From the Principal

Dear Friends,

Congratulations to all families and staff for a wonderful term. I trust most of us will get a good break and celebrate the Easter weekend with a deep level of gratitude for all it holds. We will look forward to students returning on Tuesday 26 April in anticipation of further great times for learning and cocurricular activities. In particular, I draw attention to our dawn service commemorating the ANZACs on Wednesday 27 April, and our Open Day on Saturday 14 May. We look forward to welcoming families to these events.

The Christian calendar presents again the opportunity to celebrate and reflect on the meaning and events of Easter. This can be a deeply personal experience or indeed, one with the church universal as biblical authors speak of it. Nevertheless, it is well summarised in the apostle’s writing to the Christians in Colossae, where we understand the actions of the Christ as ending the hostility between God and humanity. His brutal death and subsequent resurrection, makes friendship with God possible. It is the only means by which we may safely encounter God, either in this life or the next. The Easter holiday provides an undistracted time to investigate and study the things that are most worthwhile.

There is little doubt that Australia’s Judaeo-Christian heritage faces some serious challenges through questions raised by the current situation in Ukraine. Survey data seems to indicate that only half of us would fight (physically or politically) to preserve our land and democratic ideals from an invader. This is reflected in a broad apathy about religion and our history of democratically elected parliaments. In Australian culture, there is an unrelenting attack on our Christian values and a destructive rewriting of our history. I suppose therefore that there are some basic questions about the Australian way of life and what is essential to it, or worth investing in. In a previous era, such issues seemed more or less uncontested, and that Australia was indeed the lucky country.

While no country is perfect in its culture and politics, ours did once represent the invaluable freedoms of conscience, speech, and religion. These freedoms are much less evident now in that often there is an open contempt for them. Like in the USA, we are a divided nation on long accepted religious values. Reflective of society, journalism and politics are radical and divisive rather than truth-bearing and considerate. Debate is essential to democracy, but if we focus on false ideological narratives and cancelling any comment to the contrary, we undermine our cultural strengths. By contrast, when we focus on the things that unite us, on good character, of being generous towards each other, then our identity as a nation becomes protective and resilient. Freedoms are unifying, but we cannot take them for granted any longer.

This editorial provides me the forum to wish everyone in the Oxley community a safe and refreshing term break, and to pray for the blessings of Easter to accompany us into the new term. I do so wholeheartedly.

Warm regards,

Douglas Peck