From the Chair of Council
What is Woven into our Lives A Whole of School Assembly on Monday 26 April 2021 – with pleasant sunshine, we gathered outside. Barker College’s annual ANZAC Service was memorable, as it always is, for the excellent order of service in the tranquillity of the OBA Sound Stage and its surrounds. The birds sang during the Minute of Silence. We listened to the bugler’s rendition of the Last Post and remembered. Souls stirred. 106 years before Australian and New Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli. They scaled the steeply inclining hillsides “in a raked boot-scrambling roar” – poet Les Murray’s words – “and the sooling prints turned black with names when currents drifted the landing buoys to the heights of thyme and rosemary”.
That we remember Barker’s fallen each year in this way is tangible expression of the Christian framework within which Barker College operates. The Gospel (John 15:13) states: “Greater love has no one than this. That he lay down his life for his friends.”
Over 1000 former students of Barker College answered the call to serve our nation in the major conflicts of the twentieth century. 92 Barker boys made the ultimate sacrifice and did not return home to their families who still grieve for them.
Stone monuments or memorials such as the Roll of Honour which now appears on the stairs below the Middle School quadrangle are important ways of remembering. However, I believe that Barker’s ANZAC Service is a more powerful experience of remembrance, especially for the students. It touches the Education of the Heart. It speaks of an abiding and driving purpose for the future of all involved in the School. As we remember each of the 92, we are touched by the bravery they had, and which we must have, to defend our freedoms and to cherish always values like selflessness, discipline and courage in the face of adversity. It is values like these which underwrite the vibrancy and vitality of communities within our nation such as Barker.
Since 17 June 1916, the Barker College Community has remembered our fallen. On that day, Barker’s second Head, Mr William Carter, unveiled the School’s original Roll of Honour.
Experiences like the annual ANZAC service at Barker serve to equip this generation of Barker students with graciousness and humility, and a sense of character and confidence in the Barker way.
Before the whole school assembled, 92 students from Years 2 to 12 came forward before the Laying of the Wreath and placed a small cross of remembrance as the ninth Head of Barker College read the names of each of Barker’s fallen during World War 1 and World War 2.
The great statesman of ancient Athens, Pericles, said this and it surely resonates through the centuries:
ANZAC day started as a way to mourn the men killed in a heroic but ill-fated campaign at the periphery of a much larger war. It has become a day acknowledging all of the men and women who have served our nation in wars, conflicts and peacekeeping operations.
2 • The Barker • Issue 131 • Winter 2021
"What we leave behind is not engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." David Charles (75) Chair of Council
