From the Principal

Dear Friends,

To our graduating students.

We congratulate you on finishing the year well. Your Valedictory Dinner, Final Chapel, Final Assembly and Final Day of school activities were an indication of the esteem in which you are held. Our collective prayer is for success in the exams with results that are truly representative of your abilities in the studies undertaken over your VCE years at Oxley. Thankfully, and unlike the last few years, we will return to Robert Blackwood Hall for a wonderful final celebration of the year. October is also the month we celebrate International Teachers’ Day, and I thank all our staff who have contributed to your journey. 

Our teachers hope you have seen that a Christian Education necessarily has a profoundly different set of ideas, arguments and assumptions, purpose and endpoints than a secular one. We hope that, however long you have been at Oxley, you have caught from teachers a vision of what life can be by having a spiritual purpose. Indeed, writers down through the ages have noted that without such a purpose, we inevitably get into trouble either through internal confusions or external pressures. And this is true of nations as well as individuals. I think we see many examples of this in Australia.

Apart from God, our values will always become muddled. The prophet Isaiah says this, as does the apostle Paul and French philosopher, Frederic Bastiat. Essentially, they all say words like these: 

When misguided people, when public opinion honours what is despicable and despises what is honourable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is helpful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, then a nation has turned its back on true progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.

So, I urge you, let’s not take offence at the truth of God, that through His Christ, light has come into the world. As you prepare for a future beyond Oxley, our prayer is that the College values of truth, goodness and beauty in all of life will stay with you.

We have covered you in prayer over many years, and we will continue to commit you to the absolute generosity of grace and blessings of the Lord, to complete a brilliant year with us, and to look forward to the future with confidence under His providence.

Warm regards,

Dr Douglas Peck