This week, I’ve had the privilege of attending the Kildare Ministries conference, Our Voice, Our Future, hosted this year by St Joseph’s College in Echuca, Victoria. The conference brought together leaders from across every ministry founded by the Brigidine and Presentation Sisters. Kildare Ministries asks us to learn with wonder, lead with courage and live with compassion, and those values were on full display across three days of genuinely rich conversation about what it means to realise the full potential of young people, and indeed of humanity, in the years ahead. As a Catholic school, this is at the heart of our responsibility. Our task is to create the conditions in which every young woman in our care can flourish, in the fullest sense: in mind, in spirit, and in her sense of who she’s called to become.
One speaker’s words has really stayed with me. Sr Louise Cleary, a Brigidine Sister, spoke about the founding spirit behind our schools, and her point was simple but meaningful. Our job isn’t just to look after what previous generations built. It’s to keep developing it. She talked about needing ‘the courage to risk something new’, a reminder that stewardship on its own isn’t enough. We have a responsibility to keep improving these ministries, not just protect them as they are.
It was fitting, then, that we hosted our Pioneers and Golden Girls Afternoon Tea this same week. The afternoon was a wonderful reminder of exactly where our own foundations lie. Our Pioneers are our very first students, the girls who took a chance on this College in its very beginnings. Our Golden Girls are those who graduated 50 years or more ago, and this year we had the honour of welcoming the Class of 1976 back to mark their 50th anniversary, presenting them with St Brigid gold cross brooches in recognition of the significant part they’ve played in our history. It was a genuinely lovely afternoon, and exactly the kind of moment that grounds you as a school. It was a chance to look back with real gratitude at the women who built what we now have the opportunity to lead forward.
What is wonderful is to see that same courage alive in our own students. Last week, our Year 12 students held their HSC Showcase, presenting the major works they’ve spent the better part of this year researching, building, writing, creating and refining. Walking through that showcase, I was struck by how genuinely themselves these girls were in their work. They didn’t choose safe, predictable topics, they chose the ideas that actually mattered to them, the questions they were curious enough to sit with for months. That kind of authenticity takes its own courage. So does the rest of what a major work demands: research skills stretched into unfamiliar territory, creativity that builds something that didn’t exist before, and the commitment to keep going when the early drafts weren’t good enough yet. I was genuinely proud standing in that room.
The same spirit showed up in a very different way last Friday, when a large group of our girls took part in the Winter Sleepout in support of those experiencing homelessness. In the afternoon, our junior students cooked meals for people facing hardship, and our senior students spent time hearing directly from people with lived experience of homelessness in Kings Cross. The whole group then gave up a comfortable night at home to spend it together at school in a show of solidarity. It’s a small gesture in the scheme of things, but it asked something real of our girls, to sit with a reality that isn’t their own, simply because they care.
Between the afternoon tea, the HSC Showcase and the Sleepout, I saw exactly what we hope a Brigidine education produces: young women secure enough in themselves to be genuinely authentic, and brave enough to be adventurous. That adventure might be an unfamiliar research question, a night spent in solidarity with someone else, or simply choosing this College 50 years ago when the future was far less certain than it is now. Sr Louise’s challenge to us at the conference was not to settle for stewardship when development is possible. I think our students, and the generations of women who came before them, have already shown us what that development looks like in practice. As a College, we will keep striving forward, honouring our traditions and looking to what is next.
Mrs Kate Quinane
Principal
