Year 7 studied Belonging, through the lens of Australian Poetry and wrote poems about what it means to be an ‘Eddies Boy’.

A Poem – Eddies Boy by Kaine Heiber

The love of easy work and being line leader,
Of one teacher and small classes.
Of set spots and little shade
Is where I wore glasses,
Stronger bonds with girls and boys
Surrounded by trees and bright blue skies
I know but cannot love it,
My thoughts are otherwise.

Forever the black and red,
A place of meeting new friends,
Of many different teachers,
Of ordered lines and primary school ends.
I love the great lake views,
I love the new variants of learning,
This can be fun but also testing
This school with great opportunities, is something I am yearning!

A wide-open brick-built school
All proud to be Eddie Boys,
The passion and guidance of our teachers
The faces of boys with joy
Growing minds in maths class,
Where young men achieve,
And friendships that brightens
And to faith that guides us to believe.

The spirit of St Edward’s, my home!
We will remain a team,
By Edmund Rice we are led,
Through true sign of Christ our head
But the Boys gather all together,
And we will love and serve in God
The laughter of growing men,
The busy, crowded quad.

The spirit of St Edward’s, my home!
Place of boy’s unity,
For the Christian Brothers and Edmund Rice,
We pay back to our community
Over the large wet fields,
The times with our fellow peers,
The gateway to knowledge
Our minds grow over the years.

A Christian dominated school,
A hopeful, proud land
All you who have not loved it,
You will not understand
Though this school holds many splendors,
Wherever I may go,
I know where I belong, my home
My mind will continue to grow.

Congratulations also to Dre McPhan in Year 12, for his brilliant major work for Extension 2 English.  Dre’s writing was insightful and meticulously researched and crafted.

The following are extracts from Dre McPhan’s major work for Extension 2. The first is from the Intro, the second the conclusion.

Buried beneath tarnished landscapes left ravaged by the imperialistic pursuit of empire aggrandizement, the echo of Indigenous cultures endures. As the dust settled upon these silenced voices, the discursive clamour of the Western literary canon was the political instrument that reinforced cultural orthodoxy (Virtich, 2006). Virtich’s ‘The Canon Formation and Indigenous Anthologies’, emphasises the power of the canon to construct the social, political and cultural experience of a nation. The value a society places on this canon, acts to support the paternalist ideology that fuels the desire for economic expansion, and, effectively, has silenced Indigenous culture. As a consequence, the true narrative of the Indigenous experience has been corrupted, and misconstrued, as the coloniser consolidates the oppressive control of Indigenous Peoples through representation.

As the landscape of the Western literary canon gradually became a fertile environment for the growth of Indigenous narrative, the emerging Indigenous voice in both Australia and America began to flourish. This impending shift in turn influenced the canonical landscape as Australian and American Indigenous authors grappled against the dominant discourse to negotiate new paths of resistance, effectively destabilising the colonial values underpinning colonial literature. The establishing of this new form of prose fiction in America and Australia enabled a new interpretation to take place of the canon, unique to their specific colonial experience. Just as the original canon was influenced by the renaissance period, in the new geographical context of Australia and America, a new interpretation emerged.