgrounds, and there were riveting questions asked such as “How do you undo the foundations in society to make it so that no gender is favoured?”. Overall, it was a memorable experience, influenced by the amazing speakers and guests!

Sai Kristam - School Captain