From the Principal

The stories we tell

There is a curious symmetry to the week ahead as I write this article on the final day of the school holiday period.

In cinemas, Christopher Nolan releases The Odyssey, Homer's three-thousand-year-old tale of a man's long, storm-tossed journey home from a war he never wanted to fight.

On Sunday, more than a billion people will watch the World Cup final, willing on eleven strangers as though the fate of nations rested on a football.

Here, on our own campus, we pause to mark Foundation Day on the first day of the academic term.

Three stories, three very different scales. Underneath them, the same ancient and powerful shape.

We humans are a storytelling species. Long before we had schools, or writing, or a word for history, we sat around fires and told each other about our heroes, victories and our journey. A familiar pattern is evident, the leaving, the trial, the setback, the return of someone changed by what they had endured. Odysseus is that story.

So, in its way, is a World Cup. We watch for the emerging narrative, the heroes, the villains, the underdogs, the comeback.

The reason Homer still holds us, thirty centuries on, is that he wrote down the pattern we cannot stop living.

Foundation Day is our version of that craft.

In 1961, Rex Morgan founded Pittwater House on a conviction about what young people could become, notably that there was a need for a school in this place that prepared young people intellectually and in character for life and education.

That is our origin story and returning to it each year is not merely nostalgia. It is something closer to what Odysseus does when he finally reaches Ithaca: he remembers who he is.

A community that forgets its founding story becomes merely a collection of buildings and timetables. A community that tells its story hands its children something far greater than a place. It hands them a lineage and an invitation to become its next chapter. This heritage is our heartbeat. Ours is a great story.

This is why the past matters so much to the present. The stories we return to are how we craft a sense of self, both as individuals and together. Our students are not only learning subjects here. They are being written into a narrative that began long before them and will continue long after. In time, they will tell it to someone else.

Each of them, of course, is on their own odyssey. Every child who walks through our gates is somewhere in the shape of that journey, leaving the familiar, meeting the trials, being tested in ways they did not choose. Our task, as the adults around them, is to be both the harbour and the challenge: the steady shore they can always return to, and the people who believe them capable of the voyage.

So this week ahead as we return to the cinema, watch the game and acknowledge the significance of Foundation Day,  I hope we take a moment to feel the privilege, responsibility and the potential of the smaller, quieter, more important story we are telling here, together, every single day.

I look forward to celebrating it with you this week.