A message from the Principal

With ANZAC Day taking place tomorrow, our school community will spend the public holiday taking part in many of the wonderful traditions and events that help us to remember the huge sacrifice that was made by past generations of Australians who fought in wars and served in our military.

Whether you attend a dawn service or watch the Collingwood-Essendon game at the MCG, people will pay their respect and give thanks in multiple different ways.

At St Kilda Park, we are incredibly lucky to have a beautiful and permanent reminder of this selflessness and sacrifice in the form of our incredible school honour roll.

Located in our school office (above the Compass kiosk) it is well worth coming in to take a closer look.

A few years ago, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, our Year 5/6 students took part in an extensive research project to find out more about this amazing honour roll - to find out about the roll itself and also to try and discover some of the stories of the servicemen listed.

This research was collated into a book by Louise Moore (at the time our Library Specialist teacher) and this is kept at the school. We are currently exploring ways to make this more widely available to our school community.

Through this research, our students discovered a few really interesting things.

• The Honour Roll was designed and painted by renowned Australian artist and draftsperson George Dancey (1865 - 1922) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dancey who worked as a cartoonist on the publication Punch. George lived locally, on Beaconsfield Terrace and, in addition to our mural, also created many other murals and stained glass artworks in the St Kilda area.

• The mural was unveiled in 1924 (making it 100 years old next month) after the death of its designer. It features the names of 150 ex-SKiPPS students who served abroad during the Great War (1914 - 1918). It was unveiled by Mr. Eggleston, the Minister for Railways in a ceremony at the school. The below photo was taken at the unveiling ceremony and was included in the Melbourne Argus on Saturday 24th May 1924. Note how little our office area has changed in a century!

• The Year 5/6 students explored the service records and census entries for many of the names listed on the honour roll. Doing this allowed us to find out more about these men, where they lived, the jobs they went on to do and how they served their country during the War. 

There are many interesting and touching stories and we look forward to finding a way to share this learning with anybody interested in the near future. 

However, we were so impressed by the way that our students were able to use the many different historical sources to make links to these ex-students who became ANZACs and who we will remember tomorrow.

Neil Scott

Principal