Melbourne High Speech Night – A taste of things to come

This last week in Melbourne has been both busy and exciting. After the Victoria markets affair we had a quiet couple of days at home before preparing for the Melbourne high School speech night.

The speech night was held in the plenary hall of the Melbourne exhibition and convention centre. Even though we have lived in Melbourne before we are still adjusting to the traffic conditions. Luckily we made it to the convention centre just before the event was due to start.

As we entered the convention centre we saw lots of parents with students in uniform and many like Joe who are going to be entering the school in year nine dressed reasonably formally for the event.

As you can see from the video the size of the plenary hall is quite large and both upper and lower levels were packed with students, parents, teachers and previous “old boys”. We looked through the program for an idea of what was going to unfold for the evening. The speech night began with “the procession”. This is where the teaching staff adorned in their robes file in and take their seats on the main stage in a procession like format with organ music playing as they enter the hall. Once seated there were a number of speeches.

Starting with the chairperson of the school Council then the principal and also Julian Burnside are renowned lawyer gave inspirational speeches that really left their mark not only with the students they were directed at but with myself as well. There were many gems in the words that were shared with one thing that resonated with me was the fact that students had enjoyed good fortune by being at Melbourne high School and they were reminded that people in other circumstances would be equally is capable but may not quite have the good fortune. So it is important that as the students move forward in life they share not only that knowledge and capabilities that they have but the good fortune that they have as well. After the speeches and awarding of prizes we were treated to a musical extravaganza which included quires wind and brass instruments including a marching band.

I have just shared a couple of clips that I took on our small iPod camera which don’t do the event justice but certainly give one a taste of what the evening was all about. Another thing that impressed me was that some of the students who held Captains roles in either sports or music were given the opportunity to be the major hosts for a large part of the musical presentation.

They carried out their roles professionally as one would expect and was certainly a credit to the school. After a three hour extravaganza it was all over and had given us a taste of what Joe had to expect during his next four years. After getting home close to midnight we had to prepare for the next day where Joe was to attend his orientation day at Melbourne high School.