Captains Corner
On the 27th of March, the four school captains (and two teachers) took the train to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre for the Halogen Young Leaders Conference. It was a 40 minute train ride and we were all bursting with excitement, waiting to get there. The Halogen Young Leaders Conference (often referred to as The National Young Leaders Day) is an Australian event designed to inspire and develop leadership potential in primary and secondary students. It happens in most cities including Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, the event hosts about 437,000 students from tons of different schools. There was a couple of speakers who told us about their inspiring life journeys and all the challenges they had to face to get here. The speakers were Jacqui Bell, Nick Hudson, Adrian Beck and Catherine LagaʻAia.
Jacqui Bell – by Maya
The first speaker of the day was Jacqui Bell. She is the youngest person to run an ultra-marathon across all 7 continents. She used to love playing tennis but decided to try something new and decided to take on her first marathon. In 2018, Jacqui Bell became the youngest female in the world to complete Racing the Planets by running across four of the harshest deserts in the world. Each 250km race is over 7 days and fully self-supported. Jacqui Bell completed the first race across the Namibian Desert where she placed 1st in the 29 and under category. She then headed to Mongolia in July, Chile in September and finished the year in Antarctica. In 2019, Miss Bell became the youngest person in history to run an ultra-marathon on all 7 continents. Whilst completing the ultra-marathon as a personal ambition, she also raised just under $25,000 for the White Cloud Foundation, which was founded to improve access to treatment and increase awareness for depression in its many forms.
Adrian Beck - by Minul
After everyone had arrived, we started. The host introduced himself to us all, then he invited a few individuals from the Dance Curriculum to take over the stage they wanted us all to warm up by doing a dance called Pump it Louder. The second speaker of the day was Adrian Beck. Adrian is an author of children’s books. He told us that he was not exactly the person that would share his opinion when it came to being in a group activity (he was ‘the quiet one’) and that you do not have to be a person that is very sociable and loud to be a leader. His advice was about the importance of having a go, to follow your dreams and not to put boundaries on your personal possibilities. One quote that I found inspiring was “The quiet ones are often the best listeners”.
Cathrine Laga’ Aia – by Aradhya
At the Young Leaders Conference my favorite speaker was Catharine Laga’ Aia, she is the live action actress of Moana and she has made a lot if sacrifices to get the role of Moana. At the time she was in Year 12 and missed formal, graduation (she told us she was on a zoom call for graduation) and Spirt Week. When she auditioned for the role and didn’t even want to do it until her mum pushed her to do it, she went against her older and younger sisters for the role and even though her sisters did not get the role they still supported her during the movie. She met and acted with Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) and punched him, by accident, during shooting. She shared with us that Dwayne made her feel welcome during the filming because she felt out of place and she didn’t know anyone’s names and so instead of studying for her exam, she learnt all the crew and cast’s name. She told us that she had seen comments that people were saying “oh I wanted Zendaya instead” but even though people were saying that to her, she got personal messages from Polynesian people saying that they are so happy she is representing their culture. She was super inspiring and we got a photo with her! I am so happy we met her because I have learnt so much from her and all the other speakers!
Nick Hudson – by Keitarou
On the 27th of March last week on Friday the school captains went to Halogen, a young leader’s conference where different people come to talk to us about their lives and how they were inspired. One of the speakers was Nick Hudson and he was the final speaker for the day.
Nick Hudson is a Mental Health Leader. He has won the Australian award for mental health. Nick wasn’t a talented at school like all his other classmates but he was average at Maths and English. Nick realised later on in his life that he didn’t need to be talented like the other kids as he quoted “talent can only help you start something as it would be harder to keep it going.” That’s when he and his friends wanted to do a new push up challenge. So they set a goal for 3000 by the end of the month and tried to manually count. Then he created a Push Up app that was really basic. He and his friends used the app to achieve the goal and sometimes his friends would ask him to fix things add other features to the Push Up app. When the full app was released, it crashed in the first few days and then he got blackmailed by hackers when they asked for a ransom or else they would destroy the app. There were many challenges later on but in two years 1000 people used the app. Nick realised he should put more effort into the app for the people using the app so he worked day and night with barley any sleep to get his work done.
Then one day Nick was feeling a bit tired so he had a bit of caffeine which he rarely had and his heart started beeping really fast because it was stuffed. Then he went to a doctor and the doctor said that is heart was broken so he had to have surgery. Nick didn’t believe the 1st doctor so he went to another doctor and the doctor said that his heart was broken but Nick didn’t believe them again so he went to a 3rd doctor and this time the doctor said “your heart is broken you shouldn’t keep wasting your money and get a surgery.” That’s when they went to surgery but then they realised it would be too hard to replace it while his heart is beating so they connected to the heart to an artificial heart so they could keep it alive. Then the doctors realised that his ribcage was in the way so they opened up his ribcage to start the operation. They needed to replace the valve and the only 3 heart valves that were similar in size was a metal valve, a pig valve and a cow valve. Nick wasn’t allowed to choose which valve he wanted so the doctors picked him the cow valve. The operation had finished a few days later and when he was back alive he wasn’t allowed to do fitness for 3 months because the heart has to get used to be beating by itself again. Nicks could do fitness a little more each month.
After fully recovering Nick went back to the push ups challenge. When he saw lots of people using it he upgraded the app and in 5 years he had reached fifty thousand people using this app. This was a really inspiring speaker and his journey through challenges were incredible showing us how resilient he is when he was hacked and had operation where he became 99% human and 1% cow tissue.
