Queenwood’s partnership with Macleay Vocational College (MVC) is not something we fully appreciated until we visited with a group of ten of our friends. Before going, we had to complete an expression of interest form with questions like: Why do you want to go to MVC? What do you think you will take away from this experience? To be honest, we didn’t really know; we thought it was about raising money for people less fortunate than us. Now we realise that it is about sitting with people and listening quietly to their stories so that we begin to understand and respect one another.
During our visit we sat with girls our age in the childcare centre at MVC; some had more than one child, nowhere to live and were still committed to studying and completing the HSC. In some ways, we had a lot in common, but in other ways we realised that there are so many things that they have to think about that we do not. We realised that privilege is not about what you have, it is about what you don’t have to think about, and this trip put this perfectly into perspective. It is easy to get worked up about the little things and forget to reflect on how fortunate we are to live where we do and be able to focus on school and friendships rather than how we are going to find a meal that day.
The Australian Story episode Eye of the Storm that aired on 4 November showed the challenges that the students at MVC face every day; if you have not watched it, we recommend that you do. What it was impossible to show in just half an hour is something far deeper. On the trip, two of the Aboriginal teachers took us to Kinchela Boys Home, one of the facilities that was used by the government to ‘assimilate’ young Aboriginal children into white Australian society. Between June 1924 and May 1970, authorities of the state of New South Wales incarcerated 400-600 Aboriginal boys here. As we listened to their stories, we learnt that a number of these boys had already been through some other form of institutionalisation and suffered incomprehensible violence and abuse. As we stood on the ground where countless boys had suffered, we were incredibly affected. We learnt about the Stolen Generation at school but didn’t appreciate the complexity of the issues or fully understand the impact on individuals until we heard directly from the people affected; we think it stuck with us because it was emotional not just factual. When we went back to MVC we began to see how government policies decades ago are still having an intergenerational impact; by taking culture we broke communities and we, as a nation, are still trying to find our way back. We think that one of the best things we can do is ask people what they need rather than tell them.
So, we asked the Principal at MVC, Mark Morrison, what we could do to help. We are asking for your support in raising funds for our partner school in Kempsey who would like to install an industrial kitchen so that the community can share knowledge about nutrition and wellbeing. A kitchen would allow the school to offer students a TAFE hospitality course to equip them with the skills to work in a growing industry. Mark Morrison and students from MVC will visit Queenwood on Tuesday 3 December for a mufti day, pizza lunch and trivia. Tickets to the event are $30 but we really hope that Queenwood families will consider more generous donations to this worthy cause. Click here to purchase tickets or donate.
Through sharing stories with people from different places and with different life experiences, we have learnt so much about the world beyond Queenwood, especially how it is more complex than what it says in our textbooks.
Zoe Keating & Eliza Thompson
Year 11 Students
Postscript from Ms Stone
Over the last few years, we have raised funds to support a variety of programs and needs at Macleay Vocational College. If you would like a glimpse of the partnership between Queenwood and Macleay Vocational College you can find it here, and in that footage you will see many things in action that have been provided by the Queenwood community: the minibus which delivers the mums and babies to school, the Ginda Barri centre itself, the work of the speech pathologist with babies and toddlers – and so on.
This year’s objective is to provide a commercial kitchen, to help complete the pathway through education and into work. It will also support students to acquire life skills of cooking and food preparation which they will need to support healthy development for themselves and their babies. As you can see from the documentary, this is a community which experiences frequent food insecurity and in which there are barriers significant barriers to good nutrition, even for small children. The Senior School’s fundraising will be directed towards this, and we hope you will support it generously.
The Junior School will be focusing on our annual Christmas Gift appeal. Wrapped gifts can be places under the Christmas tree at either Junior or Senior School, and should be labelled with sex and age of recipient. Any gifts for boys or girls aged 0 – 18 are much appreciated, but please avoid battery-operated and aerosol gifts. The young children that you see in the documentary will be the lucky recipients. For many of them, it is the only time in their life that they receive a gift especially for them.