From the Principal

Welcome back after the break. Hopefully our students (and families!) enjoyed the chance to unwind and are ready and recharged to make the most of Term 2. To all our girls who represented Pymble during the holidays in athletics, swimming, diving, robotics, equestrian, tennis, artistic gymnastics and Cattle Team competitions, thank you and congratulations! More details and results can be found in our Co-curricular Sports and Robotics sections. 

The beginning of a term always fills me with hope about what is to come; there is a sense of excitement in the air and great energy regarding the students returning.

As I write this column, which I also shared with staff earlier in the week, it’s 1.11am, I’m on my way from Poland to Israel and certainly in need of finding some hope. Many of you will know from previous communications that I have spent most of the school holidays participating in The March of the Living program to learn more about the Holocaust and consider how we can offer these learnings to our students. The last week has been hard. Really hard. The group I am travelling with includes a wonderful man and Holocaust survivor, Henry Burch, and many other people who are Jewish and who have a deep and personal connection with the Holocaust, having lost grandparents, parents, aunts, siblings and, in some cases, every family member other than their parents during this period of history. We have visited death camps, labour camps (which are more death camps, really), sites of mass murder, memorials, cemeteries, museums, and many other places of significance. We have also spent time with the Righteous Among the Nations and heard about the extraordinary courage of non-Jewish individuals who risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust. 

Our group members have shared letters written by loved ones who were murdered; letters that were only received and read after the war. When we visited the mass graves where relatives of people in our group lie, we heard about the last days before their family members were massacred. We have borne witness to one group member coming across a large photo of her Aunty on display at Auschwitz where she was subjected to terrible medical experimentation and then killed. So, when I say it’s been tough, it really has been tough. It will take months, years and probably the balance of my life to process this experience – if that is even possible.

I have learned so much and have so much to share with our community but, for now, I will leave you with this reflection: Perhaps the opposite of good is not evil – it’s indifference.

We have all heard the saying, “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept” but let’s go a bit deeper than that. At times, it costs us very little to take action, for example, by picking up that piece of rubbish rather than walking past it or taking the time to turn off the lights as we exit a classroom. 

The question is, how often do we take action when the personal cost of doing so becomes more than just ‘a little’ and possibly even ‘a lot’ – and how do we encourage this in our students?

It isn’t an easy question to answer but it certainly is worthy of deep consideration. To live together, we have to learn together. This is true in all contexts of our lives – within our own families, our Pymble family and, more broadly, our global family. If we learn together, perhaps we might open our hearts enough to relegate indifference to a back seat and usher understanding and kindness further up the aisle (away from row 31, where I’m currently seated) and into First Class where these attributes belong.

Thank you to our wonderful Deputy Principal, Lamia Rockwell, for all her support that has enabled me to be immersed in this experience. There is always a lot going on at Pymble and it has been a blessing, as it was with Julie Shaw last year when I was on sabbatical leave, to be able to step out knowing that things were absolutely in hand.

I’ll be back on campus next week; in the meantime, I am sending you my best wishes for the start of the term. A special thank you to our wonderful History Captains, Cadets, musicians and choristers for all your hard work preparing and rehearsing for our Anzac Day ceremony on Wednesday. You will see one of the photos below was taken on our group’s Anzac Day ceremony in Israel. Now, more than ever, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for our armed services, all that they have done and all that they continue to do for our country.

Signing off with a fair bit of exhaustion, a good dash of homesickness, and a strong sense of hope for the future, knowing our students are in the best of hands. Each day at Pymble, our young people are growing their understanding of the world, others around them, and their potential to use their influence and compassion to make the world a better place. They are not indifferent; they are not walking past when they encounter injustice. They are learning how, when and why it is important to take action when they see something that is not just, equitable or right, and they make us incredibly Pymble Proud.

Dr Kate Hadwen, Principal