2020 Annual Review

Principal’s Address Thursday 19 November 2020

MS JACINDA EULER PRINCIPAL

Principal, Ms Jacinda Euler, delivered the following address at the School’s Annual Speech Day and Distribution of Prizes 2020.

This time last year I stood here and—forgive me if I quote myself!—began with: ‘If there is one word that I hear more often than most these days … it’s “complex”. … ‘Educating for a contemporary society’, I said, ‘is increasingly complicated and finding solutions to all of the challenges of a—complex—world sometimes seems beyond reach.’ And each year I will typically explore a theme, begin with a quote from someone wise such as Virginia Woolf or Tolstoy. But if there is a sage saying that might have come back to us from the future—to us here in this room at this time last year—I can think of nothing grander or more prescient than, ‘Complex? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’ What a year. And how important, once again is our annual marker— Speech Day—as we seek to make sense of it all. An occasion, this year, we thought may not happen. How wonderful just to be here. Chair of the Board of Trustees, Julie McKay; Trustees— past and present; honoured guests—including Susan Playford, President of the P&F; Julie Caton, President of the Old Girls Association; staff; parents; students and most particularly the young women of Year 12. The experience of 2020 On the Friday morning of January 24th I emailed parents, welcoming our families to the start of the 2020 academic year, referring to the devastation of the bushfires and the reminder that they brought of the importance of community and what truly matters. We couldn’t believe, following such horrendous drought, Australia now faced bushfires that captured the attention of the entire world. I commented on the resilience of our land and its people, which we would all be recognising on Australia Day, the coming Sunday. And on that Friday afternoon, our teachers tidied their desks following a week of preparation and professional learning, heading in to the Australia Day Long Weekend. As I left my office I said to our Deputy Principal, Mrs Ingram—‘Maybe keep an eye on this Wuhan thing, see if anything develops over the weekend.’

Just three days later on the evening before the first day of term, I emailed our families at 10.11pm to say that ‘given continuing uncertainty about this new and serious virus, students who have visited Wuhan, or the Province of Hubei, are to remain at home for the first two weeks of term’ … The tone and experience of the year was set. Decisions. There were so many decisions to be made. Every single event or detail has had to be considered, recalculated, recast and revisited. Even on Monday, we learned that our Valedictory Guest Speaker had just flown from Adelaide and couldn’t be there with us last night. Change. Change was constant and rapid, sometimes almost hourly. We read the ‘vibes’ of our political leaders and health authorities as much as we read their specific advice—‘we intend to go remote next week … no, no, we’re holding firm … actually we’ll go tomorrow.’ Time. Our sense of time was warped this year. We lost our anchors. Crossed out all those diary entries— Cathedral Concert, Mother Daughter Dinner. The ways in which the days are measured out was disrupted as our usual organising mechanisms—the School calendar, our daily timetable—were overturned. We lost the usual, reassuring cadence of our year. Sometimes it seemed that time stretched out endlessly before us—a blank, unknown page. And then following novelty, there was … the monotony. We have lived a lifetime in a year it seems. For there was something surreal, incomprehensible— and still is very, very strange—about our experiences. And coupled with this sense of disbelief was the inevitable disappointment. Some Year 7 girls didn’t get to have that day they had been dreaming of for years—their first day at Girls Grammar. Our ‘experimental’ Year 7s, now Year 12 of 2020 faced constant disappointment—leadership opportunities curtailed. The Formal. And seemingly immutable events in our calendar (QG Cross Country, Athletics)—were summarily cancelled. Sport, gone. Open Day, closed.

Brisbane Girls Grammar School Annual Review 2020

53